HU Credits: 4

Degree/Cycle: 1st degree (Bachelor)

Responsible Department: psychology

Semester: Yearly

Teaching Languages: Hebrew

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Anat Ninio

Coordinator Email: Anat.Ninio@huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Sunday 9:00-10:00

Teaching Staff:
Prof Anat Ninio

Course/Module description:
In the course we shall deal with parents’ behaviors as providers of “scaffolding” for the language development of young children. The study will focus on the natural teaching methods parents engage in that may facilitate successful learning. We shall analyze observational data on interaction in natural circumstances in order to identify meaningful parental behaviors.

Course/Module aims:
The aim of this course is to teach students micro-analytic methods of analyzing communicative events involving parents and young children, and in particular on the basis of naturalistic videotaped observations.

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
to manage a research project dealing with parent-child interaction;
to plan micro-analytic analyses of parent-child interaction relevant to the research questions;
to carry out micro-analyses of interaction with reliability and efficiency;
to classify the context of communicative moves to systematic categories;
to perform statistical analysis of the research results, including identifying repeated patterns of parent-child interaction;
to summarize the findings in an organized, clear and succinct research report.

Attendance requirements(%):
100%

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: The course will be conducted partially as a reading seminar, and partially as a research seminar. The students will read theoretical content, will present it to the group, and will discuss it. The research part will be carried out in a laboratory in the University. We shall analyze observational data of naturally occurring interaction that was already collected in the children’s homes, videotaped, transcribed and annotated for communicative intents of the participant, both Hebrew language and English language. The work will include micro-analysis of interactive events, coding for meaningful parental behaviors. The students will function as a research team, and will meet in regular meetings to discuss both the theoretical basis of the research and in order to participate in the design of methods of analysis.

Course/Module Content:
In the course we shall deal with parental behavior as provider of “scaffolding” for the language development of young children. Our aim is to describe in detail the ways in which parents make sure that children understand what they mean when they address them, and as a result, raise the chances that the children will be able to learn new words within the interactive context. The research will focus on the strategies of natural teaching employed by parents, in an attempt to characterize repeating patterns in parent-child interaction, such as certain games, which may make successful learning possible. In the reading component of the course, we shall concentrate on understanding the concept of natural teaching, on the background of Vygotzky’s theory of learning in interpersonal interaction, and his concept of “The Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD). Another topic which will be given time in the course is the pragmatic aspect of conversations, including an acquaintance with concepts such as “speech acts”, interpretation of meaning in context, and the development of communication in children.

Required Reading:
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb learning. Language Acquisition, 1, 3-35.
Macnamara, J. (1972). Cognitive basis of language learning in infants. Psychological Review, 79, 1-14.
Ninio, A. and Bruner, J. (1978). The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language, 5, 1-15.
Rommetveit, R. (1985). Language acquisition as increasing linguistic structuring of experience and symbolic behavior control. In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), Culture, communication, and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives (pp. 183-204). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tardif, T., Fletcher, P., Liang, W., Zhang, Z., Kaciroti, N., & Marchman, V. A. (2008). Baby’s first 10 words. Developmental Psychology, 44, 929–938.
Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Whitehurst, G. J., Falco, F., Lonigan, C. J., Fischel, J. E., DeBaryshe, B. D., Valdez-Menchaca, M. C., & Caulfield, M. (1988). Accelerating language development through picture-book reading. Developmental Psychology, 24, 552- 558.

Additional Reading Material:
Bellon, M. L., Ogletree, B. T., & Harn, W. E. (2000). Repeated storybook reading as a language intervention for children with autism: A case study on the application of scaffolding. Focus on Autism & Other Developmental Disabilities, 15, 52-58.
Fisher, C., Hall, D. G., Rakowitz, S., & Gleitman, L. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua, 92, 333-375.
Gleitman, L. R., & Gillette, J. (1995). The role of syntax in verb learning. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The handbook of child language (pp. 413-427). Oxford: Blackwell.
Gopnik. A., & Choi. S. (1990). Do linguistic differences lead to cognitive differences? A crosslinguistic study of semantic and cognitive development. First Language, 10, 199-215.
Huang, C. T. J. (1989). Pro-drop in Chinese: A generalized control theory. In O. Jaeggli & K. J. Safir (eds.), The Null-subject Parameter (pp. 185–214). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ibbotson, P., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (in press). The communicative contexts of grammatical aspect use in English. Journal of Child Language.
Ninio, A., & Wheeler, P. (1984). A manual for classifying verbal communicative acts in mother-infant interaction. Working Papers in Developmental Psychology, No. 1. Jerusalem: The Martin and Vivian Levin Center, Hebrew University. Reprinted as Transcript Analysis, 1986, 3, 1-82.
Verlinden, A., & Gillis, S. (1988). Nouns and verbs in the input: Gentner (1982) reconsidered. In F. Van Besien (Ed.), First language acquisition (pp. 163-187). Antwerp, Belgium: ABLA.
Wood, D. J., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, 17(2), 89-100.

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 10 %
Participation in Tutorials 20 %
Project work 40 %
Assignments 0 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 30 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %

Additional information:
The students can prepare a seminar paper within the course.