CULTURE-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE STYL: The Development of Oral Narrative and Literacy (Child Language and Child Development, 1) - Softcover

Minami, Masahiko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185359573X ISBN 13: 9781853595738

Verlag: MULTILINGUAL MATTERS, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Communication skills are considered extremely important for the development, preservation, and transmission of culture to future generations, and incorporate the complicated relationship between language and culture. This book focuses on an analysis of personal narratives by Japanese pre-school children. The book also analyzes mother-child narratives and joint book-reading activities.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dr. Masahiko Minami has written extensively on psycho/sociolinguistics with a particular emphasis on cross-cultural comparisons of language development and narrative/discourse structure. He has published significant contributions to works covering cultural constructions of meaning, childcare quality in Japan, and East Asian students' experiences in U.S. classrooms.

Dr. Masahiko Minami has written extensively on psycho/sociolinguistics with a particular emphasis on cross-cultural comparisons of language development and narrative/discourse structure. He has published significant contributions to works covering cultural constructions of meaning, childcare quality in Japan, and East Asian students' experiences in U.S. classrooms.

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Culture-specific Language Styles

The Development of Oral Narrative and Literacy

By Masahiko Minami

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2002 Masahiko Minami
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-573-8

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Part 1: Theoretical and Ethnographic Background, 
1. Introduction, 1, 
2. Literature Review, 13, 
3. Research Design: Methodology and Basic Concepts, 52, 
Part 2: Analyses of the Personal Narratives Conducted Between Japanese Preschool Children and Adults, 
4. Monologic Narrative: Narrative Development, 76, 
5. Monologic Narrative Structure in Japanese, 109, 
Part 3: Mother-Child Narrative Interactions, 
6. Parental Narrative Elicitation Styles, 154, 
7. Cross-Cultural Comparison of Parental Narrative Elicitation, 193, 
Part 4: Development of Literacy in Japanese Children, 
8. Styles of Parent-Child Book-Reading in Japanese Families, 238, 
Part 5: Conclusions Derived from the Current Study and a Discussion of Topics for Future Studies in Narrative Discourse, 
9. Conclusion and Implications, 259, 
References, 290, 
Index, 310, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Problems

In any society, a child's life is driven in part by particular models of what parents believe to be the 'good life' and the 'ideal individual.' Culture has a variety of implications in this respect. To begin with, culture is defined as consisting of a set of attitudes, beliefs, customs and values shared by a group of people, communicated from one generation to the next via language or some other means of communication (Fischer & Lazerson, 1984; Matsumoto, 2000; Super & Harkness, 1980). This definition suggests that culture is learned behavior, shaping attitudes and encouraging some types of behaviors more than others. Conversely, newborn babies have no culture; as they grow, they gradually acquire a particular set of behavioral patterns that are appropriate for their culture. In this way, culturally distinct parental goals and plans for child development are implemented in a wide variety of forms. Children from different cultures develop differently according to the cultural standards endorsed by the adults around them. Thus, the process of parents' socializing their children following specific cultural norms and, in turn, children's learning culturally appropriate behaviors is what socialization is all about.

This book focuses on language socialization; by acquiring linguistic knowledge, which is immersed in sociocultural knowledge, children become socialized through language. In fact, language socialization is defined by Ochs (1996) as 'the process whereby children and other novices are socialized through language, part of such socialization being a socialization to use language meaningfully, appropriately, and effectively' (p. 408). Because 'part of acquiring language is the acquisition of the social meaning of linguistic structures' (Ochs, 1986, p. 7), in this book culture is considered in relation to linguistic/discursive phenomena.

In divergent cultural settings, we can indeed observe dissimilarities in parental expectations and in communicative styles, and, accordingly, examining various aspects of children's pragmatic and sociolinguistic development becomes imperative. That is, cross-cultural differences in socialization often become discernible when observing that children in different cultures have to become competent in the appropriate pragmatic use of their language, as well as the grammar and vocabulary. In this way, the acquisition of a culture-specific communicative style – i.e. linguistic knowledge plus knowledge of the social rules of language use known as communicative competence (Hymes, 1974a) – plays a significant role in the process of language acquisition and the development of language skills, such as the choice of topics, rules of turn taking, modes of storytelling and rules of politeness (Heath, 1982, 1983, 1986). As adults, however, most of the pragmatic rules are so culturally ingrained that we are not even aware that we are following certain systematic rules.

Children learn grammatical patterns during the course of face-to-face interaction; interaction is viewed as a crucible that forges knowledge of the language that children are expected to acquire. Narrative is typically considered a text in which the narrator relates a series of events – either real or fictive – in the order in which they happened. Furthermore, narratives are a communicatively driven form of discourse in that individuals tell stories to one another and not to themselves (Stavans, 1996). For the purpose of investigating cross-cultural differences, parent–child interactions, especially their narrative interactions as connected and extended discourse, provide good examples. To begin with, conversation between parents, particularly mothers, and their young children forms the context in which narrative discourse abilities typically emerge. Snow and Goldfield (1981) present ways in which, through book-reading interactions with adults, young children learn what questions to ask and what responses to provide; for instance, illustrating that particular aspects of language use that parents emphasize will be eventually adopted by children, these researchers documented one child's spontaneously supplying information that his mother had previously inquired about, over several sessions of reading the same book. This methodology focusing on narrative can be applied to language acquisition, particularly the foundation of communicative competence (Hymes, 1974a), with reference to mother–child interactions.

Furthermore, through conversational interactions, parents transmit to their young children not only language-specific representational forms and rules but also culture-specific interaction styles, such as culturally nurtured canonical narrative discourse patterns. Bruner (1990) specifically hypothesizes that (1) at an early stage of development, the child, interacting with the caregiver, enters into the world of meaning construction, and (2) the meaning creation process in narrative discourse is closely related to specific forms of cultural representation. Following his hypothesis, we will be able to claim that while people from virtually all cultures tell stories, at the same time, they shape culturally canonical forms of narrative, narrative thinking, and interpretations through social interactions. Thus, as Bruner puts it, 'Narrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression' (p. 77) and 'four-year-olds may not know much about the culture, but they know what's canonical and are eager to provide a tale to account for what is not' (pp. 82–83).

Cross-cultural comparison of narrative productions has been addressed in previous studies. For example, Au (1993) describes 'talk story,' an important speech event for Hawaiian children in their local speech communities. 'During talk story children present rambling narratives about their personal experiences, usually enhanced with humor, jokes and teasing. The main characteristic of talk story is joint performance, or cooperative production of responses by two or more speakers' (Au, 1993, p. 113). Along similar lines, from her observation of 'sharing time' classes, Michaels (1981, 1991) draws the distinction between the ways that African American and European American children describe past events in their narratives. Further examining the same data as Michaels used, Gee (1985, 1986a, 1989a,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 185359573X
• ISBN 13: 9781853595738
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar