Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 9, Issue 1, 1986

“But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods .... neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor councellors, they were totally good for nothing.

We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind offer, tho’ we decline accepting it: and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them”.

(Response of the Indians of the six nations to a suggestion that they send boys to an American college, Pennsylvania, 1744).

It is argued that the concept of communicative competence includes ‘strategies’ or ‘tactics’ where language is used in interactions in order to achieve desired outcomes for participants. This study examines different types of communicative strategies employed by adults and children in negotiating what is ‘acceptable behaviour’ or ‘rules of conduct’ for children. The influence of social and cognitive development of children on the forms of communicative strategies available to them is treated as central.

Two case studies have been done on the early language development of boys (without siblings), using a functional framework (Halliday, 1975; Painter, 1984). This paper will discuss the results of a case study of a second-born child, Alison, analyzed using the same methods as the above studies.

The similarities and differences between the children will be examined. They all made a functional distinction between language for learning (“Mathetic”) and language for doing (“Pragmatic”), although the distinction was expressed differently in Alison’s case. Differences were also noted in Alison’s development of Transitivity and Mood. The relevance of environmental factors will also be discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the significance of intonation in narrative texts in Kuniyanti (Kimberley, WA). It is suggested that intonation realizes the information structure of texts. Tone units correspond to information units. Each tone unit has one syllable that is more prominent than the others; this falls within the constituent which has the most important item of new information. The investigation is based principally on solicited texts.