In terms of activity, Z starts off in the beginning of the recording drawing a banana in his pad which H, the caregiver, uses to help stimulate a conversation using open questions. H uses 15 open ended questions in the transcript compared to 14 closed questions. Although there is little difference in the usage of both open and closed questions, some of the questions which I categorized as closed could be considered tag questions such as “we had some banana, didn’t we?” maybe used to get Z to interact more rather than for power. Also, some of the questions could be considered as just utterances H used to ask herself questions out loud that she didn’t need Z to respond to such as “(quietly) you think it goes there?”. These are a just a few reasons as to why there is little difference between the amount of times an open ended question is used in comparison to a closed question. So by taking these uses into account, it would highlight the difference in usage more clearly. This would prove the hypothesis that caregivers will ask more open ended questions to children rather than closed questions in order to stimulate more child speech.
Zone of proximal development (ZPD) was a concept introduced by Vygotsky which describes the difference between what a learner can and cannot do with help and in the case it is what the child can and cannot do in terms of language and their development. One way H scaffolds Z’s language development is by asking him questions like, “what are you drawing (.) Zach?” because by asking them H is making Z answer her and describe to her what he is doing even though he knows she can see what he’s doing and therefore he is expanding his use of language.
Great analysis. Revisit the ZPD - I have to help him to do something that he can then use those strategies to do it independently (eventually) e.g. helping him to extend his utterances by asking follow-up questions that show him what amount of information listeners will be interested in: "what happened though?"
ReplyDelete