Parent child interaction in Nigerian families: conversation analysis, context and culture

and older women (Timyan, 1988). It is expected that older children will take an active role in
both playing with the younger children and in teaching them (Law, 1999).

Whilst parent-based therapy interventions that seek to adapt and make changes to PCI
clearly have positive benefits for language development, this may not apply to all children,
particularly those from ethnic minority communities. Furthermore, it is unclear precisely which
aspects of intervention are most beneficial; what are appropriate levels of specific parent
behaviours and in what ways do these behaviours affect the child (Tannock and Girolametto,
1992)? The general stimulation approach involves teaching parents a variety of techniques which
makes it difficult to be clear which are responsible for changes in the child. Sampling can be
problematic: the children are often heterogeneous and sample size limits generalisability.
Although imitation and expansion were the only examples of responsive and structural aspects of
maternal language that significantly correlated with child improvement in Girolametto et al ’s
(1999) study, other techniques may have proved significant with a larger sample size.

The aforementioned features of Nigerian parent-child style and attitude raise the
possibility that the PCI of Nigerian parents may bear similarities in design to teacher-pupil talk.
The various features, benefits and difficulties of instructional teacher-talk have been disputed.
There are claims that a directive or teacher-talk style lacks semantic contingency and provides
few opportunities for joint engagement, resulting in negative effects on language learning
(McDonald and Pien, 1982; Olson-Fulero, 1982). A strong view is that directives that constrain
behaviour and dominate turn taking are associated with negative, restricted and less complex
language in children (Girolametto et al., 2000). However, in a study of teacher’s input to
preschool children in a day care setting, no correlation was found between adult use of directive
language such as test questions or yes/no questions and restricted child language output. In
contrast, other researchers propose that directive language input can have a positive effect on
language learning by facilitating engagement in conversation, particularly for less
conversationally skilled children or younger children (Tannock, 1988; Pellegrino and Scopesi,

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