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Language Development and Literacy

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Language Development and Literacy

Ruth A. Berman Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel

Overview

The linguistic knowledge and language use of high school adolescents is discussed as demon- strating a turning point in later, school-age lan- guage development, reflected by the ability to deploy a rich repertoire of the lexicon and gram- matical constructions of speaker-writers’ first lan- guage in different types of discourse and varied communicative settings. To start, the key notions of “adolescence” and of “linguistic literacy” are defined, as background to a survey of research- based findings for text construction abilities in different genres, taking into account both local linguistic expression and global discourse organi- zation. This is followed by consideration of the cognitive underpinnings of discourse construc- tion, in the conviction that general socio-cognitive abilities both underlie and enhance linguistic knowledge and language use during the period in question and that they are crucial to developing literacy. This forms the basis for consideration of the thematic content of adolescent discourse in different discourse genres, and the ability to express a more objective or distanced perspective on events and states of affairs at later school age.

The route to linguistic literacy is then reconsidered in terms of developing abilities in reading and writing – the canonic media of edu- cated, literate language usage – with mastery of written language as a hallmark of literacy extending well beyond grade school age The final section considers developments “beyond adolescence” as reflected by educated adult mem- bers of a given speech community, highlighting the long developmental route from initial emer- gence via acquisition to mastery of linguistic structure and language use. The paper concludes by underlining the interplay between facets of general socio-cognitive development consolidat- ing in adolescence – such as divergent thinking and perspective taking – and the language-specific skills in lexicon and grammar needed for effective communication.

Introduction

This overview considers the linguistic knowledge and language use of high school adolescents, as a turning point in later, school-age language devel- opment (Berman 2007), reflected by the ability to deploy a rich repertoire of lexical and syntactic devices skillfully and flexibly both in isolation (Kaplan and Berman 2015) and in extended dis- course and in different communicative settings.

Berman 2016a; Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2007; Rimmer 2008). These developments prove to be critical for achievement of “linguistic literacy”

# Springer International Publishing AG 2017 R.J.R. Levesque (ed.), Encyclopedia of Adolescence, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_19-2

(Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002) and becoming a literate member of a given speech community (Berman 2016b; Ravid and Berman 2009b). The term “adolescence” is used here with reference to the period corresponding to the upper grades of high school in English-speaking and European countries, between 15 or 16 and 18 or 19 years of age. Some scholars identify students in the preceding, middle school years as adolescents (e.g., Heller 1999), but for present purposes, the age-range of 11–14 is defined as “preadoles- cence,” representing a transitional stage between grade school middle childhood and high school adolescence (Davidi 2014). The age-schooling level considered below is recognized as a period of significant changes in social, cognitive, and moral development and in a range of abilities that emerge in middle childhood and flourish in adolescence (e.g., Case 1985; Flavell et al. 1993; Kohlberg 1984; Moshman 1998; Selman 1980). Current research in developmental psychology and neuroscience highlights adolescence as a time of major transition in “the shift from a caregiver-dependent child to a fully autonomous adult” (Paus 2005, p. 60), one that reflects devel- opments attributed to increased higher-order cog- nitive capacities (Proverbio and Zani 2005), greater executive control (Kluwe and Logan 2000), and the assembly of an advanced “execu- tive suite” of abilities (Steinberg 2005). The key theme of the discussion that follows is that such general processes both underlie and enhance lin- guistic knowledge and language use during the period in question and that they are crucial to developing literacy.

This overview derives from investigation of later language development – growth in knowl- edge of linguistic forms and how to use them across the school years – as a burgeoning domain of contemporary inquiry (Berman 2004; Nippold 2007). Research in different languages highlights adolescence as a major turning point in develop- ing sophisticated command of linguistic expres- sion in both speech and writing (Berman and Ravid 2009), in mastery of text construction abil- ities (Berman 2008), and in processing and com- prehension of different genres of discourse (Kaplan 2013). Adolescence is also a critical

period in the consolidation of literacy, going beyond the “emergent literacy” of early childhood and acquisition of writing as a notational system (Pontecorvo 1994; Tolchinsky 2003), on the one hand, and the role of “functional literacy” in dif- ferent sociocultural contexts (Verhoeven 1994), on the other. Rather, concern here is with “linguis- tic literacy” (Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002) as both a prerequisite for and a consequence of ready access to a wide variety of language resources, particularly written materials – from Internet entries to newspaper reports, from short stories to encyclopedic texts. Production and comprehen- sion of extended discourse in different genres (narrative and expository, descriptive, and infor- mative) emerges as of particular relevance to school-based language and literacy activities in the high school years. Interactive, socially moti- vated language use of adolescents in different communicative settings warrants separate atten- tion, beyond the confines of the present overview.

Text Construction Abilities: Local Linguistic Expression and Global Discourse Organization

A major finding of a large-scale crosslinguistic project on developing text construction abilities from school-age into adulthood (Berman and Verhoeven 2002; Berman 2005, 2008) was that results clustered together in the two younger age- groups investigated – 9-to-10-year-olds in middle childhood and 12-to-13-year-old preadolescents – with a significant cut-off between the latter and 16-to-17-year-old high school adolescents. This pattern was consistent across the domains that we analyzed, from local-level linguistic expression in lexicon and syntax to global-level text quality, thematic content, and overall discourse stance and across the variables of discourse genre (personal experience narratives and expository discussion), medium of production (speech and writing), and target language typology (across seven different languages). For ease of presenta- tion, findings in this overview derive mainly from English and Hebrew as two languages that differ

2 Language Development and Literacy

significantly in historical development, lexical composition, and morpho-syntactic structure.

In the first place, striking advances emerged in the quality of lexical usage of high school adoles- cents compared with middle school preadoles- cents. This was reflected in reliance on more sophisticated, low-frequency vocabulary items typical of higher registers of language use – in English, by significantly greater use of polysyl- labic words and items of Latinate origin (Bar-Ilan and Berman 2007; Nir-Sagiv et al. 2008); in Hebrew – by more complex derivational morphol- ogy and use of elevated, less everyday vocabulary (Ravid 2004a; Ravid and Berman 2009a); and in both languages – by broader use of abstract nouns with general rather than specific reference (Ravid 2006). Corresponding age-related findings emerged for a significant increase in use of com- plex syntax among students of high school age compared with younger children in different languages – including English, French, Hebrew, and Spanish. The adolescents made greater use of both finite and nonfinite subordination; ((Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2009a; Gayraud et al. 2001); their texts revealed longer and more complex noun phrases (Jisa and Tolchinsky 2009; Ravid and Berman 2009b); and they availed themselves increasingly of passive voice and other construc- tions that function for downgrading of agency and present a distanced, less subjective perspective on events (Jisa 2004a; Reilly et al. 2005; Tolchinsky and Rosado 2005).

Analyses of global-level text construction abil- ities confirm findings from earlier research to the effect that by middle childhood, children aged 9 or 10 years old are able to produce well-structured narratives, both in speech and writing, describing events in chronological sequence, with a rela- tively well-defined beginning, middle, and end to their stories (Berman and Katzenberger 2004; Tolchinsky et al. 2002). The grade school children in the crosslinguistic study were also able to dis- tinguish between the two genres of personal expe- rience narratives compared with expository talks and essays that they constructed on topics such as violence in schools and interpersonal conflict in general. They expressed this distinctiveness both linguistically – in the lexical and syntactic forms

they used – and even thematically – by recounting dynamic events in their stories as against making generalized statements in their essays (Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2004, 2007; Kupersmitt 2006). In contrast, mastery of expository discourse at a global level of organization and conceptualization emerges much later, typically only in high school, both in text production (Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2009b, c) and comprehension (Kaplan 2008). In discussing an abstract topic, it evidently takes until adolescence for students to be able to process and construct a coherent set of core propositions or “top-down” generalizations to express key ideas that are elaborated by specific, illustrative, and motivational material.

Cognitive Underpinnings of Discourse Construction

The contrast between the relatively early ability to recount concrete, sequentially organized events in narratives compared with the later consolidation of nonnarrative discourse in adolescence is con- firmed by studies showing that it takes until high school for students to reach a relatively mature level in understanding and constructing informa- tive, encyclopedic type texts (Kaplan 2008; Ravid and Zilberbuch 2003). These convergent findings can be attributed to both the earlier and broader experience of preliterate children with narratives as a universal mode of discourse (Berman 2009) and to the cognitive burdens imposed by dis- course in the “logico-scientific paradigm” under- lying nonnarrative modes of thinking (Bruner 1986). An expository text, rather than describing events that have or could have occurred, needs to create its own content, so to speak, so that, in addressing an abstract topic like interpersonal conflict, the organization and content of a piece of discourse are intertwined, with the result that the quality of an expository discussion “depends not only on how the flow of information is orga- nized but also on the logical consistency and originality of the propositional content that it con- veys” (Berman and Katzenberger 2004, p. 89).

Another cognitively anchored development in discourse abilities that first consolidates around

Language Development and Literacy 3

adolescence is what is termed the shift from “dichotomy to divergence.” The markedly distinc- tive forms of expression used in producing narra- tive compared with expository texts are attenuated with the shift to adolescence. The younger chil- dren’s texts tend to be monotonic: Their narratives consist almost entirely of descriptions of dynamic, highly specific events anchored in the past; and their expository texts are almost entirely confined to generalities and judgments concerning familiar states of affairs. This reflects a clear grasp of what is involved in each of the two genres as distinct types of discourse, but it also shows that younger children have difficulty in expressing multiple perspectives on events or issues in producing extended discourse. In contrast, the narratives produced by speaker-writers from high school tend to be more mixed or divergent, including expository-like generalized propositions and eval- uative commentary; correspondingly, in their expository texts, adolescents and adults may elab- orate on core propositional elements by means of narrative-like illustrative episodes and reference to specific situations or personal experiences. Lin- guistically, this means that from adolescence onward, narratives may include verbs in the time- less present or future tense and conditional or other moods relating to hypothetical contingen- cies rather than to concretely dynamic events, while in their expository discourse, students may use action verbs in past tense or perfective aspect in presenting specifically concrete illustrative episodes.

Taken together, these developments in text construction abilities demonstrate the intimate connection between cognitive development, the growth of linguistic knowledge, and advances in language use in adolescence. As Karmiloff-Smith has argued for development of knowledge of lan- guage (as of other domains), “children first con- solidate each of the systems (the morphophonological, the syntactic, and the semantic) separately, only later does one system constrain another” (Karmiloff-Smith 1992, p. 181). Relatedly, a leitmotif of earlier work on children’s developing narrative abilities in differ- ent languages was the observation that being a proficient language user requires both

“(1) knowledge of the overall resources of the linguistic forms and rhetorical options of the native language, and (2) the ability to work with all these various systems and keep all of them active simultaneously, within a continuing and continually updated, representation of the lis- tener’s (or reader’s) current state of knowledge” (Berman and Slobin 1994, p. 609). This leads to the conclusion that the cognitive task involved in gaining proficient command of the interrelations between linguistic forms and discourse functions is extremely complex, one that has a long devel- opmental history, continuing at least through adolescence.

Thematic Content and Perspective Taking in Extended Discourse

Cognitive developments in divergent thinking and perspective taking combine with affective and social developments and expanded life- experience to affect not only how adolescents express themselves, but also what they relate to when constructing extended discourse. For exam- ple, the narratives of older students, from adoles- cence onward, include longer, more detached, and more elaborate background information in the opening parts of the stories they tell in different languages (Berman 2001; Berman and Katzenberger 2004; Tolchinsky et al. 2002). This is consistent with the shift observed in late ado- lescence in the overall discourse stance expressed by speaker-writers of different languages: from highly involved, personalized, and subjective atti- tudes and orientations to more distanced, general- ized, and objective points of view, taking into account more of the listener-reader’s interests and knowledge base (as documented for different languages in the papers in Berman 2005). Research on narrative evaluation, in the sense of the interpretive commentary and subjective per- spectives that speakers provide on the events recounted (Labov 1972), shows that among youn- ger children, this is largely affective; it is more socially oriented in preadolescence and becomes more cognitive and reflectively interpretive in later adolescence and adulthood (Ravid and

4 Language Development and Literacy

Berman 2006; Reilly 1992). Segal’s (2008) study of Hebrew speakers’ accounts of an experience recalled from the Gulf War revealed similar age- related shifts in attitudes: The 11-to-12-year-old preadolescents related mainly to concrete facets of everyday routines, 15-to-16-year-old adolescents talked more about the social interactions involved and the emotional stress they experienced, while adults commented cognitively on their interpreta- tion of the events and speculated on their possible consequences.

Developments are thus clearly evident in the thematic content of narratives produced on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict. Grade school children talk and write mainly about fights or quarrels about physical objects and posses- sions, at home or school, while adolescents relate increasingly to social issues and relationships (Berman 2000). Linguistically, these changes are reflected in the “narrative lexicon,” where youn- ger children refer mainly to animate agents and to concrete situations, while adolescent speaker- writers relate to more general and more distanced topics expressed by means of abstract nominals such as disagreement, controversy, and reaction (Ravid and Cahana-Amitay 2005). Linguistic expression in expository discussions of similar themes (violence in schools or interpersonal con- flicts in general) also reflects changes in the direc- tion of less subjectively involved attitudes. For example, Tolchinsky and Rosado (2005) conclude from their analysis of Spanish constructions for downgrading of agency that “account must be taken of the fact that the emergence of passives and the increment in use of other forms occur together with a change in the thematic content of the texts.” A similar conclusion is reached by Reilly et al. (2005) analysis of passive construc- tions in expository essays in English, to the effect that “agents in the passives used by adolescents and adults frequently take the form of abstract nominals as opposed to the animate agents (often to be inferred) typical of the younger children’s texts.” This interrelation between use of grammat- ical constructions and expression of particular types of thematic content is mirrored by Ravid and Cahana-Amitay’s (2005) finding for a devel- opmental shift in Hebrew texts, from largely

verbal predicates to nominal types of predication that relate to “more generalized and distanced topics.” Lexicon and syntax thus interact with age-related changes in overall attitudes expressed in discussing a socially relevant theme. The expository texts of grade school children and pre adolescents consist almost entirely of generalities, divorced from concrete instances or individual attitudes and personal experiences. High school students, in contrast, are able to combine a generic, abstract perspective on the topic of inter- personal conflict with personalized commentary on how they view such situations or how these affect them as individuals. At the same time, the overall perspective of older speaker-writers, even in their narratives, most particularly in their expository essays, is by and large more distanced, detached, and objective than that of the younger children.

These developmental differences in perspec- tive taking are markedly reflected in the way that high school compared with grade school students use modal expressions such as may, might, could, be able to, should, have to, ought to, must, and other linguistic means of encoding propositional attitudes that relate to hypothetical contingencies (Kupersmitt 2006; Reilly et al. 2002, 2005). Across the board, such expressions are far com- moner in expository than in narrative texts, since they refer to possible states of affairs and the circumstances attendant on them rather than to events that actually took place. Nine-year speaker-writers of different languages typically make use of such terms with a “deontic” import, to express attitudes that reflect socially prescribed norms, in the form of prohibitions and stipulations (e.g.,“ People shouldn’t just ignore violence, hit back”, “If someone hurts you, you must face up to him”; “When there is violence, don’t just sit there, do something!”). In contrast, adolescents use modal elements in an “epistemic” sense, taking into account various alternatives and hypothetical states of affairs to express cognitively motivated, mentalistically anchored, individual conclusions in relation to a given state of affairs (e.g., “such a situation is liable to have serious consequences, if people cannot step back and . . .”; “If there is

Language Development and Literacy 5

sufficient goodwill on all sides, then conflict may be avoided altogether”).

Reading and Writing in the Development of Linguistic Literacy

Largely convergent findings for those documented above for text construction abilities have emerged from recent research on later school-age reading comprehension. Students from middle childhood to adolescence (in grade school, middle school, and high school) were presented with narrative and informative texts at differing levels of difficulty, and then required to answer questions designed to tap different levels of text comprehension (Kaplan 2013). These ranged from literal understanding of explicitly mentioned factual material to deriving inferences from text content, followed by the ability to inte- grate top-down and bottom-up facets of the text to construct novel categories of knowledge and men- tal representations, and on to the highest level of meta-level interpretations derived from text- external world knowledge and implications. The two higher levels of discourse processing were attained primarily by adolescents and adults, but by hardly any of the younger students, irrespective of genre or level of difficulty of a given text. The preadolescent seventh graders demonstrated the effect of an expanded knowl- edge base and their greater exposure to literacy- based activities so that they were able to tackle the demands of factual and inferential questions better than younger children in the 9-year-old group. However, Kaplan found few qualitative changes in the strategies and functions met by the broad- ening basis of prior knowledge between grade and middle schools. It took until high school adoles- cence for students to deploy the cognitive flexi- bility required for integrating top-down generalizations with bottom-up specifics, to apply metacognitive processing and abstract thinking in order to interpret the hidden meanings of a text. These convergent findings for a spurt in adolescence in comprehension as well as produc- tion of extended discourse shed light on the pro- cesses of reading and writing as two interrelated

facets of language and literacy that develop in tandem across the school years (Heller 1999).

Literacy as defined here thus assigns a privileged role to written language as a means of becoming fully accommodated to the cognitive as well as the social and economic demands of con- temporary postindustrial society (Olson 1994, 2006a, b; Ong 1992, 2002). Learning to write is more than “just learning to express your ideas in an alternative medium to speech” (Strömqvist 2006). Rather, becoming literate means gaining command of written as well as oral language and being able to move skillfully between the two modalities as alternative, and complementary, sources of input and modes of expression. Studies comparing texts produced by the same partici- pants in both speech and writing demonstrate that, again, high school emerges as a cut-off point in the distinction between oral and written language (Berman 2016b; Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2010; Berman and Ravid 2009). Grade school students in middle childhood are capable of pro- ducing narrative and expository texts in both modalities, but they write very much as they speak. Middle school preadolescents emerge as an intermediate group in this respect, with some facets of their lexical and syntactic usage showing greater differentiation between the two modes of expression. Only from high school onward, how- ever, is there a clear and marked distinction between the linguistic means deployed and the rhetorical devices that are used in the two modal- ities, revealing adolescence as a watershed in the ability to treat written language “as a special style of discourse” (Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002; Strömqvist et al. 2004).

From this point of view, too, adolescence con- stitutes a milestone in achieving command of “book language” (Blank 2002) and the academic style of expression necessary for school-based achievements (Jisa 2004b; Snow and Uccelli 2009). What Slobin (2004) has termed “thinking for writing” consolidates only in adolescence, as a period that combines increased world experience and exposure to different types of written mate- rials with greater cognitive flexibility and more skillful deployment of a full repertoire of

6 Language Development and Literacy

linguistic devices in controlling and shaping the flow of information in extended discourse.

Beyond Adolescence

The final issue addressed here is “so what is left for adults?”, given the characterization of adoles- cence as a developmental watershed between middle childhood and preadolescence, on the one hand, and high school and adulthood, on the other. So far, discussion – like most research on later language development – has focused on changes in linguistic knowledge and language use during but not beyond the school years. Although adult participants were included in many of the studies reviewed above, they were not perceived as a “control” group in the canonic sense of the term. This is because, in practice, in the diverse types of extended discourse consid- ered here and the complex nature of the tasks involved, there is no one “correct answer,” nor is a particular product necessarily the “best.” Earlier research of this author on oral Hebrew-language narratives all based on the same children’s picture book story led to the conclusion that it was not possible to pinpoint a particular narrative type as reflecting an adult “model” . . . (and that) mature manipulation of this (as of other discourse) varies greatly from one individual to another (Berman 1988).

Besides, in principle, language and literacy, possibly other knowledge domains as well, have no clear end state but are constantly evolving and developing throughout the life cycle, or until such time as dementia sets in – as recorded, for exam- ple, in the “nun studies” documented in Kemper et al. (2001) and Mitzner and Kemper (2003). Rather, the adults investigated in the studies referred to here, mainly university graduates in their late 20s and early 30s, serve primarily as a point of reference as well-educated, literate, but non-expert speaker-writers of a standard dialect, since they are not professional language teachers, writers, or journalists.

In highlighting the unique status of high school adolescence as a developmental cut-off point in mastery of language and literacy, the research

cited in this overview affords little in the way of detailed comparisons between the adolescent and adult participants. Partial exceptions are the stud- ies of Reilly et al. (2005) on English and of Ravid (2004b) on text production in Hebrew, both of which note in passing that the language used by adult speaker-writers of the standard language differs significantly from that of high school seniors. Further, while a basic grasp of the distinc- tion between what is said and what is meant crit- ical to understanding nonliteral language is achieved by early childhood and flourishes around adolescence (Berman 2007; Tolchinsky 2004), reading poetry, as the highest form of non- literal use of language, has been shown to consti- tute a heavy cognitive burden even for adolescents, with mastery of this genre achieved only in adulthood, if at all, possibly demanding specialized training (Davidi 2014; Peskin 1998; Peskin and Olson 2004).

The following comments on what develops beyond adolescence are suggestive of initial insights and potential domains for further investi- gation rather than based on hard-and-fast research findings. First, while various metalinguistic abili- ties are well established by adolescence, meta- textual capacities may require greater maturity and reintegration of a range of cognitive capaci- ties. Meta-textual processing of extended dis- course means that readers are able to go beyond a text and consider it from outside itself, to apply their text-external world knowledge and value systems, so as to assign a well-informed, original, and individual interpretation to the information it provides, the ideas it expresses, or the events it recounts. In writing an essay or giving a talk, as in telling a story, it may take until adulthood for speaker-writers to provide their own commentary on the ideas expressed or the events recounted, linking them concurrently both to general text- external states of affairs and generalizing from their own life history and experience. This requires sophisticated abilities in establishing interconnections between diverse categories and knowledge systems – along the lines of the later levels (E3 and E4), and possibly even uniquely level E4 re-representations in Karmiloff-Smith’s (1992) developmental model of metacognition.

Language Development and Literacy 7

A second idea hinted at in prior research is that increased command of and experience with read- ing and writing means that for literate adults, written language will have an increased impact on the spoken (Jisa 2004b; Strömqvist 2006). That is, educated adults can – in suitable circumstances – use the language of writing when they speak so that the distinctiveness between speech and writing that is the hallmark of developing literacy may become blurred or at least attenuated – analogously to what was noted earlier for the shift from dichotomy to divergence in relation to different discourse genres. This idea, as noted, requires further study, supported by appropriately detailed, and innovative, research designs (Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2010).

A third possible development that may take until adulthood to achieve (again, if ever) is con- solidation of an individual rhetorical style of expression. In a study of developing oral narrative abilities in different languages based on the same picture book adventure story, a peculiar type of U-shaped curve was observed (Berman and Slobin 1994). The accounts of the youngest par- ticipants, 3-to-4-year-old preschoolers, were highly diverse, varying considerably from one child to the next – a finding that was attributed to the fact that they had not yet established a narrative mode of discourse. The schoolchildren aged 9–10 years, in contrast, provided largely stereotypical, conventionalized accounts, evi- dence of their having internalized a narrative schema, but without consolidating an individual style of narrative performance (Reilly 1992). The adult participants – and they alone – told stories that were, like those of the younger children, extremely varied in style and content, even though all were based on the same fictive picture book events: Like the 9-year-olds, the adults relied on a shared, top-down organization of narrative struc- ture, but in some cases, this was elaborated by a rich network of evaluative, meta-textual commen- tary, and text-external generalizations; in others, they summarized all the various search events in the story in a few short encapsulations to produce a bare bones, precisely economical account. Indi- vidual variation was also reflected in the wide range of text lengths of adult narratives, from

40 to 160 clauses (Berman 1988). Clearly, extra- linguistic factors such as social conventions, peer pressure, schoolroom prescription, and so forth underlie these age-related shifts from juvenile variability to (pre)adolescent commonalities and on to adult individuality (or “post- conventionality” in terms of Kohlberg’s 1984, model). This suggests a valuable domain for fur- ther investigation of how linguistic knowledge, language use, and literacy develop in and beyond adolescence.

Conclusion

In the different domains of linguistic knowledge and discursive skills reviewed above, adolescence emerges time and again as a developmental turn- ing point, with “the process of gaining mastery of written language as a hallmark of literacy extending well beyond grade school age” (Jisa 2004b). Taken together, the research surveyed here demonstrates that it takes until adolescence to become a literate member of a given speech community, commanding ready and informed access to a large variety of written materials in different genres and styles of discourse. The shifts noted in use of vocabulary and syntax, in dis- course organization, and in the thematic content and social attitudes expressed by adolescents compared with younger school-age children underscore the interplay between use of lexical and grammatical constructions and the communi- cative purposes that they serve. As such, they indicate that the (linguistic) form/(discursive) function approach proposed by Slobin (2001) for early phases of language acquisition provides a valuable perspective for research on later lan- guage development as well. And they consistently reflect the interaction between facets of general cognitive development such as divergent thinking and perspective taking and the language-specific ability to deploy a varied and appropriate reper- toire of linguistic devices at the service of extended discourse. The human capacity of “thinking for speaking” that Slobin’s (1996) crosslinguistic research has shown to emerge in early childhood combines with “thinking for

8 Language Development and Literacy

writing (and reading)” to demonstrate a long developmental history that continues from early school-age into and possibly beyond late adolescence.

Lacunae in the research presented here include, first, the need to go beyond extended (largely written) discourse to consider oral interactive communication of adolescents – with their peers, in the classroom, and in family settings (see, for example, Blank 2002; Blum-Kulka 1997). Another is the need for suitably designed studies comparing the language use and literacy practices of adolescents with that of adults – possibly divided between young, college-age, and more mature populations. A third direction would be the clinical and pedagogical implications of research on high school students with language- learning disabilities – as suggested in Scott’s (2004) work with 11-to-12-year-olds. Finally, cross-cultural comparisons might go beyond the largely mainstream, middle-to-upper class populations figuring in this survey to investigate the nature and role of language and literacy among adolescents from different social backgrounds and in more or less literate communities.

Acknowledgments Grateful thanks are extended to the editor of the encyclopedia for his constructive feedback and to Bracha Nir and Batia Seroussi for their valuable comments on an earlier version. The author alone is responsible for inadequacies that remain.

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