The Effect of Socioeconomic Status on Parents’ Dialogicality

Abstract

Parent level of education makes important contributions to the linguistic development of children (Hoff, 2003). This cross-sectional study, focusing on the link between families’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their language use, aims to investigate whether parents’ levels of SES influence their interaction styles with their children in terms of dialogicality. Dialogicality refers to “the ways in which one speaker’s concrete utterances come into contact with the utterances of another” (Wertsch, 1991: p. 54). Research suggests that when adults give children opportunities of dialogicality and let them become active participants during conversations, i.e. when the interactions are more dialogic, children show greater language gains (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Within this context, this study is an attempt to explore how and to what extent parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds encourage their preschoolers to become more active in their interactions. Ten families differing in SES were audio-taped in their homes for about 15 minutes in the toy play context with their five-year-old children. The transcriptions were coded as exchanges, and then each exchange was coded as an II or IR or IRF pattern according to Sinclair & Coulthard’s spoken discourse model which was developed in 1975. The model, consisting of three-part exchanges: Initiation, Response, and Feedback, known as IRF, was developed through the application of transcripts taken from primary school classroom settings in the 1970’s. Focusing on these parent- preschooler dialogues, this study tried to find out whether families’ interaction styles differentiate depending on their SES; thus, which children were encouraged more to become active speakers before starting their formal education. The results show that SES has a crucial effect upon parents’ dialogicality, that is, high SES parents’ interaction styles are much more dialogic.