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10 May Our colleagues share their research with us

Late language development, schooling and writing

 

A central component of later language development is the emergence of academic discourse: that is, the oral and written language skills needed to successfully communicate in formal settings such as school and work (Nippold, 2007). Such skills include the acquisition of a specialized vocabulary, composed of low frequency words coexisting in an elaborated semantic network, as well as the ability to produce and understand complex syntactic structures such as passive voice and subordinate object and embedded clauses, and a certain degree of familiarity with academic genres whose discursive organization is strongly conventionalized.

Among the factors involved in the achievement of such acquisitions are schooling, cognitive maturation, and socialization of subjects. Educational actions, in particular, promote in children and adolescents an increasing metalinguistic competence by exposure vocabulary not used in everyday language, and complex syntactic structures. In addition, from the age of 11 to 12 children enter the stage of formal operations, enabling them to resort to hypothetical-deductive reasoning and to consider multiple points of view (e.g., in an essay).

In addition to the socialization practices to which adolescents and young adults are exposed in school, that require from them an increased refinement of communicative competence and, therefore, of their pragmatic abilities (Nippold, 2000; Berko Gleason and Bernstein Ratner, 2010), it is the task of writing specific academic genres, with their cognitive and discursive demands, that most clearly enhances the use of these learning.

In this sense, the texts written by adolescents at school are a good source for the observation of various phenomena of acquisition of later language skills, in the understanding that written production offers the student important advantages over speech because it provides more time to search in the lexicon the precise vocabulary and to organize the discourse according to its communicative purposes. Thus, writing is an opportunity for planned and reflexive linguistic action (Schleppegrell, 2004), and its analysis reveals the adolescent’s exercise of new modes of discourse and a metalinguistic awareness, which at that stage of life is in full development.

References

Berko Gleason, J. y Bernstein Ratner, N. (2010). Desarrollo del lenguaje. Madrid: Pearson.

Nippold, M. A. (2000). Language development during the adolescent years: aspects of pragmatics, syntax, and semantics. Topics on Language Desorders, 20 (2), 15-28. Aspen Publishers.

————— (2007). Later language development. School-age children, adolescents, and young adults (3a. ed.). Austin: Pro-Ed.

Schleppergrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling. A functional linguistics perspective. Nueva Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Written by

Eva Margarita Godínez López

Doctorado en Lingüística (FLL-UAQ/CONACyT)

for the class :Fundamentos de la Investigación Científica, Dra. Magda Giordano (INB-UNAM)

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