Culture and Spoken Discourse

In "Learning How to Talk in Trackton" and "Teaching How to Talk in Roadville," Heath brings to the forefront traditions often observed but seldom discussed in a detached manner. Seeing the rituals having to do with children described in this book is reminiscent of our class discussions regarding making the normalized "weird" for students by asking them to take a closer look at social practices that are taken for granted. The decreasing celebration of every expected newborn, names of items considered necessary,  and introducing the child to members of the family are examples of accepted practices (113-117). One type of communication between children learning how to talk and adults consists of an exchange where the child unknowingly reciprocates a form of teaching language. When the child repeats a term but misuses its meaning or mispronounces it, family members imitate the pronunciation back to the child and may even use the new extended meaning of the word in their household. Heath uses many examples of this throughout the chapter, and in becoming a less normalized convention in the reading, the terms of children and their use in families began to connect to and resemble collaborative learning. The extended meanings and new pronunciations of terms are not only reflections of the child's attempt to mimic their caretakers and learn to effectively communicate with them, but also reflections of the adults' effort to engage with the child's efforts. When family members and others who spend a significant amount of time with the child begin to incorporate the child's speech into their own everyday speech, it is (perhaps subconsciously) a gesture that a child contributes to what is considered acceptable speech in a household rather than just being the one who must learn. The words and phrases that are used within a family as a part of that "teaching" drop out of the family's vocabulary soon after the child is perceived as too old for "baby talk." The temporary language does not appear to have a long term purpose in the family outside of perhaps a nostalgic memory that is associated with the terms the child brings into their environment. I do not want to make a sudden leap to the classroom environment, but I will for the purpose of this post. I found myself wondering how the speech the child brings into the family relates to what students bring into the classroom. Students tend not to find their speech appropriate for academic purposes and have the expectation of education as a way to rid them of their nonstandard language or to help them mask their use of the nonstandard in academic settings. The relationship between the history of collaboration in a child's upbringing may connect to students bringing in baggage about their speech as something that is not valuable.