The recording was conducted in the mid-morning hours. The activity involved a play mimicking a restaurant in which the children came in to buy food items ranging from pizza, pepperoni, corn, sandwich, hamburger, ice cream, chicken, and cookies. It was organized through the active participation of the teacher in the play as a co-manager of the restaurant together with two children who helped in selling to the other children taking up the role of customers. The background setup was filled with activate conversations among customers who were interacting in their affairs.
The play was lively as the children took it very seriously in acting their roles. No pre-training was offered before the action except that the children were informed that they would participate in a restaurant play. They accepted gladly and were available for it. The total numbers of customers together with the restaurant's management were ten where girls were four and boys five and a teacher. The setting of the play was within the school compound at the playfield.
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The play sought to help the children develop receptive and expressive skills. Receptive skills include listening, in the case of plays, and reading their class work. Expressive skills include speaking and writing (Trommer, 2012). The children exercised these skills in the play through listening to each other and talking as they ordered for their respective items.
Content
There are five domains of language, which include morphology, phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.
Phonology
Phonology is the simplest unit in the language domain. It involves the ability to listen and decipher the systematic organization of sounds in a language. The child should be able to distinguish between a sound, a letter and a word by the time they enter school (Davenport & Hannahs, 2013). The children in the play were well advanced in phonological skills. They were capable of interacting with the teacher who had a highly advanced phonological skill and could understand each other. The customers could order food with the accurate pronouncement, and this confirmed their advanced phonological abilities.
Morphology
While phonology deals with the ability to distinguish between sounds forming words, morphology, on the other hand, deals with the ability to understand how words are formed and how they may be related with other words. For example, words such as conflict, concise, compose, construct, conduct are all related but not similar; they all share the root word " con” which is a word for “together” (Rasinski, Padak, Newton & Newton, 2008). The ability is developed at a lower level in the customers and can only be noted in the use of a few words, which are compounds of two roots such as “something.”
Syntax
Syntax refers to the arrangement of words forming a sentence that can have meaning to the listener (Chomsky, 2014). The customer’s ability to construct sentences is profound.
The customers construct sentences such as
I think that is the wrong one
Can I pay?
I think I want something around the list too
I found some pizza
Some of the sentences are as simple as two words, three words and some are complex having eight words. This ability makes the conversation complete. One of the customers addresses the teacher in strong words promising that the teacher will be fired if she does not work well and provide the ordered food.
Semantics
Semantics is important in language development and involves the ability to learn new words or vocabularies and understand their meaning and relationship with other words (Bavin & Naigles, 2015). For example, the word photosynthesis is applicable in biology unless applied in other cases to convey symbolic meaning. The customers can learn and master new words and use them to express their needs. They use a wide variety of words that apply to the play setting: food-related words such as
Pepperoni
Hamburger
Sandwich
Chicken
Ice cream
Toast
The list is long; some of these words are complex, but they can master, understand, and apply them.
Pragmatics
Conversations are helpful only when the sentences are arranged. Subsequently, there is turn-taking so that the participants can listen, understand, and contribute to the conversation until a solution is arrived at, a goal is achieved, and the conversation is brought to an end (Bublitz & Norrick, 2011). The customers manifest well developed pragmatic skills. They can converse with the restaurant's managers as they ask for items on the menu, requests again for another order if what they desire is not available or disagree with the restaurant chief manager (the teacher) if what they need is not available. The customers exercise turn-taking which is very important to a conversation; they all do not order food at once instead one orders after the other, which means that they can understand hen one conversation is over.
Conclusion
The play was very helpful in understanding the ability of children to learn vocabularies, construct sentences, and communicate. The children manifested well-established abilities in the five areas of language: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Their ability to take turns was also noted in the conversation together with the ability to form individuality in their choice of items.
References
Bublitz, W., & Norrick, N. R. (Eds.). (2011). Foundations of pragmatics (Vol. 1 ). Walter de Gruyter.
Chomsky, N. (2014). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Vol. 11 ). MIT press.
Davenport, M., & Hannahs, S. J. (2013). Introducing phonetics and phonology . Routledge.
Rasinski, T., Padak, N., Newton, R. M., & Newton, E. (2008). Greek and Latin roots: Keys to building vocabulary . Teacher Created Materials.
Trommer, J. (Ed.). (2012). The morphology and phonology of experience (Vol. 41). Oxford University Press.
Bavin, E. L., & Naigles, L. R. (2015). The Cambridge handbook of child language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
