Allocation and acknowledgment in young bilingual children's conversations

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to describe one aspect of the communicative competence of 4-year-old Spanish/English bilingual children: the strategies they used in both languages for allocating turns and acknowledging them in peer conversations within a bilingual classroom context. Ethnographic techniques including participant observation, interviewing, and videotaping were used to collect languaguesed data. Allocating episodes were identified and described, frequencies calculated, and patterns interpreted in context. Within the episodes, three patterns of allocating and five patterns of acknowledging were identified. The children tended to use Spanish more often for the pattern that consisted of sets of allocators in one turn, while they used English more often for the pattern that consisted of sequences of allocators in a series of consecutive turns. Despite this difference, rates of acknowledgment were high and were almost the same in both languages. In this bilingual context, then, the children used different allocating strategies integrated with their two languages to communicate successfully.