James Britton

Britton, James. Language and Learning: The Importance of Speech in Children’s Development 2^nd ed. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1993. Print.

Summary:

Britton’s work is more pragmatic in how he sees children and education. One duality that he defines is that of the participant, when one gets things done or acts through talk/speech, and spectator, when one talks for one’s own pleasure (99, 101, 124). There are times for both, but Britton explains that in order to understand how language works, these two roles must be understood. He is primarily concerned with creating the best education for children, which will in turn influence society, while at the same time acknowledging that language, even Standard English, changes and will continue to do so. Britton also creates a continuum of writing, from Transactional (“to fit into, to articulate with, the ongoing activities of participants”) to Expressive (“more fully meets the demands of a transaction… more explicit…however it reaches a wider audience by quite another means; by heightening or intensifying the implicit”) to Poetic (“demands a ‘sharer,’ an audience that does not interrupt…[a] response in kind is not therefore inherent”) (174, 177, 175). Britton also establishes that language creates the world of a child even though it is incomplete (233).

Response:

At one point Britton claims that “As the child becomes more familiar with diverse forms of the written language—forms adapted to different audience and different purposes—he will draw more and more upon those forms in his writing” (166). This reminds me of the model theory we talked about in TCC and also written about in classical rhetoric texts, but I do not know that simply seeing these different forms would then trickle down into writing habits. He does not go into specifics about how this concept actually works, but it would seem that students would need to do more than just read, but to actually be encouraged and required to try these different forms. It is not clear if Britton means that the written forms they could learn from are only the ones he means they encounter in school with guidance either. This learning from models is more difficult than he goes into in this passage and the rest of the chapter.

Connections/Questions:

Britton’s practicality made him a bit easier to follow, aided in part by how he creates structures within his text, similar in some ways to Piece’s construct of firstness, secondness, and thirdness and how those pieces worked within relationship and influencing one another. When Britton writes about language as a function “to get things done” and then later in the sentence about “language of being and becoming may roughly describe the other” role, this was reminiscent of Heidegger and his concept of revealing (125). He also uses Chomsky’s theory of languages using grammar in “three fundamental properties of sentences,” and Britton writes about Langer’s intuitive perception concept (200, 216). One slightly surprising connection was when Britton writes that “Effective communication is a social good: for that reason it is desirable that the forms of our speech should be appropriate to the occasion and intelligible and acceptable to our listeners” (132). This is essentially a great definition of rhetorical situation and also harkens back to early rhetoricians’ desires of using rhetoric for the good of society.