Signed English in the classroom, IV. Aspects of children's speech and sign

Abstract

This paper explores the use of Signed English by children and their teachers in classroom conversations. Analyses of children's loquacity in sign (measured by their mean length of turn) are compared with previous analyses of the children's loquacity in speech to reveal high correlations between the two. Children's length of utterance in both speech and sign increased with age. However, their reliance on sign, relative to speech, declined with both age and IQ. The implications of these findings for the efficacy of Signed English as a vehicle for assisting the acquisition of spoken English are discussed. Analyses of the relations between teaching style and children's use of sign parallel those found between the same measures of teacher language and children's use of speech, implying that children may use speech and sign to perform similar communicative functions. Whether children communicate in words alone or in signs and speech, their levels of initiative, loquacity and misunderstanding relate to the manner in which teachers manage discourse. No evidence was found to suggest that teachers react differently to children as a function of their pupils' relative use of speech and sign. Morpho-syntactic analyses of the speech and sign of a sub-group of children reveal marked similarities with the 'input' they receive from teachers on two measures. The relative use of 57 morpho-syntactic categories by teachers and children were highly correlated as were the relative frequencies with which a sub-set of 28 categories were spoken, signed or both spoken and signed. The close correspondence between the content and expression of teachers' and children's communication implies that pupils may be acquiring a system of communication similar to that being displayed by their partners in communication. The implications of these results for theoretical debates about the 'impossibility' of the task of acquiring speech/sign hybrids are discussed. The paper ends with a general discussion of the theoretical and educational implications of the findings presented in the whole series of papers on the use of Signed English in the classroom (S.E.C. I-IV).