Learning to Say No in Chinese

This study investigated the characteristics of adult-child disputes in 10 Mandarinspeaking families in Mainland China. Naturalistic interactions between caregivers and their 2-year-old toddlers were analyzed by coding the occurrence of disputes and the disagreement strategies used by caregivers and toddlers in times of dispute. Results showed that children's most frequent disagreement strategies included direct refusals, protests, and silence. In contrast, adults seldom used silence or refusals but instead used direct positive requests, expressions of dissatisfaction, and prohibitions when disagreeing with their toddlers. Overall, the results from the present study support the notion that disputes are ways to reflect existing social structures and ways by which adults in a culture can socialize children into disagreement strategies appropriate to their roles.     

Learning to Say "No" in Chinese

This study investigated the characteristics of adult-child disputes in 10 Mandarinspeaking families in Mainland China. Naturalistic interactions between caregivers and their 2-year-old toddlers were analyzed by coding the occurrence of disputes and the disagreement strategies used by caregivers and toddlers in times of dispute. Results showed that children's most frequent disagreement strategies included direct refusals, protests, and silence. In contrast, adults seldom used silence or refusals but instead used direct positive requests, expressions of dissatisfaction, and prohibitions when disagreeing with their toddlers. Overall, the results from the present study support the notion that disputes are ways to reflect existing social structures and ways by which adults in a culture can socialize children into disagreement strategies appropriate to their roles.     

印度高等院校中的双语教学问题及其启示

本文研究印度高等教育中英语、印地语和地区语言的使用情况,分析双语教学问题对印度高等教育质量的影响,希望能对教育国际化背景下的我国高等教育如何避免民族语言的"失语症"问题提供参考.     

从社会语言中窥究社会文化——浅谈日常英语与英国人

语言是文化的一个核心的组成部分。从某种特定的语言我们就可以了解到这种语言使用者的一些特点。英语,作为整个大英民族思想表达的一种工具,也向我们展示出他们的心理状态、国民特点以及他们倾向的行为方式。这篇文章就是采用例证法从日常英语,如称呼,礼貌的问候,说话的委婉方式以及回避禁忌的方法等方面来说明这一点。     

Exploring the social connections in preschool settings between children labelled with special educational needs and their peers

This paper reports on a small-scale study of the social interactions between six children labelled with special educational needs and their peers in their respective early years settings. Data from play observations, photographs and staff interviews is used to examine the dynamics of the connections that they make with other children. The position of these six children as active agents in making decisions about their peer interactions is highlighted and the ways that this agency is expressed is analysed. By focusing on the personal strategies that the children use to make social connections the findings contribute to the developing understanding of children's relationships within inclusive early years settings. In particular compatible play interests and personalities are identified as significant factors that attract children to one another in this case study. It also emerged that recurrent playmates did not feature consistently in the social exchanges involving this group of children. This factor is considered in the context of it being indicative of the social connections that children labelled with special educational needs pursue. Suggestions for further investigation are proposed and key practice messages offered around developing awareness and facilitation of social connections between children.     

Blurring boundaries, distant companions: non-kin female caregivers for children in colonial India (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

This paper examines the history of child-care by non-kin, “non-family” members and their representations in colonial India. It focuses primarily on Bengal and relies on several genres of literary documents. Bengal harboured the seat of the British imperial capital in the city of Calcutta until 1911 and its culture was shaped in unique ways compared with other Indian cities. Based on a reading of select literary documents such as European advice manuals and Bengali personal narratives, the paper argues that the relationship between caregivers and children in colonial households attests to the building of new ties and deep ambiguous, multi-dimensional relationships with non-kin members thereby revealing the plasticity of Indian families where sociocultural boundaries were blurred and intimate relationships forged. Beginning with the literary representation of a wet-nurse in Mahasweta Devi's short story Breast-Giver, the paper delves into the world of European and Indian accounts to recuperate the history of the caregivers. It demonstrates that despite the emphasis of recent scholars that the construction of a respectable middle-class identity was based on a sharp distinction from lower social groups, such as working women and prostitutes, the history of child-care by hired domestics reveals the sharing of a common world by different caste-class groups and the interpenetration of the two domains of culture.     

Talk with Your Mother or Your Sibling? Developmental Changes in Early Family Conversations about Feelings

Developmental changes in the pattern of family conversations and talk about feelings were examined in a longitudinal study of 50 families observed at home when the second-born children were 33 and 47 months old. Significant increases were noted in the total amount of talk and the frequency of talk about feelings between sibling pairs as well as decreases in the amount of mother-child conversation and references to feelings. Differences in whose feelings were discussed and in the context of references to feelings were found for mother-child and sibling-child dyads. Developmental changes in the children's use of feeling state language co-occurred with the increase in interaction between children and their siblings. The findings contrast the "complementary" nature of mother-child interaction and the "reciprocal" nature of child-sibling interaction and support the argument that the quality of particular relationships influences the use children make of their communicative competence.     

Gender Codes at Odds and the Linguistic Construction of a Hybrid Identity

This study traces the ways in which an Arabic-speaking immigrant girl in Cyprus positions herself towards the different gender ideologies that she encounters at home and in school. Through Nadia's linguistic choices and discursive strategies we come to see how competing gender codes, meeting at the crossroads of geographic, linguistic, and cultural transition, lead to the emergence of a hybrid cultural identity. The data also reveal that "passing" is not always the goal of speakers who enter a new culture; instead, social categories such as gender mediate between the ability and the willingness to pass. These findings suggest that L2 users, through their daily linguistic and cultural practices across and within discourse sites, become agents of multiple, dynamic, and flexible identities. The study demonstrates the particular implications of second language learning and use and gender ideologies in the process of identity construction and highlights the complexities of identity work in today's multilingual and multitextual social settings.     

Young children's use of video as a source of socially relevant information

Although prior research clearly shows that toddlers have difficulty learning from video, the basis for their difficulty is unknown. In the 2 current experiments, the effect of social feedback on 2-year-olds' use of information from video was assessed. Children who were told "face to face" where to find a hidden toy typically found it, but children who were given the same information by a person on video did not. Children who engaged in a 5-min contingent interaction with a person (including social cues and personal references) through closed-circuit video before the hiding task used information provided to find the toy. These findings have important implications for educational television and use of video stimuli in laboratory-based research with young children.     

Developing a play‐based communication assessment through collaborative action research with teachers in northern Canadian indigenous communities

With the goal of developing culturally appropriate approaches for assessing and supporting children's language use, teachers of 4‐to 6‐year‐old children in northern Canadian rural and Indigenous communities are involved in a 6‐year collaborative action research project. Teachers video record children's interactions during dramatic and construction play and then meet with university researchers to carry out inductive analyses of ways in which children use language to achieve social purposes. From these analyses, a Play‐based Communication Assessment has been created. Examples from two teachers' classrooms in one Indigenous community are used to show how play contexts and the still‐evolving play‐based communication assessment provide opportunities for teachers to recognise and build upon the linguistic and cultural resources that children bring to classrooms. Through the play‐based assessment and action research processes, teachers have come to recognise the richness of children's language when they are engaged in play and have gained understandings of their community's culture. Teachers and researchers are exploring ways to capture children's non‐verbal communication abilities through this assessment approach.     

Computer use in learning about language

This study is part of a research project aimed at studying ways and effects of introducing computer use within a context of linguistic education. Linguistic activities, in which language was treated as an object instead of a means of communication, were carried out through a curriculum unit aimed at developing reflection on language. Within the curriculum a new software has been developed and implemented. The software promotes reflection on language and metalinguistic awareness in a social and educational context in wich «playing with language» is stimulated in children. It requires language comprehension and production, and offers to children (working in groups of three) the open task of composing sentences and stories in a problem solving setting. In this study we collected observational data on children’s interactions with the software and used the data as an ecological measure of children’s metalinguistic development. Positiv effects of the curriculum supported by the computer use were verified through measures of metalinguistic skills, investigated through individual interviews and administered also to a matched control group.     

Three constructs of institutional identity among international doctoral students in Australia

Postmodern institutional interactions in Australian universities, among students and staff, entail negotiation of identity, legitimacy, and ‘social capital’. For many international students, this happens in an additional language and culture, in English. The case study presented here profiles four international non-English speaking background Ph.D. students in an Australian university, observes their out-of classroom departmental interactions, and uses a sociocultural perspective of second language in use to map their approaches to the negotiation of institutional identity. Two focus group interviews with the participants illustrated how, despite similarities among the participants in the beginning as newcomers to a Western university, students chose different pathways for integration, engagement in institutional interactions, and identity construction. The discussions highlight the role of agency and intentionality in participation and learning through interaction which leads to a critique of the ‘international student' as a label that underplays student agency.     

When Cultural Norms Discourage Talking to Babies: Effectiveness of a Parenting Program in Rural Senegal

In some areas of rural Africa, long‐standing cultural traditions and beliefs may discourage parents from verbally engaging with their young children. This study assessed the effectiveness of a parenting program designed to encourage verbal engagement between caregivers and infants in Wolof‐speaking villages in rural Senegal. Caregivers (n = 443) and their 4‐ to 31‐month‐old children were observed at baseline in 2013 and 1 year later at follow‐up. Results showed that caregivers in program villages nearly doubled the amount of child‐directed speech during a play session compared to baseline, whereas caregivers in matched comparison villages showed no change. After 1 year, children in program villages produced more utterances, and showed greater improvement in vocabulary and other language outcomes compared to children in comparison villages.     

The Unfamiliar and the Indeterminate: Language,Identity and Social Integration in the School Experience of Newly-Arrived Migrant Children in England

Research into the language socialisation of migrant-background children in new educational contexts has pointed to a complex relationship between language, identity, and social integration. This article helps us to further define this relationship in two main ways. Firstly, through focusing on the specific (and largely neglected) context of the experiences of newly-arrived migrant school children from disadvantaged backgrounds and with little initial command of English, in the East of England, which has in recent years seen a steep rise in the population of children from Eastern Europe in particular. Secondly, through inductive analysis of the pupils’ accounts of their experience in the new environment, the article identifies four key themes which shed light on the overlap between language, identity, and social integration in this context: perceptions of exclusion in the new language environment, the social boundaries of language use, L1 exchange as communicative capital, and languages and identity simulation.     

Improving Communication with People with an Intellectual Disability: The content validation of the Biala-II profile

This study explores the content validity of a profile used to describe the communication behaviour of people with intellectual disabilities. The profile, named Biala-II - a Wiradjuri (an Australian Aboriginal language) word for "I understand you" - makes use of the knowledge of informants who are able to provide specific and detailed information on the ways in which a person communicates. This information can be used by ''communication partners'' to guide their interactions with a person whom they do not know well. Five samples of experts - parents, researchers, residential workers, speech pathologists, and special education teachers - rated 16 "best practice" indicators and then rated Biala-II in relation to these indicators. They also answered questions about specific features of the profile with attention to the methodology employed and the likelihood that its use would improve communication with people with an intellectual disability. The results reveal a high level of support for the profile.     

Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Insights From Deafness

The condition of deafness presents a developmental context that provides insight into the biological, cultural, and linguistic factors underlying the development of neural systems that impact social cognition. Studies of visual attention, behavioral regulation, language development, and face and human action perception are discussed. Visually based culture and language provides deaf children with affordances that promote resiliency and optimization in their development of visual engagement, executive functions, and theory of mind. These experiences promote neural adaptations permitting nuanced perception of classes of linguistic and emotional-social behaviors. Studies of deafness provide examples of how interactions and contributions of biological predispositions and genetic phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors including childhood experiences and actions of caregivers shape developmental trajectories ( M. I. Posner & M. K. Rothbart, 2007 ).     

“以言破言”与“能指优势”——论中西文学批评在语言意识上的一个差异

“以言破言”是中国古代文化和文学的言说方式之一,其源于对不可言说之物表达的需要,体现了中国文学解决言意矛盾的一种策略和智慧。现代西方文论、尤其是文本批评,则强调文学言说具有“能指优势”的特点,突出了文学语言的形式特征。本文试图通过对“以言破言”和“能指优势”两种理论的比较,阐明中西文学批评在语言意识上的差异和形成这种差异的深层原因。     

Mixed-Age Interactions in Family Child Care

Preschool-age children's experiences within the mixed-age setting of family child care homes and the influences of these experiences on development were examined. Development variables included social and cognitive play, and receptive and expressive language. Consistent with Vygotsky's developmental theory, children's interactions with mixed-age peers were more powerful predictors of development than the mere availability of mixed-age peers. Interactions with older peers were associated with more complex cognitive play behaviors. Interactions with younger and same-age peers were associated with less complex social and cognitive play and lower receptive language scores. Characteristics of the child care setting appeared to moderate children's behavior in the mixed-age environment. Children in higher quality family child care homes with responsive caregivers were less likely to interact with younger children. No evidence was found of different developmental outcomes across developmental domains for older versus younger children.