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

Literature / 60

Sometimes communication takes the form of a three-party interaction, with
older siblings acting as a link between the mother and the young
children, monitoring and reporting their behaviour and interpreting their
meanings (Ochs,1983). This is common in the data considered in the
present study.

The role of siblings as caretakers has been analyzed in a study conside-
ring a controlled sample of 186 societies chosen for their relatively
detailed ethnographic data on children (Veisner and Gallimore,1977). It
was found that, after Infancy, the role of principal caretaker was being
performed by siblings or peers in approximately 60% of the situations
examined; the predominant social experience for young children was to
spend up to 70% of their time in the sole company or in charge of
siblings. In another study covering 5 non-Western cultures (Whiting and
Whiting,1975), siblings and cousins were found present during
observations in 50% of the cases.

All this has important consequences:

- for infants, it means that the majority of verbal input is not from
adults;

- for children older than 5 or 6, it means that they relate with adults
from a position of being already in a responsible role;

- given this circumstances, continuous dialogue is rare (Harkness,1977);

- older children spend less time Interacting with adults than the
youngest; they are also less talked to , and the social content of
mothers' verbal interaction shifts to greater proportion of directives
related to the caretaking function (Harkness and Super ,1977);

- older children develop a characteristic commentary style, connected
with their role as 'reporters' of events (see page 132), which
corresponds to what was coded as 'descriptive' in the IKDE study (see
3.4, page 92).

In family structures different from the Western, there may be
comparatively little direct input in terms of language addressed by
adults to children: this does not necessarily mean, however, low quality
input. A comparative analysis of adults' and children's (4-8 year old)
talk to younger children (2-3 year old) in a rural Kenyan village showed

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