AQA June 2012 past paper- Jess text


Jess is three years old and in text A she is doing a jigsaw puzzle with her mum. Jess and her mother are both at home so the register of the language tends to be more informal and the tone will be more chatty and Jess is in her comfort zone.

The caregiver plays an important role in the text, in this her mother is the caregiver. The mother asks a lot of interrogatives. "where does this one go" and "where's the nurse"  this is important to jess' language development as she is trying too negate conversation and tries to show jess how to create questions and a question- answer response. By asking questions, the mother is helping Jess build up network building, for example; by asking Jess "what's that" and Jess replies saying "umbrella" it encourages Jess to think about her surroundings when looking at the picture cards and encourages her to talk. This idea was proposed by Jean aitchison and is called labelling. Also, this can be seen through the mother recasting Jess. Jess answers her mother saying "gloo" and her mother replies by just simply saying "igloo" This links with the face theory proposed by Goffman, this links to the theory as the mother uses recasting to try and avoid telling Jess off for pronouncing the word incorrectly because she is saving face and doesn't want to discourage Jess in her speech. 

Jess is in the telegraphic stage. We can see this in text B, as we can see she tries to form sentences and questions; " penguins(.) what's that" this shows that is she is able to structure questions to interact with her mother. This supports Bruner's theory of social interactionist. This supports his idea that turn taking is a way of interacting with children and it helps to educate children on important linguistic features. Here jess could have learnt to form questions from her mother interacting with her through a question-answer response.

Jess is in stage 2 of bellugi's negation stages. This is when she uses the negative word in the correct place but doesn't use an auxiliary, foe example " I not know" this shows that she have some understand of how to use a negative word but her understanding has not quite developed fully yet as she doesn't use an auxiliary. 

Jess omits consonant clusters; this is shown when she tries to pronounce "policewomen" and "chocolate"  this shows that she finds it harder to pronounce longer syllables. this could support piaget's theory that  children have a cognitive understanding of language and how to function the English language, however, their physical pronunciation is not as developed ad their cognitive understanding.