Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

Literature I 55

those related to the formal properties of utterances (Iexico-Syntactic
complexity, well-formedness) (Veils and Gutfreund,1984), but those that
maintain the child's active verbal interaction, in particular 'topic
incorporation', i.e. the semantic relatedness of adults' utterances to the
child's previous utterance (Veils and Robinson,1982).

The facilitation provided by adults does not consist in utterances
considered in isolation, but in their appropriateness in the sequence of
conversation, where the child learns the 'essentially collaborative
nature of interaction (Barnes et al.,1983). It was the frequency with
which the adults picked up, extended and elaborated the child's topic or
activity (the contingent nature of adults' speech) that was associated
with the greatest amount of measured progress in language acquisition
(Veils,1983a).

The main points of the Bristol study related to the quality of adults'
input may be summarized as follows:

it is extending rather than questioning which is associated with the
language progress of the child, because it provides opportunities for
him to enter into meaningful interaction (Barnes et al. ,1983). This
enhances the motivation to interact as the child has, on the one hand,
a feedback on the organization of the language system to check the
appropriateness of his language in conveying information (French and
Vobl,1981), and on the other, a structure through which rules of social
interaction are discovered (see page 150);

direct requests in context of control (directives) were found to be
significantly correlated to measures of child's progress, as often they
lead to participative interaction, one reason being that the locus of
reference is of Immediate interest for the child and it is easy for
him to discover the relationship between form and intended meaning
(Barnes et al.,1983; Velis,1985; see page 144);

parents differ in their style of interaction and in particular in the
contingent appropriateness of feedback they provide (Vells,1983b). The

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