Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

‘language’. However, there is much moreto language learning than the ability toappropriately segment a stream of speech.Traditionally, from the work of Bruner(1986) and Wells (1986) and others,we have come to see parents, carersor adults as leaders and scaffolders oflanguage use and conversation. However,the research of Bloom and colleagues,when observing and recording childrenfrom nine months onwards, indicates thatchildren are often the initiators, leadersand directors of talk events andconversations, determining and shapingthe content, length and nature of the talk.They say that ‘both child and mothercontributed to the architecture of the earlyconversations between them, but in factit was the children who were “in charge”’.(Bloom et al 1996: 3171; our italics). Thoseof us who have either lived or worked withbabies and young children would supportthis view from experience of often beingled into conversations, or indeed corners,by young developing conversationalists,often in public spaces! And asopportunities for satisfying curiosity arise,the questions of young children,as developing philosophers, are oftenunanswerable, for example ‘Where wereyou when the sun was built?’ (Coles 1996).The child as ‘director’ of play orconversation is only possible if a sensitiverelationship is evident between the childand adult. Singer claims that the childlearns to ‘read’ her/his mother’s face andthat equally ‘the mother, as the moreexperienced other, attributes certainmeanings to the infant’s diffusemovements. She mirrors and imitates herchild. She interprets her child’s movementsas communication cues that suggest somejoint course of action’ (Singer 2001:2). Thisreciprocity, or mirrored language, actions,gestures or expressions, develops ably intoshared understandings as games, play,teasing and word play become part ofdaily interaction.Play of course soon becomes thecontextual space where meaning is madeand negotiated as children develop waysof interacting with toys, space and ‘others’to construct and reconstruct worlds.As children attempt to make sense of theirlives through play, stories are told,narratives are constructed (see chapter 3).Rosen claims that ‘we can locate narrativein human actions and the events whichsurround them and in our capacity toperceive the world as consisting of actionsand events sequentially ordered (Rosen1988: 13) and as children recreate the rolesof those around them such narratives areconstructed in often the simplest forms,using basic resources and barely indicativelanguage and gesture. Meek offers theview that ‘in their own versions of storieschildren explore intellectually the natureof their own situation – childhood…andas they learn to become both the tellerand the told, they are also learning todialogue with their futures’ (Meek 1998:118). These lessons are best learned fromthe stories heard, shared, discussed andloved in the company of parents, adultsand others who are prepared to suspend79