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

1990). Directiveness can be reinterpreted as a helpful strategy that scaffolds children’s
participation in ongoing activities and invites them to take part in conversation (File, 1994).

A further issue relates to the role of conversational initiative and responsiveness during
interactions. The adult’s domination of the topical agenda may be perceived as negative in the
context of early interactions (Vigil, D.C., Hodges, J. and Klee, T., 2005) although other studies
have contradicted this assertion (Girolametto et al., 2000). Yoder and Kaiser (1988) suggest that
one reason for such discrepancies may be the differing contexts in which language is sampled.
The use of directives in adult-child conversation is undoubtedly highly context specific and
directives used to refer to the task at hand and its context (for example, during book-reading or
small group work) may produce more positive effects than directives used only in free play
contexts (O’Brien and Nagle, 1987). The perceived discourse role of the activity (i.e. the
underlying instructional purpose) is also an important consideration (Girolametto et al., 2000).

Given the cultural bias of Nigerian parents for didactic teaching of correct behaviours and
an anticipated teacher-talk style, it is expected that parents will respond to children’s errors
employing a style of exposing correction. During exposed correction, the co-participant’s error is
made explicit since the speaker supplies a corrected version (typically a lexical item) that
contrasts with the erroneous version (Jefferson, 1987). The examination of parental response to
child error is important given the potential role of corrective feedback in grammatical and lexical
language development (Saxton, 2005). In social talk, there is a strong dispreference for drawing
attention to the errors of a co-interactant (Pomerantz, 1984). Therefore, repeated, exposed
correction could be viewed negatively by SLTs who ascribe to this cultural view. Embedded
corrections (for example, reformulations embedded in side sequences) keep issues of
incompetence away from the interactional surface. However, Radford., Ireson, J. and Mahon, M.
(under review) argue that children experiencing problems learning language may find exposed
corrective input more beneficial than embedded corrections because errors are made more salient,

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