1 Chapter 2 English in the Repertoire By Barbara Mayor Presentation: Dr. Faisal AL-Qahtani

2 Introduction: Developing awareness of language variation  How language use varies between speakers and contexts  How children need to select between languages or language varieties to communicate appropriately with others.  Learning what is socially appropriate  Sensitivity of children to social and cultural contexts and to the forms of language appropriate in each case.  impact of gender on children’s speech patterns.

3 Cooperative conversationalists  Evelyn Hatch: children are ‘cooperative conversationalists’. language acquisition is initially a matter of learning the rules of social behaviors and only later a matter of learning the grammatical rules.  Communicative Competence  Chomsky: linguistic competence vs. linguistic performance  Dell Hymes: performance is also governed. Children also need to learn the rules of use too (sociolinguistic competence): (p. 45).

4 Bilingualism  Children need to develop in two important aspects: They need to recognize their various languages or varieties of language as separate systems to keep them apart. They need to learn how to use their various languages or varieties of language appropriately.

5 Bilingualism As A First Language: Merrill Swain  Differences between the experience of learning English monolingually and that of learning it bi- or multilingually from birth: the monolingual baby learns how to talk at the same time as learning to distinguish the sounds of one particular language. and learns to make sense of the language at the same time as learning the rules of one particular system. the bilingual baby will be in a similar situation with a broader corpus of incoming data. separation of vocabularies and the sound systems begins earlier than the separation of grammatical systems. both need to learn which contrasts (phonemic, tonal, grammatical, semantic) within a language are significant. bilingual child must learn in what ways the rules can be generalized across the two languages and whether the languages differ in any systematic way. bilingual child will naturally try to predict a regular pattern of differences in much the same way as the monolingual child will try to predict regularities within a single language.

6 Code-switching: Between languages or varieties of language  Purposes to single their shifting attitudes or identities to achieve personal goals or particular pragmatic effects. each language may be associated with a particular kind of practices or activities. very young children are sensitive to contextual variation in language. Children talk in different ways to different people:  different registers. learning to be an English-speaking girl or boy  Gender awareness

7 Acts Of Identity/ Social Positioning: Learning To Express Oneself  shifting speech style to suit the context of speaking or the audience.  peer pressure: young children will acquire the accent of their peers rather than that of their parents (Payne, 1980).  individual idiosyncrasy  children exposed to different varieties of a language from a young age will likely develop different social values that are attached to each variety.

8  accomplished in English through a variety of linguistic levels.  unconsciously children can adopt the speech of others to identify with them.  or consciously emulate the speech of those they want to be close to or to impress or get something out of it.  or consciously mimic the speech of others to say something ironic or comical or provocative. Acts Of Identity/ Social Positioning: Learning To Express Oneself