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

and grammatical teaching is separated from the meaning of the utterance and lessens the child’s
processing load.

Speech and language therapy services target resources within family settings in order to
address issues of delay/difficulty that could impact on school learning. During family work it is
important that therapists take account of the local interactional context of the parent-child dyad
set within a wider cultural understanding of the family. In PCI research, a common technique is
to adopt a pre-prepared coding system that seeks to capture the functional use of language,
(Girolametto et al., 1999; 2000). However, as coding decisions rely on subjective judgements
about what should be looked for and what is appropriate, they risk being culturally biased and
influenced by the researcher’s expectations and cultural context. A conversation analysis (CA)
approach is therefore taken in this study which is inductive, characterised by the researcher’s
unmotivated looking at the videotaped interaction. We seek to work only with what is seen,
without making assumptions or predictions about the inner motives or feelings of participants.
CA emphasises the practical, social accomplishment of an utterance in its sequential context
within the discourse (ten Have, 1999). Our purpose in using CA, here, is to generate insight into
what mother-child dyads are already doing and are doing well. We aim to enable SLTs to use
such knowledge to develop and extend PCI in a culturally-sensitive and relevant way so that
children start school equipped with the necessary receptive and expressive language skills to cope
with the oral and written demands of the curriculum.

Method

The study involves three mother-child dyads who live in a London borough. The mothers were all
born and brought up in Nigeria and moved to London in early adulthood. All the children were
born in England; they were all boys aged between 22 and 40 months and had no recognised
speech and language or learning disability. The mothers each spoke an African language (Ibo,
Yoruba or Ibibio) whereas the boys were exposed mainly to English.

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