Conversation Gambits

Edith has just screamed 'I don't want to go to bed yet!' at me, or near enough. What she actually actually produced is a six or seven syllable utterance with rising intonation and emphasis on the second and last syllables, which are stretched into a falling cry. 

Even though the language isn't there yet, the intonation, the music of the utterance is spot on and very specifically English. I know this because I often try and get French or Italian students to stretch their syllables for emphasis when I'm teaching intonation, and trust me, they don't like it. So this gets me thinking, how much of these intonation patterns has she learned from us? Sure I don't spend that much time protesting loudly about going to bed. But I'm sure she's listened to plenty of other expressions of protest coming from my mouth. So maybe Edie is tuning in to the forms of discourse first and picking up waveforms. Perhaps there aren't actually that many to learn. 

We have a book in our speaking and listening library called Conversational Gambits By Keller and Warner from the old days of TEFL in 1988. They get to about 60 different gambits in their book split into opening gambits, linking gambits and responding gambits. But you could probably shave it down to a fairly small group of short expressions that Edith must be tuning into and mastering one by one. the protest gambit, well that seems a fairly good place to start, especially when you're a small person and you've got two big people telling you what to do all the time.

A bird in the hand

A very natural progression that, nevertheless, was wonderful in it’s simplicity and timing. It starts with dinner time. We try to let Edith feed herself. She drinks from a plastic cup which is kept out of her reach to avoid her baptising her food and creating a sloppy mess. Just before Christmas, she started pointing at the cup when she needed a drink - the first finger stretched to indicate the desired object. A Particularly useful skill if there was a bottle with milk in it, or a banana just out of reach. The pointing was usually accompanied with a declarative humph. She quickly started to point at other things that weren’t edible things. Her bookshelf was a popular one - a good way indicate ‘I want a story’ (usually when it was bedtime.) 

Then on Christmas day, in the morning, she was sitting in her grandparents living room, on her grand mum’s lap. We were probably opening presents or something boring that had taken the focus off her briefly. She was gazing at the bird feeder, hanging outside the window. A bird landed to peck some seeds, she pointed out of the window and said ‘dere!’ A demonstrative and an  imperative too. Look at that! Look at what I’ve seen! Look at it with me! She was obviously pretty pleased with the effect this had on us because she has been doing it throughout the christmas period since that point, with the occasional addition of ‘dere dada!’ Good alliteration, Dad approves. The birds were a continued source of interest particularly because they flitted in and out, Edith had to wait and look for them carefully. The train window was a pretty exciting prospect as well, everything flashing past. We were on the train to the children’s zoo in Battersea Park. I wouldn’t have thought to take Edith there just a week ago, but now it seemed to provide the perfect ‘look at that, there’ opportunity. Edith definitely enjoyed the occasion, there was lots of finger pointing at meerkats, lemurs and otters (and the other children on the playground.) She might actually understand what those funny animals are in her storybooks now. Why do we populate our storybooks with anthropomorphized animals? Why not throw in the odd sapien?