School-Age Use

• Changes in Language Use:

  Conversational abilities

  Mastery of new communication contexts

  Narrative development
• Complex social interactions offer more opportunities to refine their storytelling
• Interactions with unfamiliar audiences force school-age children to be more explicit
• Interactions within the classroom compel students to develop greater sophistication as they navigate complex social interactions
• Conversational abilities

  Compare and contrast

  Persuade

  Hypothesize

  Explain

  Classify

  Predict

  Comfort
• By school-age, children have a better understanding of others, and are more perceptive about assumptions of listeners
• Children have a greater clarity in specifying a conversational topic
• As audiences are varied, so are the range of discourse styles
• Aspects of conversational discourse

  • Presuppositional skills
  • Style shifting
  • Diectic terms
  • Semantically subtle relationships
  • Turn taking
  • Topic maintenance
  • Conversational repair
• Presuppositional discourse: Ability to adjust message to the needs of the listener
• During school entry, presuppositional discourse is decontextualized, requiring a better understanding of the listener
• Linguistic presuppositional skills: Understanding of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences beyond the literal interpretation
• Perceptual presuppositional skills: The ability to understand the physical environment and situation in a conversation by involving visual and sensory cues to make inferences about the conversations meaning
• Cognitive presuppositional skills: Involves the understanding of the speakers feelings, thought processes and intentions
• Style shifting: The ability to adjust the way we communicate depending on the social context and the person we are talking to
• Deictic terms: Words and phrases that point out time, place, and situation when a speaker is speaking, reliant on the speakers contexts
• This, there, that, now, then, those, are examples of dietetic terms
• Turn taking: Knowing when to start and stop speaking and when to listen to the other persons words, increases with age
• Turn-taking facilitate adverbial conjunctions and conjunction words
• Adverbial conjunctions: Connect 2 independent clauses or sentences and indicates a relationship in terms of time, cause, or purpose
• As, after, although, before, if, when, while are all adverbial conjunctions
• Conjunction words: Bring 2 complete thoughts together, can stand seperately
• Topic maintenance: Ability to keep conversation going on a specific topic even when there are distractions or interruptions
• Topic maintenance requires active listening
• The two main things to occur in topic maintenance are topic shading and social maturity
• Topic shading: maintaining a previous topic while shifting to a related new topic
• Conversational repair: Ability to correct misunderstandings, errors, or breaks
• Classroom and conversational rules: Explicit rules made by authority figures for social interaction
• Raising hand to speak in class is an example of classroom rules
• The "hidden" curriculum is unspoken rules and norms for social interaction in a class setting, can be taught explicitly or learned through observation
• Social cognition model: Building social thinking/social competency based on social attention, social interpretation, problem solving, and social response
• Social attention (SCM): Attending to the social environment (other people, facial expressions, body language, words, action)
• Social interpretation (SCM): Making assumptions about what signals mean (assigning intention, motive, other meaning)
• Problem-solving aspect (SCM): Deciding what to do based on your interpretation
• Social response aspect: Responding is the main "social skills"