Community Literacy Dig: Playing with Language

Monday morning I was a part of a team conducting a “literacy dig.” As an observation team it was our task to explore, discover and collect different uses of language and literacy in a specific location over the span of approximately one half hour. Our team selected a local playground.

My role was to observe and report moments of speech between people we observed at our location. In other words, my task was to describe how people were saying what to whom.

During the time we spent collecting data I noticed three main ways of communicating between three distinct groups of speakers. The first group of speakers I will be looking at are the children who were at play. The second group of speakers consists of parents, grand-parents and other supervisors on the grounds. The third group contains the members of our research team.

Children’s Communication

“Mommy!”

The most distinct and consistent utterance I observed from the children was the calling out for their mothers and, less frequently, their fathers. The call could be heard over the entire playground at almost any given point in time, spoken with a wide range of emotions.

The two most common uses of “mommy” and “daddy” were in either expressions of excitement or pain and fear. The first half-dozen or so of the “mommy-daddy” tokens were exclamations of delight.

“Mommy, I did it!”

“Hey mom! … I climbed up that thing!”

“Mommy, look at me!”

The second most common instances of what I am calling the “mommy-daddy” token were during moments of pain or frustration. One example of this was where a young boy, around two years old, was standing next to the swing of his choice. Unfortunately the swing hung to high for him, and he saw his swinging prospect depended entirely upon his mother’s participation. Instead walking over to get her attention, he repeatedly called “Mommy!” until she arrived.

Outside of the “mommy-daddy” speech tokens, the most notable language information from children was the consistent focus on the self. In every instance I recorded, the children spoke solely in reference to, in the benefit of and in the direction towards themselves. For instance, one child called out to a group of his newfound friends:

“Come over here guys – come over here!”

Another informed his dad that he was “gonna go up the BIG slide!” – the focus being on him and his goals – and later complained, “I’m hungry. When going down a slide, a child could often be heard saying, “Mommy, look at me!”

The most obvious instance occurred when a boy was seeking the attention of his mother, who was at that time busy caring for her other child who seemed to be in some pain. He was hoping to use some playground apparatus that required an adult’s help.

Boy: “Mom!”

Mother: “Yeah” (other child crying in the background).

Boy: “I need your help with this.”

Mother: “I don’t know about that.”

Boy: “I can not… I can not do this [task] now [without your help].”

[no response]

Boy: “Mom, you can help me do something now.”

Mother: “I can’t totally help you right this second…”

The egocentric nature of children’s speech was not that surprising. They are the center of their world (as are we all, at least perceptively) and are still developing not a fuller world context from which to speak.

Adult to Child Communication

I was intrigued by the speech of adults, especially when interacting with the children. Adults would speak to children in ways that acknowledged and affirmed their centeredness. This would usually be coupled with the adoption of their speech and vocabulary, notably the expected “mommy” and “daddy.”

“Hey John, wanna go over here to this one?”

“Wanna go climb? Wanna go climb?”

A Grandfather, while pushing granddaughter on a swing sang a playful, “Aah rigidigikiky-diky.”

Often, in a similarly understanding way, adults would respond to children’s stories and statements with simple “uh-huh” and “okay” fillers, seeming to simply acknowledge that the child had spoken while not addressing the speech content.

In addition to using child accessible language and acknowledging their speech, many of the adults gave children directions in the form of questions. Instead of speaking directly and saying, “Jenny, we are leaving in five minutes,” one father told his swinging daughter:

“Hey, we’re going in three minutes, okay?”

In another instance, a father seeking to encourage his daughter to go play in another area spoke a gentle:

“You wanna swing? You wanna swing next to her?”

The first of the final two uses of language between children and adults is where adults were directing children to a particular parent, saying things like:

“Your mommy is over here.”

“That’s a daddy job.”

It is interesting again to note that the adults used words like “mommy” and “daddy,” where normal adult speech does not include these words with the same frequency.

The last use of adult to child language was in the form of reprimand, speaking in bold declaratives to attract the attention and obedience of the children.

“That’s enough, Jimmy!”

Adult to Adult Communication

The last use of language on the playground transpired in interactions between adults. Almost all speech in this context revolved around the children or child related ideas or activities. For instance, in one interaction, two grandparents were discussing a swing set:

Grandfather: “You go ahead and push

Grandmother: “Why they would put slick seats on swings, I just don’t know…”

[moments later the child nearly fell from her swing, being steadied by the grandfather]

Grandfather: “[I’m] glad I listened to you, for once!”

Finally, I captured a moment when one of the members of our research team was asking permission to photograph a child. She used language that was very different from the informal, child-like language and was more proper and deferential.

“Excuse me – I’m doing a project for class and I was wondering if I could take a picture.”

All in all I found that language use at this playground was largely informal and child-centered. With few exceptions adults would use language accessible to children when speaking to and (often) about them. Above all, the cry “mommy,” is the constant and ringing theme of the our morning’s playground music.