Community Of Practice: Eckert And Mcconnell-Ginet

In “Speech Communities” by Paul Roberts, he uses examples throughout the text that helps give his audience a better understanding of what a speech community actually is and how they are formed. One example Roberts gives in the Speech Communities of the Child. In this example, Roberts clarifies that one of the most effective speech community is that of a child’s family. For example, it is more common for a child to learn any kind of language from his family first. This is because it is more common for children to imitate what they hear at such a young age.

This shows Collin showing that linguistic skills may be developed with social contact and exposure like in the other experiments. Proof that his point can be surrounded in many circumstances. Collins thinks that these examples disprove Dreyfus’ social embodiment thesis because Dreyfus believes the opposite. That something can’t become linguistically socially an expert practice without “being a contributor expert practitioner oneself” (725). These experiments prove the opposite of what Dreyfus believes, so Collins challenges him by saying that these examples show that physical engagement with other people is not important for mastering a certain skill.

In this chapter, I examine and compare the communicative behaviour of three groups – Dance Boys, Fly Eights and Cash Money Brothers. I clarify how patterns of speech among these groups can be understood as linguistic styles and how they differ across the groups.

Our actions are what define us as humans. Words are part of our actions. Therefore, our voice defines who we are, so when we change our voice we change the fabric of who we are. Zadie Smith, the author of “Speaking in Tongues”, knows this first hand when she moved from a working class district of London to Cambridge. She felt that she was able to have both, the Cambridge voice and the Willesden voice, and use them to expand her base of knowledge; like learning a new language. However, as she became more engrossed in her studies the core of her personality that kept her at her roots disappeared and she was consumed by the Cambridge life style. She lost herself in Cambridge because she was imitating the Cambridge life style and according to Susan Blackmore’s essay “Strange Creatures” humans imitate naturally to learn. As humans imitate they change and because they change, their voices change as well; building an idea within us that our voices need to be unified, or singular. When we change voices we change mindsets making it incredibly difficult to switch between two mindsets on a whim. Our voices must be singular in order for us to correctly display our identity to the world.

For this assignment I will be explaining the terms; speech, language, communication – speech, language and communication needs. For the second part I will go into details explaining how the above mentioned terms support children’s and young people’s development and will also describe the potential impacts . I will be using examples in my work and will also add how adults can effectively support and extend children language, speech and communication needs.

The author of this selected article mainly introduces a way of managing knowledge, namely communities of practice (COP). His key argument is that he comes up with a concept that management of knowledge is a doughnut, evolving logical steps and connecting performance and strategy by knowledge. In addition, the author extremely declares the importance of practitioners in the knowledge management and the environment of communities of practice. The chosen article mainly presents three elements of COP (domain, community, and practice), detailed steps of COP, and three enabling structures (sponsorship, recognition, and support structures).

2.2 Social Rules: The Appropriate Fishman (1972, p. 47) indicates that there are norms to use language, beginning with the place, time and relation of how the language is going to be spoken. There are many types of scenery (school, work, street, home, shopping center) and different kind of roles like teacher-student, boss-employee, dad-son, and people have to act according to the society indicates. The author focusses on language usage norms that are likely to be most clearly and uniformly realized avowedly congruent situations. 2.2.1 Language norms : standard language Hudson (1980,p.127) stablishes that speaking ability depend on a variety of factors, especially the relevant norms that control the language usage. The author mentions a few norms like places where people have to speak just a little, or where people can speak at the same time than others, and there are other places where the main purpose of communication is not the style of speaking or amount of words but the content of message.

My initial speech community consisted of my twin brother and I. Although we lacked an intelligible language, we would still engage in antics that revealed we were communicating. Whether this be escaping from our play area, or hiding from our parents, our behaviors were sometimes so coordinated that it seems implausible that we weren’t communicating. Through our baby babbles and simple desires, we found success in working as a team even though intelligent language was beyond our capacity.

Natural dialogue involves the management of many communicative resources in a complex activity. Participants in a conversation transmit information, agree and disagree between each other, monitor the communicative status of their messages, make decisions about non-linguistic actions and, among other things, they deal with social conventions about who is to talk and when. Conversations are joint actions in which participants individually perform coordinated activities (Clark, 1996). It is quite illustrative the metaphor proposed by Clark about dialoguing as dancing waltz. Each individual action is coordinated in a choreographic way with the actions of the other person. How and when to talk is learned since childhood, it is known that face-to-face conversation is the matrix of language acquisition. It is common to listen parents telling to kids when is expected from them to talk (for instance, they motivate responses if a question, an order or a 'hello' was expressed, they show when is expected to say 'thank you' or 'you are welcome').

Effective group communications come in forms of verbal and non-verbal techniques. Essential parts of the entire group’s contribution are that the group contains full participating members, the group is diverse, and that the diversity is recognized and respected (Hartley, 1997). In the videos viewed, three were evaluated on the effective and ineffective communication skills of the participants and suggestions made on how they could improve. The videos are titled, “Planning a Playground”, “Helping Annie”, and "The Politics of Sociology.

Although Jim did learn speech it became noticeably odd to others around him as he had developed his own, unique grammatical characteristics and his poor articulation meant he didn’t acquire normal language skills (Sachs et al 1981). Bruner suggests that this was due to lack of social interaction in his learning of speech, which again highlights the importance of nurture in promoting a child’s language development.

In the New Merriam-Webster Dictionary a speech community is defined as a socially distinct group that develops a dialect; a variety of language that diverges from the national language in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. Gumperz, Dorian, Fishman, Labov, Hymes, and Corder helped define a speech community. This essay will touch on the basis of multiple aspects of a speech community depending on their similarities and differences as well as how the concepts of these speech communities relate to such articles written by Heller and Jackson.

When looking at sociocultural factors one is faced with a variety of models that attempt to provide a social explanation of how language is acquired. This includes an examination of such influences as the social characteristics of the setting and the learner and the social rules for second language use. While typically associated with these models, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, which is based in his study of psychology, does not attempt to use culture to explain how language is acquired. Instead, Vygotsky identifies the relationship between language and culture as a dynamic, reciprocal and constantly evolving experience whereby language and culture are constituted in and of each other.

The exchanges of view involve the whole series of distinctions, instructions, codes and signs contained in the language, which tend to reveal the participants' thought processes. The individual is helped to greater awareness of his own identity, to share in a socially significant experiment,and to gain a deeper understanding of his environment. By discussion, the group as a whole and each individual in it seek to raise their level of 'maturity', to enhance their ability to think things out in different areas, including that of effective common effort.

Language variation, whether across different regions or different social groups, is a complex topic with a plethora of factors worthy of investigation. As Figure A and Figure B show, there are some interesting patterns that develop as a result of such factors. The following analysis will consider ways in which a variety of issues can begin to explain the reasons for such correlation in the data. Specifically, ways in which methodological factors, linguistic prestige, and the notion of speech communities and ‘class’, all play a contributory role, will be considered.