M: request reformulation (explanation)
5.4 Limitations and suggestions
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child responded with the same strategy as his original strategy. At 3; 7, when the mother adopted explanations to support her original request, the child responded with another strategy or a combination of strategies.
Our findings are consistent with previous studies which claimed that the form in which mothers make requests affects the way their children refuse. Furthermore, in our findings, the effect of mother’s requests also existed in the reformulated sequence.
Ninio and Snow (1984) claimed that children’s negotiation skills will be improved by the other party’s use of justification or explanation. Our findings prove that the mother’s use of explanation arguments improved the child’s negotiation skill, which is reflected in his reformulation of refusals.
5.4 Limitations and suggestions
There are some limitations to the present study despite the findings we observed.
First, there may be limits to the findings to some extent since they are based on the results from a single case study only. Since the present study aims to explore the child’s developmental change by means of examining his performance of refusals, it is believed that a large amount of data could lead to a more complete understanding of children’s refusals and pragmatic skills. Second, in our study, although the effect of the mother’s requests was consolidated, the types of activity were quite limited and thus it is hard to discuss the effect of the type of activity. Third, the data in the present
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study were limited to mother-child interaction; hence, our findings can not tell us whether there is any difference in the performance of refusals among other kinds of relationship when the child made refusals. However, the child’s refusal performance showed that the interactional factors indeed governed the usage of refusal. In addition, the sequential patterns also illuminate how interaction occurred in mother-child conversation. We also found that the effect of the mother’s request extends to the reformulated sequence. In this way, we suggest that future research can put more focus on how children reformulate their refusal and their sequential arrangement with age. In addition, as there was only one child in our study, it was not possible to differentiate between differences in performance by gender which plays an important part in children’s pragmatic skills. Therefore, it is suggested that more mixed-gender subjects be included in future study. The investigation of the role of gender may provide more insight into children’s performance of refusals from a sociolinguistic perspective.
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CHAT Symbols (Adopted from Mac Whinney, Brain. 1995. The CHILDES project:
Tools for analyzing talk. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum)
. period
0 actions without speech
%act action tier
%sit situation tier
[= ] explanation
[=! ] paralinguistic material [% text] comment on main line [>] [<] overlapping utterances [/] retracing without correction [//] retracing with correction
xxx untelling speech
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