Characteristics of negotiation discourses in peer talk of 10 year old NZ children

Abstract

Child language development has tended in the past to concentrate on formal aspects of language, generally sentence level and below, such as the development of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics. Interest at text level has focused heavily on children’s development of narrative, with more recent interest in ‘expository’ texts, both of which have tended to be children’s monologic talk to an adult, often from a social distance (i.e. with a relative stranger). There is little published data on children’s development of oral texts with their peers. This presentation will discuss data from a research project which gave 10 year-old pairs of children a structured task to obtain samples which emulated authentic text. No adults were present during the task. The presentation will discuss the advantage of this type of text over the others above, in that the children were involved in a dynamic interaction in a context which was appropriate for them (both the interactant and the task). This data allowed insights into children’s use of resources for explanation, argumentation, and politeness and face. Analysis of the data comes from a systemic-functional linguistic perspective (Halliday, 1985; Martin & Rose, 2007). It will show how the children managed interpersonal meaning as well as experiential meaning, and how these functions might be developing across time.