This Essay scored 30/30 and FULL MARKS across AO1 and AO2 for Section B for the AQA A level English Language in paper 1
The essay can easily be used as a template for any type of text you might receive in the exam
Written by an Oxford University Offer Holder
Answers the unseen question: "Is Chil...
Child directed speech is the most important reason for language development
In the transcript, a father is shown to be reading an alphabet book with his son. The
importance of child directed speech (CDS) is demonstrated throughout the transcript,
especially in the abundance of the use of the Initiation Response Feedback structure. This is
exercised when a parent asks a question, the child responds, and the parent offers a
criticism, for example, in terms of Jamie, the father asks, ‘where’s jamie’s hand?’ to which
Jamie spreads his hand out and the father responds ‘yes, that’s right’. The IRF structure is
important in furthering the reaction between caregiver and child, and gaining the child’s
attention--an important feature of CDS. The ‘Feedback’ section of the IRF model is not
dissimilar to Skinner’s operant conditioning theory, in which he theorised that children’s
language is shaped by caregivers through positive reinforcement (for standard grammar and
pronunciation) and negative reinforcement (for non-standard linguistic usage) therefore
making them more likely to speak in the correct manner. However this theory is heavily
criticised, firstly as negative reinforcement is rarely used as children are more likely to be
corrected on the truth factor of what they say rather than linguistic accuracy, and that
negative reinforcement can hinder language development and children don’t respond to it.
The effectiveness of IRF can therefore be questioned.
Developing from the initiation section, caregivers may often ask questions they know
answers to, for example when Phil says ‘what’s that?’ This draws a response from the child
and maintains the social interaction, whilst also illustrating that the parent knows more that
the child and is helping them to learn. This validates Vygotsky’s scaffolding theory; that
children learn language through support from caregivers who are classed as a more
knowledgeable other. Caregivers therefore lead children to their zone of proximal
development, an area just outside their current attainment level. Whilst this scaffolding does
not apply exclusively to CDS, it could include CDS as a subunit of the aforementioned
interaction.
Jamie appears to be just developing into the holophrastic stage; reduplication is abundant in
his vocabulary, ‘ pen pen’, ‘gen gen gen’ and some reduplicated babbling (‘ni ni’) remains
present. Katherine nelson, at this stage, found that parents who utilised word choice
correction not pronunciation correction had children that developed more slowly. This once
again disproves the effectiveness of operant conditioning, and suggesting that features of
CDS such as expansion (when caregivers develop what children say in a more complex
manner) may not be as effective as recasting (when caregivers repeat the grammatically
standard version of the child’s non-standard utterance back to them). In this sense, CDS is
not the most important feature; the type of CDS used can be suggested to be important as to
whether it nurtures or hinders language development.
The child also demonstrates use of over extension; Jamie views the picture of the queen and
says ‘mummy’, suggesting that he identifies all women as being his mother. Phil then replies
using expansion: ‘...Oh, Mummy’s a queen’ adopting the use of the diminutive and correcting
the truth factor of what Jamie has said to some extent (by introducing Jamie to the idea of a
Queen) without hindering the development by using negative reinforcement or a complete
correction. In this sense, the ‘gap filling’ idea expressed by Aitchison to explain
overextension is addressed; she theories that children overextend as they recognise the
difference between two things, but don’t yet know the new word. The expansion therefore
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