H714: Childhood Socialization October 10, 2006 Kendra Winner

October 10, 2006 Agenda  Course Administration Critical Response Papers, Lecture Slides, Office Hours  Childhood Socialization Continued … Video Analysis Primary and secondary socialization  Acquisition of Discourse Styles  Facilitated Discussion

Video Observations continued  What adult goals can you infer?  How much are very young children treated as “real” conversational partners?  How do adults structure their talk to support joint interaction? To support teaching?

Cultural Variation  Contexts of occurrence US white middle class Kaluli  Frequency of occurrence  Significance/meaning (structure/function)  Variation among members of a society  Explicit/Implicit

Examples of Early Language Socialization  Peggy Miller  South Baltimore Dyadic  A >B  B>A Direct instruction  Elinor Ochs & Bambi Schieffelin  Samoa Polyadic  A>B  B>C  C>A Observation

Socialization Contexts  Primary Socialization Family/Home Community (peer groups, religious organizations)  Secondary Socialization Peer groups  Distinctive speech events and routines that don’t have a parallel in adult society or adult expectations Yup’ik Story Israeli Ritualized Sharing School Work Institutions/organizations

H714: Acquiring Discourse Styles: Narrative and Argumentation October 17, 2006 Kendra Winner

Relationship between language socialization and literacy  Scollons/Tannen: Oral literate styles lay the foundation for literacy  Heath Broad styles of meaning making are reflecting in taking meaning from texts  Hemphill & Snow: Specific decontextualized interactions around written text  Michaels Narrative style is a primary indicator of academic writing style

Narrative as a Universal (or not)  What is the relationship between the stories of a culture and the socialization and production of stories by individual members of a culture  What is the relationship between memory and structure?

Minami & McCabe, 1995 Rice balls and bear hunts: Japanese and North American family narrative patterns 1) Japanese mothers requested less description from their children than did the Canadian mothers 2) Japanese mothers gave less evaluation than the Canadian mothers 3) Japanese mothers showed more verbal attention to children than the Canadian mothers

Japanese story telling: Minami & McCabe, 1991  Haiku as a discourse regulation device (1991)  When I was in ____Orientation  I got a shotAction  It hurt a lotOutcome  When I was _____Orientation  I got another shotAction  It didn’t hurt a lotOutcome

E: Have you ever gotten jabbed with anything? C: Uh huh. I got jabbed with a bee. E: By a bee. Oh, tell me about it. C: See, I got jabbed on my foot. I was barefooted. I screamed and I screamed and I cried and I cried. I screamed and I screamed. Until my next door neighbor came out and my Dad came out and my brother came out. And Peterson & McCabe, 1985

Peterson & McCabe, 1985 cont.  they all carried me into the house but after that happened I got to sleep overnight with my neighbor.

Transcript Analysis  What narrative skills do these mothers seem to be valuing and/or supporting in their children?  How do these interaction styles look like what children are likely to experience in school? How do they look different?

Discourse – Kang (2003)  Compared narratives produced in response to a wordless picture book by young adults: Koreans produced significantly shorter narratives in both English and Korean than did the native English speakers Koreans produced significantly fewer evaluations and orientation in both English and Korean and fewer events than did the native English speakers

Variation in Narratives  Length  Organization  Reportability/tellability  Participation rules  Purpose/Function

Argumentation

Adolescent Discussions  Girls Tracy – African American Kelly – Irish American  Boys Kareem – African American Brendan – Irish American

Adolescent Discussion Analysis  What are broad characteristics of the girl’s conversations? The boy’s conversations?  What’s the relationship between form and content? How is the way they talk, related to what they say? Do the conversational styles create context for particular language use (e.g., syntax)?  How do the two groups handle conflict and disagreement?  How might these strategies translate into a classroom?

Adolescent Discussion Analysis  Turn length  Topic flow  Listener support  Vocabulary

Argumentation: Peggy Miller  Discourse genres as ways of seeing, situated in human activity  Loosely connected networks of discourse genres

Sarah Michaels (2005)  James, working-class 9, 10, 11 Because I know the answer. Because me and my sister plays school a lot. My sister teach me this when I play school.  Stephany, middle-class The answer is 11 because you are counting by 3’s. The first number of the pattern is 2. And the second number is 5. There are three numbers from 2 to 5. The third number is eight. And there are three numbers between 5+8. And then that means that you just have to go up 3 numbers from 8 and then the answer is eleven.

 What are each of these students doing in these two activities?  What can you infer about how each student understood the two activities?  What if any relationship do you see between how each student manages the narrative versus the think-aloud activity? Narrative & Poetry Analysis

Literary Response ….  Literary Response Abstract themes from literary texts Move away from concern with representing events depicted in the text Distance themselves personally from characters and events (Applebee, 1978, 1991; Rogers, 1991, Thomson, 1987; Vipond & Hunt, 1984)

Delpit, 1990 in Hynds & Rubin, Eds. Perspectives on Talk and Learning Within our celebration of diversity, we must keep in mind that education, at its best, hones and develops the knowledge and skills each student already possesses, while at the same time adding new knowledge and skills to that base. All students deserve the right both to develop linguistic skills they bring into the classroom and to add others to their repertoires.