Halliday and Dore

Michael Halliday's functions of speech
In 1975, Michael Halliday identified that childrens langauge in their early years has 7 key functions. He believed that children are motivated to learn language as they believe it enables them to serve certain functions for them, such as to express their needs. This is ultimately named 'learning how to mean'.

4 of the 7 functions are labelled as helping the child satisfy physical, social and emotional needs.
Instrumental: When the child uses language to express their needs - Example - " I Want milk"
Regulatory: Where language is used to tell others what to do - Example - "Come here"
Interactional: Where language is used to form a relationship/ socially interact with others - Example "Love you mum"
Personal: Use of language to express the speaker's identity or/and feelings - Example - "I've been good today"

The other 3 functions are heuristic, imaginative, and representational. These help learning children understand the environment they are in.
Heuristic: When language is used to gain knowledge about the environment - Example - a running commentary of a child's activities "look at the fox"
Imaginative: Language is used to create expand the child's imagination, usually by telling stories
Representational: Using language to convey facts and information - Example "I have long hair".

John Dore's infant language functions

These are much more simple and basic to understand compared to Halliday's slightly more in-depth theory. Still similar to Halliday in the fact that children still learn language to develop necessary functions, they are just a lot more basic.

Labelling - Naming or identifying a person, object or experience
Repeating - echoing language spoken by a more accomplished speaker
Answering - Directly responding to an interrogative or declarative (or any utterance) by another speaker
Requesting action - demanding something e.g. food or drink
Calling - shouting/ loudly talking to attract attention
Greeting - simply saying "hi" or "hello" 
Protesting - Objecting to a request
Practising - Repeating language that the child speaks when no adults are assisting, trying to independently develop their language.

In the transcript, relating to John Dore's infant language functions, it is actually the accomplished speaker who does the repeating of words or phrases, acting as interrogatives; this may be used to enhance the learning of the young speaker and encourage them to keep talking which will inevitably enhance their language skills and ability.
Furthermore, just 1 of the 4 functions used to satisfy physical, social and emotional needs (Halliday) was used "i got food on the floor". The reason that the other 3 from that category such as instrumental function were not used was because Zach was mainly talking about what he was doing at that moment, not needing to request for things. Because of this, many heuristic and representational functions were used because the interrogatives being asked allowed for a running commentary style conversation to occur, where Zach was detailing what he was doing throughout the conversation, also showing the simple 'labelling' occuring from John Dore's theory, such as "here's the skins".

ideas of theory and data - investigation

distinctive features of language use - Most probable I will investigate
Robin Lakoff's deficit model - focus on if it is true that women use uncertainty features, possibly compare to if men use them at all, or compare a woman's in 3 different situations, making it reliable, e.g. formal interview, informal chat show etc - ensure i mention if it is planned speech.
Zimmerman and West - dominance - if it is true that men dominate conversations due to their 'perceived' superior status e.g. talk for 2x long, interrupt more - if so, make sure comparable factors are correct to enable this investigation to happen.

Language change
The change of language over time - effect of technology, social media - investigate the language of someones / a company's official website compared to twitter feed.
Historical changes of the English language over time - Shakespeare, 20th century, modern day

Language of certain jobs 
Sports commentary - how it is different from analysis after game and normal speech
Language of the media - how tabloids are different from other tabloids and broadsheets

19/09/2016 - Vygotsky

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD

 The zone of proximal development is defined as "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" by Lev Vygotsky in the last 10 years of his life. Because of his early death, this theory is not yet fully developed.

In a nutshell, it is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what they can do with help.

Vygotsky stated that a child will follow an adult's example of doing a task and gradually develop the ability to complete this task without any assistance.

Among other educational specialists, Vygotsky believed that the role of education is to provide children with tasks that are within their zone of proximal development to encourage them to keep learning.

He also believed that, instead of determining a child's knowledge based on tests given in schools (based on memory in a way), their development of their learning and knowledge should be based on their ability to solve problems independently and then with the assistance of an adult.

A concept of 'scaffolding' has been gradually developed by theorist Jerome Bruner, and furtherly developed by Wood and Middleton in 1975, supporting Vygotskys idea. They believe that this idea is that, when helping learning, a teacher or adult will help a child with a task within the child's ZPD, and will later reduce the amount of help as it becomes unneeded due to the child understanding what is needed to complete the task.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/Zone-of-Proximal-Development.html#scaff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

Me as an English Language student

As an English language student, I developed my skills of working effectively and efficiently on a variety of different pieces such as comparative essays and opinionated articles. What I found the most challenging was to quickly identify techniques used in a piece of work, such as the task in paper 1, and would also be unsure that if the techniques I identified were meaningful enough to write about to a good standard. To do well this year especially in paper 1, these skills of mine will need to be improved. 
Despite this, I enjoyed the topics learnt such as the effects that accent and dialect can have on your speech, most probably because I come from Bristol which has a unique dialect. Consequently, I use multiple traits from the Bristol dialect such as "where you to".