Tom Transcript

Imitation and reinforcement are the most crucial tools for children’s language acquisition. Evaluate

The genre of this text is a spontaneous conversation. It has an informal register as there are paralinguistic features such as the child giggling. The audience of this transcript is Tom, his mother and his father. The mode of the transcript is spoken as it is an interpersonal and unplanned dialogue. The purpose of this transcript is to discuss the subject of Tom using his dad’s bike.

Imitation is when something is being copied; in this example speech is being copied. The child imitates his mother when she models a phrase that he has said. In one of Tom’s utterances, he says “the dad bike”. His mother then goes on to model him by saying “Dad’s bike” in order to provide him with the standard form. Tom then goes on to imitate “dad’s bike” however the first time he says, he says it the original way “the dad bike” and then repairs himself, eventually saying “dad’s bike” multiple times. He hears the standard form, he then uses the non – standard form however self corrects himself and uses the standard form with the suffix. Skinner is a theorist in which believed that imitation is key, like Bruner, he believes that when interacting with a child, the child will imitate you and that is how they learn to acquire language. Skinner believed that children are like ‘empty blood vessels’ in which language had to be put into, they learn language from the environment, people. Chomsky is a theorist which disagreed with Skinner. Chomsky suggested that a child has a built in LAD (language acquisition device) and learning language is a natural ability. He believes LAD converts the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children then learn different/new vocabulary and relate the syntactic structures from the LAD to form different sentences.  Chomsky said that imitation is not how children learn due to adult’s language sometimes being broken up and ungrammatical. Children will usually recognise if an adult uses an ungrammatical sentence. Tom imitating his mother in this transcript supports Skinner’s theory as he does learn the Standard English form from imitating his mother.

Operant conditioning is a theory that B.F Skinner came up with; it is based on whether behaviour is determined by its consequences. Positive and Negative reinforcements are used. Positive reinforcement is where praise or response is given, Negative reinforcement is where they are punished or ignored. Tom’s mother gives him positive reinforcement when he uses a non-standard form “Is dat your talker”. His mother replies with ‘My talker? Yeah (.) that’s a tape recorder”. She gives him positive reinforcement by repeating what the noun he says and replies with ‘yeah’ even though it isn’t the standard name. She is impressed with his recognition of the communication noun. Giving him positive reinforcement may give him confidence whilst speaking, and modelling him at the same time using the correct noun, ‘that’s a tape recorder’ may help him to learn more complex language in the future. Tom saying ‘talker’ supports Chomsky as he would not of imitated  this noun from anybody as his mum calls it a tape recorder.

She also gives him positive reinforcement when he is counting the chickens. He counts “one (.) two(.) three (.) four (.) one (.) two (.) three (.) four (.) five (.) six (.) seven (.) eight (.) nine (2.0)”. His mother counts “One (.) two(.) three (.) four (.) five”. His mother is helping him learn how to count by doing it the correct way; she may be using a strategy such as pointing at the chickens or counting from left to right in order to teach Tom a simpler way of doing it correctly. Tom may have counted the chickens twice as he may not have had a method to use, however he is at the Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky, where he may be able to do it with help from his mother.