CHILD DEVELOPMENT PEDAGOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Michael Halliday (1975) suggests that we need language because we are forced to interact with other people and with our environment. As we get older and language becomes more complex, so does the social sub-text it carries; however for young children, most utterances serve only one function at a time.

Detailed explanation-2: -Halliday’s theory of language argues that language doesn’t just mimic meaning, it creates meaning. Imagine a number of families standing together looking at Venus, the evening star. Listen to what they’re saying. One mother with a young child is reciting, ‘Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight.

Detailed explanation-3: -For Halliday, children are motivated to develop language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs. Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions.

Detailed explanation-4: -In his early work, known as “scale and category linguistics, ” Halliday devised four categories (unit, structure, class, and system) and three scales (rank, exponence, and delicacy) to describe language.