• 沒有找到結果。

Chapter 4 Results

4.3 Interaction of Maternal Interactional Styles

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

4.2.1.

In section 4.2, how discourse topics were maintained by the mothers’ constant elicitations and the children’s responses, and the types of topics discussed within the interactions were investigated. In terms of the two children’s performance of topic collaboration / incorporation in maintaining discourse topics, it seemed that they could not only matching the propositions in the previous utterances produced by their mothers, but also provide new information in varieties of situation. They were also capable of maintaining here-and-now and non-present topics with their mothers’ elicitations. In some circumstances, e.g., free talks and pretend plays presented above, they could even take control over the development of discourse topics. In addition, the two children change topic with nearly equal frequency. However, from this aspect their capacities seemed illustrating no difference despite of their mothers’ different conversational behaviors.

4.3 Interaction of Maternal Interactional Styles and Topic Maintenance

As mentioned above, the parents play significant roles in helping the children

participate in conversations and maintain conversational topics. In other words, adults are usually the dominant speakers in adult-child conversations. They usually keep

conversations going by asking lots of questions, which serve to give the floor to the young participants who might have difficulties conforming to the same conversational topic and not yet fully acquire the competences of turn taking and topic maintaining.

Besides the immature conversational skills, distraction and impatience of children could occur in occasion and make it even harder for them to maintain conversational topics. In the conversational exchanges, the mother’s intention to engage the child in the

conversations thus becomes significant for the child. It could be expected that if the mother is less interested in encouraging the child’s participation in the conversation, maintaining of topics and continuing of conversations would be more difficult for the dyad.

In section 4.1, results regarding maternal interacitonal styles revealed LIN’s mother’s frequent intention of controlling LIN’s physical behaviors. In addition, as presented in section 4.1.2, LIN’s dyad maintained topic episodes with shorter length in average than LJW’s dyad. Combining these results with the mother’s dominant role in maintaining interactions, LIN’s mother’s directive intention was thus more vivid. What follows is a typical example of LIN’s dyad:

(9) LIN is handing a glove.

‘It’s not a handkerchief, it’s a glove.’

6 *MOT: 好可怕 [= put the glove on LIN’s hands].

‘Frightening.’

7 *MOT: /e//e/不要弄啊.

‘Don’t do that.’

After questioning LIN what the thing that LIN was handing is, LIN’s mother turned to pay attention on what LIN was doing instead of eliciting LIN’s further maintaining of the topic, which resulted in a short passage of conversational topic. As reported in McDonald and Pien’s (1982) study, mother’s desire of controlling her child is negatively related to the desire of eliciting her child’s conversation. Being more directive than LJW’s mother in terms of the interactional style, LIN’s mother was thus less interested in engaging LIN’s participating in conversation. Regarding maintenance of discourse topics, LIN’s mother’s underlying intention, controlling LIN’s physical behaviors, drove her to control LIN’s behaviors at times even when she was engaging LIN in conversations. At most of the times, these directive utterances were in turn followed by LIN’s physical reactions rather than verbal replies. Here it should be noted that there were still topic-maintaining directives observed in the data. It’s not directives itself that were obstacles for continuing topics but the very nature of directives—to request for physical reactions. In the face of directives, LIN might response with commanded actions or merely being ignorant to the requests. In either ways, topics that the dyad was previously attended to were very likely to be discontinued.

As for LJW’s dyad, what were commonly observed in the data were LJW’s mother’s constant elicitations, particularly questions which elicit one single piece of information at a time. What presented below is one of the examples as to how LJW’s dyad maintained topics through great numbers of speaking turns:

(10) LJW’s mother is asking LIN about what should be done before going to school in the morning.

1 *MOT: 要去上學呢.

‘How about going to school?’

‘Be ready for the school, right?’

4 *LJW: 要起床.

‘And say good morning to who?’

10 *LJW: 媽媽.

‘What is the first thing you do after you get up?’

14 *LJW: ^+, 要刷牙.

‘Brushing the teeth.’

15 *MOT: 還有勒?

‘And?’

16 *LJW: 還有洗 <澡> [?].

‘And taking a shower.’

17 *MOT: 還有勒?

‘And?’

18 *LJW: 還有漱口.

‘And rinsing the mouth.’

19 *MOT: 還有勒?

‘And?’

20 *LJW: 還有上廁所.

‘And using the toilet.’

21 *MOT: 對了.

‘Right.’

The above example is merely a portion of passage taken out from a topic episode, lasting for 34 speaking turns in total, to which LJW and her mother devoted. LJW’s mother kept asking questions that allowed LJW to follow the topic ‘what to do in the morning ’. From line 13 to 20 it can be seen that by appealing to identical questions that requested for one single piece of information, LJW’s mother successfully elicited LJW’s continuous

following responses. In addition, in the line 2-3 adjacency pair, LJW’s mother began with a test question ‘what do you have to do in the morning’ in line 2 and turned the answer

‘be ready for the school’ to that test question into a report question ‘be ready for the school, right’ in line 3. Although in line 3 LJW’s mother was actually providing the answer herself, turning of the answer into a report question had two functions: concerning information-requesting and the child’s knowledge, it provided the requested information for the child to be informed; concerning conversational exchange and the child’s

communicative capacity, it provided a floor for the child to take. By means of such kind of elicitation, the child could easily maintain the topic with a minimal reply ‘yes’ and be

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

informed at the same time. LJW’s mother’ adopting report question in such way was observed at times, which might be illustrated by her more frequent use of report question than LIN’s mother and explained by her intention of elicit LJW’s conversation.

Results of the average number of speaking turns devoted to the same conversational topic by the two dyads showed that the average number of speaking turn with a topic episode maintained by LJW’s dyad was significantly greater than that maintained by LIN’s dyad. Although such a difference in their interactions might be explained by the mothers’ conversation-eliciting / directive intentions, it’s also likely that the children’s performance of topic-maintaining could explicit such a difference. It could be expected that if the child frequently discontinued the discourse topic engaged previously, the average length of a topic episode would become short. In order to come up with a clearer picture of the two dyads’ interaction, the dyads’ rate of topic change should be taken into consideration.

In daily adult-to-adult conversations, it is usually the case that in one way, the two participants cooperate to establish a stretch of conversation containing propositionally inter-connected utterances, or say a topic episode in our study. In the other way, adult participants frequently shift topics as well due to factors going beyond conversation itself such as social considerations and individual preferences. Such underlying motivation, to continue discourse topics, also works for adult-child conversation, particular from the parents’ perspective. One distinct characteristic in adult-child dyad is that since the young child is linguistically and developmentally inferior to the adult conversationalist, the adult one usually becomes the dominant speaker. In our current study focusing on mother-child conversation, this kind of conversational dominancy is rather important in a way that the

mother dominances the conversation in order to encourage the child’s participation and improve his or her conversational skills. Such underlying conversation-continuing motivation might thus explains the low rate of topic change in both dyads presented in table 8 :

Table 8 Comparisons of the two Dyads’ rate of topic change

LIN LIN’s Mother LJW LJW’s Mother

In general, comparison within a dyad indicated that in general the children changed topic more often than their mothers, conforming to results presented in the previous studies where the children were found to have hard times devoting themselves to the same discourse topic and required the parents’ help in the conversational interactions (Foster, 1982; Wanska & Bedrosian, 1986; Huang, 2004).

In addition, as reported in section 4.1.2, comparison of the two mothers’ rate of topic change indicated that LIN’s mother changed topic much more often than LJW’s mother.

Combining this result together with the two children’s equivalent rate of topic change and the shorter average length of LIN’s dyad’s topic episode presented in section 4.1.2, at this point it is plausible to reason that the higher rate of LIN’s mother’s topic change led to the shorter length of topic episode. In order to obtain the picture of how topic episodes were ended by LIN’s mother’s frequent topic change, the two mothers’ communicative intents in topic-changing utterances that ended topic episodes were further examined and the results are presented in table 9:

Table 9 Mothers’ speech category in topic-changing utterances that ended topic episodes

LIN’s Mother LJW’s Mother

Directives 17(39.5%) 7(10%)

Questions

Repairs 0 (0%) 0(0%)

Test Questions 10(23.3%) 12(17.1%)

Real Questions 5(11.6%) 9(12.9%)

Verbal Reflectives 0(0%) 0(0%)

Action Reflectives 0(0%) 0(0%)

Report Questions 0(0%) 2(2.9%)

Attention Devices 1(2.3%) 15(21.4%)

Responses to Question/Directives 0(0%) 0(0%)

Acknowledgements 0(0%) 0(0%)

Declaratives 6(13.9%) 13(18.5%)

Total 43(100%) 70(100%)

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

As presented in table 9, repairs, verbal reflectives, action reflectives, responses, and acknowledgements were absent in both mothers’ topic changing utterances that ended topic episodes due to their very nature of depending on immediate preceding utterances.

Both mother used questions frequently when ending discourse topics. These questions could serve to initiate new topics and provide their children floors to take and new topics to be maintained. However, while the frequency of directives in LIN’s mother’s

topic-changing utterances that ended topic episodes was equivalent to the frequency of questions, that of LJW’s mother’s topic-changing utterances that ended topic episodes was much lower. In addition, compared with LIN’s mother, LJW’s mother used much more attention devices when ending topics. Many of these topic ending attention devices served as both (a) the utterances that ended the immediate preceding topic episode and (b) the beginning of new topic episode. In other words, besides adopting many questions, LJW’s mother also used many attention devices to establish joint attention when she was about to initiate new topics for LJW. The data also suggested that these attention devices often succeeded to open a new topic episode for the dyad:

(11) LJW is holding a book and pretending that it is an ice cream.

1 *LJW: 0 [= pretending that she is eating an ice cream].

2 *MOT: 好不好吃?

‘Does it taste good?’

3 *MOT: 有沒有猴子的味道?

‘Does taste like a monkey?’

4 *LJW: 0 [= nodding].

T opi c E pi sode 1

‘Let’s see something else.’

9 *MOT: 這個我們剛剛已經看過了.

‘We’ve already seen this.’

10 *MOT: 裡面還有貝殼耶.

‘There are shells.’

11 *LJW: 嗯.

‘Yes.’

In example (11), LJW was pretending that she was eating an ice cream in the first topic episode. After several conversational exchanges including questioning and commenting, LJW’s mother ended the topic episode of pretend play and initiated a new topic by adopting an attention device in line 7. According to the model of a topic episode in our study, when a new topic is introduced by a speaker, it does not necessarily open a new topic episode since it could be discontinued by the same speaker’s following utterance within the same speaking turn or discontinued by the other speaker’s immediate following utterance. Back to the current example, the attention device in line 7 strengthened the joint attention and signaled a change of focus for LJW. What were

T opi c E pi sode 2

brought into the conversation by LJW’s mother was then acknowledged by LJW in line 11, establishing a new topic episode.

For LIN’s mother, occurrence of directives (39.5%) within topic-changing utterances which ended topic episodes was not only much more frequent than those within all her utterances (19.6%)4 but also the most frequent speech category compared with the other adjacent categories in table 8, suggesting that it’s plausible to blame directives to be for topic-changing and the shortness of topic episode in conversations between she and LIN.

Although the occurrence (10%) of directives within topic-changing utterances which ended topic episodes for LJW’s mother was also slightly more frequent than those within all the utterances (5.9%)5

4 Refer to section 4.1.1.

5 Also refer to section 4.1.1.

, in LJW’s mother’s topic-changing utterances which ended topic episodes, it was attention device that occurred the most frequently.

Close investigations into LIN and LJW’s mothers’ speech category within topic-changing utterances which ended topic episodes further illustrated different conversational intentions of the two mothers: LIN’s mother changed discourse topics frequently due to her paying attention on LIN’s physical behaviors rather than the conversation itself. As the conversation flew, LIN’s physical behavior caught her eyes at times, resulting in her occasional directive utterances that served to constraint LIN’s behaviors and tell her about what to or not to do, which were in turn very likely to discontinue discourse topics. LJW’s mother, on the other hand, due to her intention of eliciting LJW’s conversation, paid more attention on the joint attention between LJW and her when changing conversational topics.

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

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

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

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

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

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

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

N a

tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

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

particularly when changing topics. In order to explain such a finding that is contrary to