Ways of Telling: Text Repertoires in Elementary School Children

Abstract

Whenever we characterize the language styles of different groups of speakers, there is a double obligation. At the same time that we point to contrasts, it is critical to ask about commonalities. In recent years, the contrastive analysis of language in children with oral and literate speech styles has largely emphasized the differences between their patterns of speech, in particular, the “difficulties” children with oral styles encounter when they enter the literate culture of schools. In the process, we have failed to look for commonalities in children's knowledge of language use across tasks. In an effort to investigate these commonalities, children with literate and oral speech styles were asked to re-tell the same events in a number of different formats, including a play rendition with small figures and an entirely oral account. If compared to one another on a single task, the two groups of children did exhibit differences in the particular way they use language to encode events. However, each group of children also made similar types of adaptations when portraying the events through play and oral narration. As they moved from playing to narrating, both groups of children edited more carefully, combined contextual information and language differently and employed more explicit language. Thus, many young speakers, despite their own preferred style of language use, hold a common definition of the dimensions of language which can or should be modified across at least these two tasks. This basic knowledge, in addition to information about contrasts in language styles, should provide the starting point for teaching children about the differing demands of conversation, classroom discourse and writing.