The Adult's Half of the Conversation

What comes back to you?

SPEAK No notes: name the five theories from last lesson — surname + one-line idea each. Which one put the ADULT at the centre of the story?

Skinner (imitation + reward) · Chomsky (inborn grammar) · Bruner (learning inside conversation) · Halliday (language does jobs) · Tomasello (chunks + frequency + passion). Bruner centres the adult — and today is his theory in close-up.

Today: the adult's teaching moves and the child's conversation skills, so you can analyse BOTH halves of any transcript — where a third of the marks quietly live.

The invisible teacher

Watch any parent with a two-year-old and you'll see a strange thing: they run a highly effective language school without knowing it — no redpen corrections, no drills, all disguised as chat. Exam questions about "engaging and interacting" are largely asking: can you see the school?

SPEAK Prediction round. A child says "doggy runned away". The parent wants to correct the verb WITHOUT saying "that's wrong". Invent the parent's reply. What did your version do?

"Oh no, the doggy RAN away?" — the correct form handed back inside genuine interest. If your invented reply did something like this, you already understand today's core move.

The adult toolkit — six moves to name

1 · Modelling / recast

Returning the child's word or sentence in its standard form, without criticism.
Child: "the /wɪŋ/" → Adult: "the swing!"

2 · Expansion

Repeating the child's utterance with the missing grammar installed.
Child: "it big" → Adult: "it IS a very big one"

3 · Reformulation

Re-asking your own question in simpler or different words.
"what did you have for lunch? (.) what did you eat?"

4 · Interrogatives — the engine

Questions, questions, questions. Open ones invite long answers; yes/no ones lower the ladder when the child struggles. Counting who asks the questions is instant discourse analysis.

5 · Tag questions

Little hooks that invite the child back in: "…isn't it?", "…don't you?" — turn-passing devices dressed as grammar.

6 · Repetition & echoing

Repeating the child's words to confirm receipt and keep the ball in the air: Child: "sprinkles" → Adult: "sprinkles?"

Together these form child-directed speech (CDS) — the adjusted register adults use with small children (simpler structures, higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, here-and-now topics). The six moves are its visible, quotable machinery.

SPEAK Cover the boxes. Six moves from memory, with an invented example each — go.

Move spotter

One transcript, six adult moves hiding in it. Rosa is 2;11, helping her mother unpack shopping.

1 M: what did we buy at the shop? (.) what's in the bag?
2 R: apples (.) and the /ˈneɪnəz/
3 M: bananas! (.) lovely yellow bananas
4 R: me carry it
5 M: you'll carry the bananas will you (.) they're heavy aren't they
6 R: heavy (2) where egg gone?
7 M: where have the eggs gone? (.) good question (.) you find them

Find each move, say the line number aloud, then check:

a) Reformulation

Line 1 — the question re-asked in different words ("what did we buy" → "what's in the bag"). Also line 7's reworking of Rosa's own question.

b) Modelling a pronunciation

Line 3 — /ˈneɪnəz/ handed back as "bananas!", correct form, zero criticism (and note Rosa's weak syllable deletion feeding it).

c) Expansion of a telegraphic utterance

Line 5 — "me carry it" returned as "you'll carry the bananas", with pronoun, auxiliary and full noun phrase installed. Line 7 does the same to "where egg gone?" — supplying "have" and the plural.

d) Tag questions

Line 5 — "will you", "aren't they": two invitations for Rosa to take the next turn.

e) An echo that confirms receipt

Rosa does it too — line 6's "heavy" echoes her mother. Echoing runs both directions; children use it to hold their turn while processing.

SPEAK Now the child's half: what does Rosa contribute to keeping this conversation alive? Find three things — then check.

She answers every question relevantly (turn-taking), she initiates ("me carry it" — an offer!), and she asks the transcript's only child-question ("where egg gone?") — initiating a topic of her own. A child who initiates is ENGAGING, not just responding: that's the question focus, evidenced.

Conversation skills — the child's half

The question asks what the child's language allows them to do. These five conversation behaviours are the answer bank:

Skill	Looks like	Why it's evidence
Turn-taking	answering at the right moment, waiting, holding a turn with "er"	the machinery of interaction itself
Initiating	starting topics, asking questions, making offers	engagement, not just response
Topic management	steering to a passion; answering "sideways"	agenda-setting with limited grammar
Repair	trying again after "tell me that again"; self-correcting ("yes (.) no (.)")	monitoring their own communication
Shared context	meanings only THIS listener can decode	the 15-mark context strand, live

The stranger test

Child (3;0): we goed the place (.) with the big fish (.) and I patted /ˈreɪdə/

SPEAK The child's mother replies instantly: "you loved stroking the stingray at the aquarium, didn't you?" A stranger would understand almost nothing. Explain what the mother is using that the stranger lacks — and why that contrast is worth a whole paragraph of the 15 context marks.

Shared experience decodes what grammar leaves out. The mother supplies the place (aquarium), the referent (/ˈreɪdə/ = stingray) and the verb sense from memory the stranger doesn't have. In a familiar home context, a child's language achieves far more than the same words could achieve alone — which is precisely HOW the child's language "allows them to engage and interact": the listener is half the system.

Exam voice: the interaction paragraph

A model, using the Rosa transcript from Move Spotter:

"The interaction is powered by Rosa's mother's child-directed speech. Her interrogatives — reformulated within a single turn, 'what did we buy at the shop? (.) what's in the bag?' — hand Rosa repeated invitations to speak, while her expansion of the telegraphic 'me carry it' into 'you'll carry the bananas will you' models pronoun, auxiliary and noun phrase without a word of correction, the tag question passing the turn straight back. Rosa is no passive partner: her 'where egg gone?' initiates a topic of her own, which her mother reformulates and then delegates — 'you find them' — turning grammar modelling into a shared game. This is Bruner's scaffolding made visible: the adult adjusts support in real time, and the child's developing forms become fully functional turns in a joint activity."

Take it apart, then build your own

Count the model's quotes and named moves aloud. Then write your own interaction paragraph on the transcript below. Target: two adult moves + one child conversation skill + a theory link.

Child (2;8): daddy (.) my tower falled down
F: oh no (.) your tower fell down? (.) shall we build it again?
C: build a bigger one (.) a big big tower
F: a really big tower (.) how many blocks do we need?
C: er (2) lots (.) hundred!
F: a hundred blocks! (.) we'd better start

"The father's recast of 'falled down' as 'fell down?' corrects the overgeneralised verb inside sympathy rather than criticism, and his interrogatives ('shall we build it again?', 'how many blocks do we need?') repeatedly hand the turn back. The child initiates the plan — 'build a bigger one' — escalating it with the repeated intensifier 'big big', and holds a difficult turn with the filler 'er' before the delighted guess 'hundred!'. Each developing form becomes a working move in a joint project, exactly the conversational apprenticeship Bruner's scaffolding describes."

SPEAK Honest audit: did your paragraph analyse BOTH halves — adult and child? If one half was missing, which sentence would you add?

Recall zone

From Lesson 4: which theory does an expansion best evidence — and which experiment challenges pure imitation?

Bruner's social interactionism (scaffolding); the wug test — rules applied to words never heard before.

From Lesson 3: "my tower falled down" — name the feature and the stage it typically belongs to.

Overgeneralisation (virtuous error) of -ed; characteristic of telegraphic into post-telegraphic development.

From Lesson 2: why is a pause like (2) evidence and not empty space?

It shows processing time, turn-holding, or an adult deliberately waiting — interaction behaviour you can quote.

From memory

1. The six adult moves — from memory, with examples.

Modelling/recast · expansion · reformulation · interrogatives · tag questions · repetition/echoing.

2. The five child conversation skills.

Turn-taking · initiating · topic management · repair · exploiting shared context.

One-minute teach-back

1:00

SPEAK Explain to a new parent, in plain English, the three most powerful things they already do that teach their child to talk — and why they work. One minute.

REFLECT Before this lesson, whose lines did you read more carefully — the child's or the adult's? Has that changed, and what will you look at first in the next transcript?

I can analyse both halves of a child–adult transcript: the adult's scaffolding moves and the child's conversation skills, tied to theory and context.