Interpretation Z 161
exchanges in contexts of control, and this factor has consequences for
the pattern of interaction. Children seen to have little or no Informa-
tion adults need or want to get.
The Infornation exchanged in Dialogue Texts is always related to the
'here and now', to the on-going activity. This is due, on one hand, to the
United roles perfomed by the children, which do not include reporting
on younger siblings or on events in the village, and, on the other hand,
to the fact that verbal forns in Dialogue Texts are United to the
present tense, the present continuous and the future continuous, so that
the exchange of Infornation cannot concern past or hypothetical events.
Vhile the principle of grading the difficulty of the linguistic !tens
introduced is not questioned, it can be argued that a grannatical
criterion for the grading is not necessarily the best, as sone of the
forns nost Comnonly used nay be grammatically complex. It is because of
their complexity that, according to the textbooks, children will express
hypothetical conditions in Portuguese only in Grade 3, while the cognitive
and linguistic competence to use hypothetical forms in Ll discourse is
already well developed before they enter Grade 1 < UDff,1964). This is an
argument often put forward to support the thesis of 'semilingualism', but
I do not think it applies in the specific situation of Mozambique, where
contact with the L2 is limited to a few hours a day.
Certainly the utilization in the Dialogue Texts of the familiar role of
'reporter', using the present continuous tense in the beginning, would
facilitate children's identification with the characters and the use of
texts for role play. Children could report on their younger siblings, and
situations of referential communication, conducive to explicit narration,
could be easily introduced.
Dialogue Texts do not include tutorial situations, and adults' questions
in them are mostly Real Questions; they tend, however, to be Polar
Interrogatlves more than Open Questions, while Disjunctive and Tag
Questions are as rare as in the home conversations. Children In Dialogue
Texts tend to reply with single-utterance turns and never volunteer
information but always offer it in reply to adults' questions.