Language and Learning: The Importance of Speech in Children's Development

by James Britton

Language and Learning is a rich and moving account of how children learn to talk and the role of speech in cognitive development.

Genres: Education, Language, Nonfiction

330 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1970

Reviews

[Liam Porter · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a pretentious book. It has no particular core idea running through it, and is only described as "the outcome of James Britton's attempts to understand the observable behaviour of children as they grow up" in the blurb. That is fair to say. He attempts to understand the behaviour, but seems to have accumilated nothing but transcripts of speech - zero insight into the workings of language. Only transcripts and endless arbitrary divsions of observable speech into developmental stages and genres of speech, from one place at one time. Yet the style of the book is lofty and fancies itself philosophical.

His major influence is Piaget, but Britton does not so much stand in the lineage of psychologists so much as write literature reviews and, if he reports something interesting, such as the following, you are left asking why you don't read Piaget instead:

Perhaps the best illustration of a child's egocentrism of viewpoint is that given by Piaget when he says, "a boy of six to seven years old is ready to declare that he had a brother but that the brother has himself no brother". It is a matter of being unable to step outside himself in order to see the world from another person's point of view: thus it is equally a sign of egocentrism that a young child will often omit himself altogether when he tries to count how many people there are in the room. (Piaget 1959, p.275) This limitation of view-point will affect in some degree everything a child says: it is Piaget's point that attempts to converse run counter to this egocentrism, whereas the running commentary and other forms of monologue run with it. p.59

The second of Britton's heroes, Vrgotsky, quoted as an authority figure throughout, hints at where the former's foggy, vain writing style stemmed from. A certain "Vgotsky" seems a sort of pseudo-psychological guru who proclaims upon "thought", "meaning" and "words." Britton's commentary is fawning and condescending to the reader, who is presumed to be taken aback by the lofty "heights" of Vgotsky's pearls of wisdom. To the pearls, Britton adds truisms dressed up as profundity, e.g. "talk in infancy [he takes this to be audible thought] finishes where we can no longer observe it [he means subconscious thought]"

"Thought must pass first through meanings and then through words." (Vgotsky, 1962, pp.149-50) The journey is not always completed: Vrgotsky quotes at the head of the chapter we have been considering this extract from a Russian poem: "I have forgotten the word I intended to say, and my thought, unembodied, returns to the realm of shadows." The air may be too thin for some travellers when speculation reaches these heights. They must be comforted, however, to realize that the term "post-language symbols" has been widely used to refer to some of the elements we deploy in our thinking. There can in my view be no reasonable doubt that talk in infancy is the beginning of a developmental process that finishes where we can no longer observe it, in the workings of a man's mind. p.64

Here he imbues the barest facts about human communication with a totally unwarrented mystique. All he says here is that there is a phonemic structure of words which stand them in opposition to minimally different phonemic structures - e.g. the vowels in "fail" "foil" "file" - and that words have a semantic value and a phonological value which are realized in paralell (and which are sometimes prioritized one above the other). Britton cannot resist adding "(and writing)" at the end, presumably because he thought it sounded more logically airtight, yet it's a nonsense, taken literally: the only "corporeal quality" of "writing" is the act of writing with a moving hand, and this is not a "corporeal quality" "employed" in an utterance.

The actual sound of "file" as I speak the word on a given occasion has an absolute and not a relative value and does not concern you as you listen to me: what concerns you is how that sound in my speech relates to others - "fail", "foil" for example - and only when, with the help of many contextual clues, you have my sound placed in the system as I speak it will the word be unambiguous to you. Of course we make rules for outselves that supersede these rules when it is more than bare, ordinary discourse we are after: speakers care how they sound for many reasons over and above intelligibility; lovers make wooing noises with their words; and poetry is the supreme example of a kind of utterance that employs the corporeal qualities of speech (and of writing). p.78

Here, there is only plain fact that utterances have not only a bare semantic interpretation and sound, but also a context. Notice how Britton bold-prints commonplace terms and vague invented phrases as if they ought to be jotted down and revised:

"Oh I see, it's this that's doing it!" is a remark that was perfectly intelligible when it was made to me, as an opening gambit, some time ago. It was intelligible partly because of the immediate situation in which it was made; partly because items in the situation were indicated by the speaker's gestures; and partly because the speaker and I shared in common certain previous experiences. The utterance, the present situation, actions within it, and a shared sense of past experience - these were required to make up the total intelligible speech event. My reply was an action: the situation, my action within it, and the shared context of past experience combined to produce an intelligible event p.97

And one last example is where he attempts to summarize generative syntax. I have omitted the quote from yet another authority figue guru, Bruner, from whom it is obvious these embarassing misunderstandings stem. Britton claims that generative grammars are only a way of describing sentences... which is not true - they are attempts to explain the working of natural language. Britton claims that "transformations" in Phrase-Structure Grammar (he does not use this term) are the combination of two "finished" grammatical structures from natural language, when in fact they are the transformation of one single structure with two levels of representation. He lists 3 "fundamental properties" which are all complete garblings of general linguistic concepts (subject-predicate, verb-object, and noun modification) completely non-specific to Noam Chomsky. Britton makes the freeform association of "predicate" with "experience" and "subject" with "constant value" and "verb-object relation" with "cause and effect" (surely SV would be cause and effect, not VO):

When we turn now to syntactical relationships in general - relationships expressed in the sentence as a whole - the picture is so complicated that we must select only the salient points. We shall be guided by Bruner who in turn takes his lead from one of the most influential of living linguists, Noam Chomsky[...]. All languages incorporate in their grammar three fundamental properties [...] and they are closely related to the characteristics of mature thinking. They are (1) the [b]subject-predicate relation[/b] by which what is named in the subject is show, in terms from logic, to be a "function of" what is said in the predicate. This is perhaps little more, in common sense terms, than saying that the subject and the predicate are related in a particular way, a way that is constant from sentence to sentence; and that formulations of aspects of experience (predicates) are meaningful - can be believed or disbelieved - only when they are anchored upon some given entity (the subject); (2) the verb-object relation which expresses the logical relation of cause and effect, and (3) modification which represents what logicians call "the intersect of classes": in "a green hat," "green" is a modifier of "hat," and "a green hat" represents the intersect of "green things" and "hats."

[...]Chomsky, in setting out to describe in as economical and systematic a fashion as possible the relations between setence structure, would explain The man wore the green hat as a re-writing, a transformation, of two basic sentences, The man wore the hat and the hat was green. But it must be noted that the abstract system he arrives at is a way of describing structures and not an explation of how a speaker produces sentences. p.201

Buber himself is liberally quoted throughout. I feel very sorry for the Open Univerity students for who this booked was a "Set Book":

Martin Buber recognizes the same sort of one-sidedness in the relation of teacher to child. He assigns the educator's function as he states what he means by education:

Buber: The world, the whole environment, nature and society, "educates" the human being: it draws out his powers, and makes him grasp and penetrate its objections. What we term education, conscious and willed, means a selection by man of the effective world: it means to give decisive effective power to a selection of the world which is concentrated and manifested in the educator. (Buber, 1947, p.89)

If the educator is to select widely from the world, the whole environment, he must live in the world: if he is to make his selection not arbitrarily "from himself and his idea of the pupil" but "from the pupil's own reality" he must "have gathered the child's presence into his own store." p. 183

Another guru who Britton takes his style from is a certain "Chukovsky." This follows the same pattern of the Vrgotsky excerpt quoted above. The authority figure is quoted, Britton adds some reverent remarks and then a colourless personal commentary with pretentious gravity:

Chukovsky: Hardly has the child comprehended with certainty which objects go together and which do not, when he begins to listen happily to verses of absurdity. For some mysterious reason the child is attracted to that topsy-turvy world where legless men run, water burns, horses gallop astride their riders, and cows nibble on peas on top of birch trees.

But the reason grows less mysterious as the author proceeds:

Chukovsky:The child plays not only with marbles, with blocks, with dolls, but also with ideas. No sooner does he master some idea than he is only too eager to make it his toy.

The turning upside down in play - the misfit improvisations - are both self-congratulatory symbols of the child's new achievement and a means of reinforcing what he has learnt about actuality. The self-congratulation becomes more explicit when, as often happens, the absurdity is part of somebody else's behaviour - as when Simple Simon was stupid enough to fish for a whale in his mother's bucket. So Chukovsky concludes, the function of such rhymes and tales "is obvious; for every "wrong" the child realizes what is "right," and every departure from the normal strengthens his conception of the normal." p.87

The book is full of arbitrary and idiolectic division. Of "spectator" speech and "participant" speech. Of "conative" "expressive" "poetic" and "informative" speech. Or maybe of "transational" "expressive" "poetic" according to another arbitrary authority figure. Each author in this genre of pseudo-lingustic, pseudo-psychological, pseudo-sociological, pseudo-philisophical writing has his own. This undercuts the explanatory of power of any one, especially when they only seem liked dressed-up common sense (here, with an odious liberal bias attached):

Looking now at internal relations, a child in a status-organized family who says "Why?" to an instruction is likely to have an answer, "because I tell you to." In the person-organized family he is more likely to elicit a reason, and explanation - "because if you don't you'll have nothing to spend when you go on your holiday." The second kind of answer unsually leads on to more talk: the first acts as a full stop to the discussion. p.96

In its defense, this book reports many vivid transcripts from young people and how they use speech. It tracks the development from babbling to a sort of "running commentary" to the language of teachers and pupils, diary writing, and other arbitrary "genres" of speech. My problems may not affect other readers.

[José Van Rosmalen]

In het Nederlands: de taal en het leren, aula 504.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Language is a means by which we organize our representation of the world. Before speech there is no conception, there is only perception. It is from successive experiences of words in use that a child builds up his resources. Man interposes a network of words between the world and himself and thereby becomes master of the world.