The child's experience in the relationship between language acquisition, speech and writing

Abstract

The round table reviewed here focuses on the use of language in language acquisition. Each researcher develops his presentation emphasizing an aspect about the child and the use of language: Lourenço Chacon expounds on the relationship between oral and literacy practices in unconventional writing data, in a discursive approach; Marlete Sandra Diedrich explains about acquisition, speech and experience of meaning, in the benvenistian enunciative perspective; Gabriela Maria de Oliveira-Codinhoto presents on relative prayers and writing acquisition, in a functionalist perspective. With their analyzes, which converge in demonstrating the functioning and systematization of the language in initial linguistic productions, each with its uniqueness, the researchers show the potential of studies on the child's relationship with the language.

Text

The round table entitled “The child and the use of language: speech, writing and their relations in language acquisition”[1] (in original, A criança e o uso da língua: fala, escrita e suas relações na aquisição da linguagem), held on July 17^th, 2020, at 7pm, composes the vast schedule of event Abralin Ao Vivo (Linguistis online). The round table was composed by Loureço Chacon (Universidade Estadual Paulista), Marlete Sandra Diedrich (Universidade de Passo Fundo) and Gabriela Maria Oliveira-Codinhoto (Universidade Federal do Acre), under the mediation of Giovane Fernandes de Oliveira (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul). The guests discussed the use of language and its relations in the language acquisition, emphasizing the constitution of the child a speaker and a writer, from the following theoretical and methodological perspectives: discursive, enunciative and functionalist. The debaters approached different theoretical perspectives to establish dialogues about the child’s maturation experience in the use of language, both in speech and in writing, each from their perspective, from the systematization of language and initial linguistic productions.

Lourenço Chacon (Unesp) presents “The speech/written relationship in unconventional data of child writing” (in original, A relação fala/escrita em dados não-convencionais de escrita infantil), building a explanation from two questions: Do unconventional data of children's writing allow questions to be asked about the relationship between speech and writing? If so, what questions does the acquisition of writing point to? To try to answer questions, the researcher situates the listening public in their conceptions about the concepts of speech and writing, assuming the perspective that oral practices and literacy practices do not develop isolated, and therefore, the constitution of the subject as a speaker and as a scribe takes place, precisely, through the crossing of different oral and literacy practices. In this perspective, Chacon presents the idea that we can look this phenomenon through speech data, observing the evidence of crossing in oral practices and in literacy practices; and through writing data, observing at oral and literacy practices constitutive of the subject. To clarify these concepts, the researcher presents the analysis of corpus, observing the relationship between speech and writing, from data of infant writing. His analytical point of view comes from a group of productions and studies of himself and other researchers, about phenomena that escape the conventions in relation to punctuation, segmentation of words and orthography. The analysis reveals that unconventional data from children’s writing can raise questions about written and speech relationships, these data indicate the scribe’s transit simultaneously through practices of orality and literacy, as well as the writer’s conflicts about what should guide his written practice. Finally, the analysis reveals the historicity and the constitutive subjectivity of the writing subject.

Marlete Sandra Diedrich (UPF), with the title “The acquisition of language: an experience of signification” (in original, A aquisição da linguagem: uma experiência de significação) contributed to the discussion focusing on the language acquisition as an experience of signification. To construct his explanation, the guest takes three axiomatic points: 1) The child speaks to others who speak; 2) The child is constituted as a speaker of a language; 3) The child apprehends the world through speech. The researcher assumes the enunciative perspective of Émile Benveniste and the enunciative acquisition perspective of the Carmem Luci da Costa Silva to build her analysis, mobilizing aspects of speech and the child's constitution as a speaker. Diedrich affirms that such theoretical principles illuminate the discussions about language acquisition and that, from the studies about the enunciation, focusing on the symbolic of the language, it becomes possible to analyze the awakening of the child's consciousness in the social environment, appropriating language to live their experiences of meaning with other subjects through discourse. Mobilizing the guiding concepts of the analysis, Diedrich summons a beautiful corpus of language data of Lulu and Antônia, interrogating the data in the search to understand how, from linguistic productions, each child relates the language and the experiences of meaning. From this, the researcher analyzes data of speech acquisition of the child Lulu, in the relationship with his sister Antônia, in two excerpts. The data explicitly state that if "we talk to others who talk," children also do so. In the first excerpt of the corpus, Lulu, six-month-old, is summoned by her elder sister to mark herself and participate in the speech; in the second excerpt, already one year and six months old, Lulu assumes forms that resemble linguistic forms and she is now able to summon his elder sister Antônia to the enunciative scene, what illustrates the human faculty of symbolizing. Moreover, the analysis of the corpus reveals the principle of subjectivity, because the child will take its place in the world through the experience of a language that introduces the individual into society, as Diedrich shows in the excerpts; and also the principle of reference, because in the experience of situations in the symbolic of language that the child apprehends the world in which he lives. The researcher concludes revealing that the analysis of the two excerpts affirms that, in the relationship with the other and with its particular way of being in the language, the child apprehends the world and manifests itself in the realization of this language in speech.

Gabriela Maria de Oliveira-Codinhoto (UFAC) enhances the discussion with the speech entitled “The relative clauses and the acquisition of writing: a functionalist analysis of children’s texts” (in original, As orações relativas e a aquisição da escrita: uma análise funcionalista de textos infantil). The researcher assumes the Dutch functionalist perspective to analyze texts written by children. She presents, as corpus, texts extracted from the database, from the work of the Research Group on Language Studies (Unesp/Cnpq), led by Lourenço Chacon, selecting texts from two students, whose evolution observes and follows during elementary school, specifically from the first to the fourth school grade, which configures a longitudinal approach research. In addition, the researcher defines as an analytical methodology a path recording the frequency of relative clauses in the texts and the analysis of the global textual composition. Anchored in the functionalist perspective, Oliveira-Codinhoto assumes some important notions to the analysis: language; acquisition; writing; and relative clauses. Based on these concepts, the author presents a newsworthy analysis, revealing explanatory hypotheses about the general frequency of relative clauses in children’s texts. She analyzes the selected texts focusing on extension, type of sentences, type of context and strategies of textual composition, compares the generalizations between the texts of the two students, and also, analyzes texts with different proposals and with the same proposals. From this thorough analysis, the researcher concludes that the students evolved in the course of their writing experiences, since, in the beginning, the predominance was of short statements, truncated sentences, and the juxtaposition mechanism; and in fourth school grade, however, they produced long statements, complex sentences, and one of the students mobilized 17 relative clauses. Therefore, in the first productions the relation of the scribe with the interaction is quite immediate, unlike the final productions in which the data revealed greater concern with the establishment of the interactional context, expanding the informational status, and presenting the emergence of more complex linguistic structures.

The discussion about the use of language in language acquisition, in the round table reviewed here, occurs to the extent that Chacon's presentation opens the discussion by highlighting the relationship between oral and literacy practices, and then Diedrich presents more details of this relationship with speech data, and Oliveira-Codinhoto finish with writing data. There are some interesting points of convergence between the presentations:

• The interweaving of speech and writing: the oral practices and literacy practices are intertwined and both leave marks in the children’s speech, this is presented in the initial analysis and confirmed in the other two analyses.

• Each child marks himself in the speech in his own way: the discursive practices of children are the result of new experiences in the world, in the interaction with peers, which ripens with the passing of time in the singularity of each subject.

• The child enters the world via language: whether through oral or oral practices, whether in speech or writing, the child occupies his place in the world through speech, in the use of language.

• The beauty in children’s speech: the researchers in their presentations and the audience in the comments by chat stressed how lovely it is to observe, through data of language of children, the process of inserting the individual into the language and the evolution of its relationship with language.

Despite taking different theoretical-analytical approaches, and even with research that comes from different regions of Brazil, the three explanations showed how complex the way that child relate to language and how this relationship evolves over the historicity of the child's discursive experiences. The discussion at this round table brought relevant contributions to the studies on initial linguistic productions and on the child/language relationship, which is, as mentioned by the mediator and explainers, always challenging and fascinating.