•  Gilmore, Perry Kisisi (our language); The story of Colin and Sadiki.Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2016 (particularly Chapters 1-3)

Infant/mother [caretaker] interaction approaches as practice within a polity

A moment for mutually directed transformation

that is also what Garfinkel called "a tutorial problem" on all "shop floors" (2002, particularly Chapers 4 and 6) and what I consider "education"

My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swadling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

(Blake Songs of experience, 1794

1. Language as an aspect of cognition

   The fundamental questions given that human beings are born "not knowing" how to speak but, everywhere and everywhen, they learn one (or more) languages in their first years. Specifically:

   1. This is most usually taken to be a matter of cognition centered in properties of the child as individual with the other human beings around the child doing little besides providing sustenance. Language acquisition is thus, most classically, a matter dealt in "psychology" and not the social sciences which have mostly have little to say about it or folded it under black box concepts:
      1. in anthropology the obvious word is "enculturation"
      2. in sociology it is "socialization"
   2. And yet, even cognitive psychologists are aware that, in the absence of specific forms of interaction with other human beings, new human beings may end up NOT speaking, or not speaking AS WELL AS others
      1. human children will not get to speak if they are prevented by profound and physical peculiarities (e.g. congenital deafness--though this can be mitigated by parents using sign languages) or very rare circumstances (e.g. infants raised by animals, infants locked in rooms with no contacts with other human beings, etc.)
      2. some children, depending on the measure (e.g. IQ, autism, etc.), appear not to develop as fully as others, or later than others.
   3. But there is no evidence that adults who enter in contact with children need specialized knowlege about language acquisition or developmental psychology.
   4. This leaves two possibilities classically debated by B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky:
      1. Skinner: the young learned by imitation, and then rewards and punishments.
      2. Chomsky: interaction between the young and adults trigger in the young innate linguistic potentialities.
   5. As part of that debate one might wonder what happens if:
      1. a child only experiences political speeches (university lectures, Sesame Street on television) where noone addressed her or included her, however peripherally
      2. other people speak 'for' the child
   6. and one might give different advice for resolving "problems":
      1. remedial" interventions
      2. attempts to change the institutional contexts (e.g. getting parents to learn sign language, vs. placing the child in a special institution).

         The classical debate centering about the apparent 'gap' between White and Black children was extensively debated by Bereiter and Engleman (1967) for the more 'Skinnerian' side and by William Labov (1972) for the Chomskian side

2. Sociocultural implications of the cognitive approach

   By the late 1960s, many started wondering whether these questions could be investigated "in the field" that is in the settings where the young who cannot speak get, over a period of about 36 to 48 months, to speak "in full sentences" in their "mother's" tongue.

   1. And conduct systematic observation of children and caretakers:
      1. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali.
      2. Lois Bloom (1973 first "ethnography" of a mother's linguistic interactions with her child) and her students

   This led to a major expansion of the problematics

   2. New questions triggered by direct observation of parents and children together:
      1. parents are involved in their children's language in many different ways including the metalinguistic, and the ideological. Not only do children "learn" the syntax of one language but they also taught genres of discourse, rules of etiquettes, etc. "First words" are not universals. Neither are "first interactions"
         1. Peggy Miller in Baltimore (observing working class mothers)
         2. Bambi Schieffelin (among the Kaluli in New Guinea)
         3. Elinor Ochs (among the Samoans)

3. New issues: Languaging (Garcia 2014)

   Neither the classical approaches, nor their critique, tell us much about what children do with the adults' instruction. All we have is evidence that children participate (including initiate conversations in ways that make sense only to their mothers and themselves). Look, for example, at this case:

   1. Gilmore and the case of the two children developing a unique language (1979; 2016) and the many issues it raises about not only "acquisition" but also language function, production, and imposition
   1. pidgin vs creole vs language
   2. borrowing and reframing
   3. play and work
   4. interpretation ("blessed by God" vs. "interesting case")
   5. fragility in history
   6. etc.
   1. Another case: a mother and her four year old daughter discuss literacy matters (from Cory Boyd's dissertation on infant literacy in the supermarket (1993).
   2. immigration from mono-lingual A to dominant-lingual B (e.g. the United States, Quebec in Canada, South Indians in North India and outside India)
   3. instruction about appropriate forms when multiple care-takers speak different languages, or different dialects of the "same" language
      1. baby sitters and nannys;
      2. gender languages;
      3. forms of respect/familiarity

4. The broader issues:

   1. meta-pragmatic awareness, its expression and use
      1. Malinowski on gardening
      2. Garfinkel on instructions
      3. what to teach in the here and now (Miller)?
   2. the evolution of modified (new?) organizations of a shop floor (familial organization)
      1. Language ideologies in homes and communities: what language(s) to speak? what language(s) to school?