Socialization to book-reading in French and English family life: a longitudinal and comparative interactive study of specialized language practices
Résumé
At the heart of understanding the relationship between child language development and everyday experience is the linguistic anthropological perspective that views language as a form of social action and speaking as organizing social life (Duranti, 2011). This view puts interaction at the center of the organization of everyday life. It builds on the premise that language is a crucial medium for instilling and transforming socio-cultural competence across the life span (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Language socialization research analyzes how and why young children are apprenticed through language into particular activities and how they learn the communicative skills necessary for inhabiting cultural identities.
In this study, social interactions during book-reading in mother-child longitudinal data were mined for culturally rooted ways in which adults and children coordinate modes of communication, actions, bodies, and objects, in the environment to enhance their knowledge and skills.
Two French children and two English children were filmed once a month in their family environment from 1 to 7 years old. We focused on book-reading situations as they naturally occurred during our video-recordings and on the unfurling of multidimensional ritualized scripts that associate an object (the book), manipulative actions, and specific language practices performed with a range of semiotic resources (gaze, facial expressions, gestures, speech). We identified two types of activities initiated by adults in book-reading situations based on their multimediality: 1) the visual medium provided by the pictures is used to make descriptions and ask questions complemented by pointing to guide the children to build their lexicon through labeling and to help them connect characters and events; 2) the vocal modality is used to tell stories and build the children’s narrative skills. But book-reading also affords wonderful opportunities for adults to navigate between reality (the children’s everyday life experience) and fiction (the events and characters portrayed through the pictures and the text). Those constant shifts elicit both displaced speech and affective comments. We hypothesize that early book reading routines between a child who cannot read and a parent are relevant situations for children’s socialization to book reading. Book reading situations may also enhance children’s capacity to identify and understand others’ viewpoints and learn to subjectively position themselves using all the semiotic means they have at their disposal.
Our in-depth analyses of the longitudinal interactive data highlight the hybridity of the language productions in book reading situations that combine text that is read with spontaneous discourse, fictive and experiential narratives. Those hybrid productions enable adults to transmit and elicit specialized lexicon, morphology, syntax, co-verbal gestures and facial expressions. Children not only develop specific language practices, linguistic constructions and genres, but are also progressively socialized to a large variety of culturally relevant displays of stance as they build parallels between the characters and events being depicted and themselves as heroes of their own everyday lives.