Chapter 5 Discussions
5.1 Comparisons with Previous Studies
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Chapter 5 Discussions
In this chapter, characteristics in the two mother’s interactional styles, the two children’s topic-maintaining, and the two dyads’ interaction are discussed related to previous studies in section 5.1. In section 5.2, a general picture for each dyad’s interaction is depicted.
5.1 Comparisons with Previous Studies
In McDonald and Pien’s (1982) study, a clear polarization into directive /
conversation-eliciting of the mother’s intention was reported. In our study, in terms of the speech level, investigations of the two mothers’ speech categories and conversational parameters revealed that while the conversational behaviors of LIN’s mother conformed more to the directive polar, LJW’s mother conformed more to the conversation-eliciting polar. Here it should be noted that McDonald and Pien distinguished merely two
polarized interactional styles but in Olsen-Fulero’s (1982) study a mother’s interactional style could fall into the directive / conversation-eliciting continuum. According to the data, instead of labeling the two mothers absolutely as directive and
conversation-eliciting mother, LIN’s mother was considered more directive than LJW’s
mother and LJW’s mother was considered more conversation-eliciting than LIN’s mother.As for LIN and LJW, examinations of communicative intents within topic-maintaining utterances revealed that the two children shared several characteristics, including frequent uses of responses and informatives, suggesting their needs for the mothers’ elicitations, particularly questioning elicitations, and their being less interactive, as pointed out in Huang’s (2004) study. In addition, in terms of topic collaboration / topic incorporation in
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topic maintenance, quantitative and qualitative analysis indicated that although they relied heavily on their mother’s elicitations and were usually dominated by their mothers, they were both able to participate in varieties of discourse topics, incorporate new
materials, and contribute more to conversations than their mothers. All these results regarding communicative competences of the two children seemed to imply that with their older age and increasing conversational skills, their mother would become less dominant and less controlling in the conversational interactions (Foster, 1982; Huang, 2004).
Foster (1982) pointed out that mothers’ scaffolding by routine structure seemed to be irrespective of maternal style since maternal topic maintenance increased with the age of the child and was unrelated to a conversation-elicitation vs. directive style on the part of the mother. Nevertheless, in our study by investigating differences of the two dyads’
interactions, where the two children were found to have almost equivalent
topic-maintaining capacities and their mothers displayed distinct interactional behaviors, it seemed that topic maintenance was related to the maternal interactional styles.
Although LIN and LJW displayed equivalent topic-maintaining competences
regardless of their mothers’ distinct conversational behaviors at the specific point of time, it might turn out that LIN and LJW’s development differ at a later point of time. Such possibility is supported by studies regarding Vygotskian thoery (Vygotsky, 1978).
Vygotskian Thoery suggested that social interactions trigger an individual's internal processes during ontogenesis. In addition, the Vygotskian perspective is also concerned with the zone of proximal development. The zone of proximal development refers to the difference between the child's actual level of development and the level of performance
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that he achieves in collaboration with the adult (Rieber & Carton, 1987), or the
relationship between the skill level spontaneously demonstrated by children versus their potential skill level, which is demonstrated only under conditions of external prompting and guidance (McCabe and Peterson, 1994). In such a view, the mother’s scaffolding becomes rather important for the child in social interactions. Investigating children’s narrative development, McCabe and Peterson (1991) found that children of parents with a topic-extending, elaborative style produced longer and more detailed independent
narratives one year later than did children of topic-switching parents. In addition, Fivush (1991) reported that children whose mothers used a great deal of orienting and evaluative devices also used these devices often in their independent narratives one year later.
Relating the Vygotskian interpretation to the present study, in spite of the equivalent topic-maintaining competences at the present time, LIN and LJW might display distinct topic-maintaining competences in a later time.
Regarding the conversational interactions, LJW’s dyad maintained significantly longer topic episode than LIN’s dyad. Since the rate of topic change of the two children was the same, we could conjecture that such difference of topic maintenance among the two dyads was attributed to their mothers.
In our study, examinations of the two mothers’ interacitonal styles and the two dyads’ topic maintenance revealed clusters of conversational behaviors for the two dyads:
LIN’s mother had a more directive intention, often controlled or directed LIN’s physical action, changed topics frequently particularly with directives, and had less interest in engaging LIN in maintaining topics; LJW’s mother had a more conversation-eliciting intention, often elicited LJW’s verbal responses, seldom changed topics, changed topic
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particularly with attention devices, and had greater interest in engaging LJW in maintaining topics. McDonald and Pien (1982) indicated that a mother engaged in conversation elicitation might choose to use device such as the maintenance of a salient topic to maximize the child’s interest in the conversation, while mothers motivated by a directive intention would presumably have little or no interest in topic devices. The two clusters revealed in our study were generally consistent with what were reported by McDonald and Pien (1982) except for the relationship between the use of attention devices and maternal interactional styles. Their argument was that since the child in the process of being directed is not intensively involved in ongoing conversational exchange, his attention is not easily accessible to the mother. She may thus resort to the use of attention-getting devices which would be unnecessary for the mother engaged in
conversation with her child. However, our data showed that being a conversation-eliciting mother, LJW’s mother appealed to more attention devices than LIN’s mother did,
particularly when changing topics. In order to explain such a finding that is contrary to McDonald and Pien’s, contexts where LIN and LJW’s mothers’ adopted attention devices were investigated. Surveys revealed that while LIN’s mother usually used attention devices in the free play and meal time, LJW’s mother did so usually when the dyad was reading. As presented in section 4.2, book-reading was a context where readily accessible materials for joint attention were provided. This suggested that for a
conversation-eliciting mother, the child’s attention was still not accessible enough even when there were materials in hands that should have caught the child’s attention.
Motivated by such a consideration, LJW’s mother thus adopted attention devices to ensure her child’s attention on the ongoing conversational exchange, especially when she
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was about to change topics. As for LIN’s mother, less interest for attention devices might be attributed to the motivation of controlling the child’s physical actions rather than maintain the child’s focus.
In sum, the present study presents ways how maternal interactional styles interacted with the dyads’ topic maintenance. To echo the research question brought out in section 1.2, the data suggested that for a dyad with a directive mother, continuing of
conversations was more likely to be overlooked due to the mother’s intention of controlling the child’s physical behaviors. For a dyad with a conversation-eliciting mother, maintaining of interactions, particularly topic maintaining, was of great concern and reflected by the mother’s continuous elicitations. Considering maternal language inputs and child language development, investigations of the data also revealed that while the mother’s influence on the child was examined, possibilities of the child’s influence on the mother should also be taken into considerations. This finding is thus conformed to Yoder and Kaiser (1989)’s study in which a bidirectional influence model of social interactions was proposed.