Chapter 8 "The Children of Trackton's Children: Spoken Lanuguage in Social Change

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Well folks, I know you've been eagerly anticipating my summary of Chapter 8...so here it is. If you feel you need further explanation or clarification, please post me a question. I am working on my next chapter (16) and hope to post that later tonight. Happy reading! Thanks again for the good work you all did.

Sarah Ruth Sullivan
August 21, 2007
Chapter Summary
From Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, Fifth Edition.
Edited by Robert B. Ruddell and Norman J. Unrau

Chapter 8
“The Children of Trackton’s Children: Spoken and Written Language in Social Change”
By Shirley Brice Heath

Heath’s chapter, found in Section Two, “Processes of Reading and Literacy,” explores the effect social context has on the development of language and cognitive processes. In this chapter, Heath demonstrates how changing from a rural culture to an urban one changes the forms and functions of language. When communities are changed, the meanings of cultural membership change, as well as the process of language socialization and social values and beliefs.

Heath references her prior study, “Ways With Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms” published in 1983, which gives ethnographic accounts of how the children of the working class community Trackton, in southeastern United States, learned to use language at home and school between 1969 and 1977. When Heath studied this community of black families in the 1970’s, their economic and social lives revolved around a rural community in which many adults worked in the local textile mills. Heath describes the black families in Trackton as intact socio-cultural groupings whose cultures were not “deficient” but were different from the mainstream pattern. The differences gave this black community a unique, identifiable value system and socialization process.

In Heath’s present study described in this chapter, she returns to Trackton to study the changes in that community and how these changes affected the language of children. The economic recession of the early 1980s severely reduced the number of textile mills in Trackton and caused a social upheaval and move to an urban culture which completely altered the lives of Trackton’s children and hence affected their language socialization.

In order to compare the lives and language of the children of Trackton studied during the 1960s/70s with the next generation studied in the 1980s, Heath focuses on two children, Zinnia Mae and Sissy[1]. Both girls were part of the early study and became the focus of Heath’s later study wherein she analyzed the social context surrounding Zinnia Mae and Sissy when they became mothers. Heath uses these two generations to illustrate how the change in the community affected language socialization.

Heath describes the study of language socialization as having two goals: developing an understanding of how language is used to socialize the young and determining how youngsters learn to use language. She focuses her analysis on three questions:

· Were the “meanings of cultural membership” learned by Zinnia Mae in her childhood
retained and carried over to the socialization of her children?
· What are the resources for adaptation within “different symbols or cultural texts”?
· What are the comparative differences between the socialization of Trackton’s children in
the 1970s and those children of the 1980s?

In the first study in Trackton, when the economic life revolved around the “good pay” of the textile mills, families remained away from “the projects” of public housing and instead tended to rent small, two-family units. This arrangement made for a close community where families spent their time outside of work at on their porches, with a great deal of interactions between adults and children. In these days, the adults surrounded their youngsters with talk and shared activities. Heath writes that the character of the African-American parenting language at the time was not “simplified” for children. There were no special routines of question-and answer or baby talk games. Instead, the adults expected children would learn to talk “when they need to.” Heath describes the black families in Trackton as intact socio-cultural groupings whose cultures were not “deficient” but were different from the mainstream pattern. The differences gave this black community a unique, identifiable value system and socialization process which was linked to a continued faith in education, the future of their youth, the centrality of religion and the power of the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood.

This unique bond of empowerment dissolved by the late 1980s, according to Heath. The collapse of a stable economy contributed to an image both within and beyond the black community of poverty, dissolution and strife. Instead of the hopeful, close community of Trackton in the 1960s and 70s, the children of the 1980s were raised in an increasingly isolated and negative environment.

Heath provides a case study of Zinnia Mae in order to illustrate how language was affected by the change from a rural community with an intact cultural identity and closeness between families to an urban, isolated situation. In 1985, soon after she turned 16, Zinnia Mae moved from rural Trackton to urban Atlanta where she lived in a high-rise public housing apartment unit with her three young children, a daughter, Donna who was 16 months old and twin sons who were two months old. There, on the urging of Heath, between mid-1985 and mid-1987, Zinnia Mae taped over 400 hours and wrote approximately 1,000 lines of notes about her activities.

In sharp contrast to the abundance of community interaction in Trackton which had been facilitated by the closeness of houses and life spent outside on the porches, Zinnia Mae and her children lived a very isolated, non-verbally interactive existence. Because of their living conditions with their single mom, the children rarely left the apartment and did not have other children over to play with them. The lives of both mother and children revolved around the television, with infrequent visits by Zinnia Mae’s girlfriends. Zinnia Mae’s children did not engage in the interactive performing, joking and storytelling that marked the social context of Trackton’s children a generation prior.

The amount of talk between mother and children was very low in comparison to the way life had been in Trackton. Heath writes that in a random selection of 20 hours of the tapes, only approximately 14% of the recording sessions included talk between Zinnia Mae and the children. Zinnia Mae met the physical needs of her children, but did not stimulate verbal interaction as she usually waited for the children to address or approach her. When Zinnia Mae did initiate talk it usually was designed to give them a brief directive or question about their actions. The language socialization resources of Trackton and Zinnia Mae’s apartment contrasted sharply in almost each aspect of the process. The physical and social isolation of the family forced the majority of the interactions to be dyadic (occurring between two people) rather than “multiparty” as was the case in Trackton’s open community of adults and children. By herself, Zinnia Mae was not able to assume a key role in enabling her children to learn to use language across a wide variety of styles and functions, nor did she engage in guided or collaborative tasks with her children.

The language development of Zinnia Mae’s children did NOT match the pattern of Trackton’s children observed in the 1960s. Since her children did not have the benefit of multiparty, dynamic language interactions, they did not move through the stages of language socialization seen in Trackton’s children:

1. A repetition stage, in which children repeat chunks of speech heard around them
2. A repetition with variation stage, in which children manipulate the speech they picked up
from those around them
3. A participation phase, usually reached around 2 years of age, during which they attempt
to create their own talk to bring into adult conversations, thus becoming an active part of
an ongoing dialogue

Zinnia Mae’s daughter, Donna, though not formally evaluated by Heath, showed significant deficiencies in her language abilities. In contrast to the Trackton children of the 1960s who were raised within a close-knit community of adults and children, the language socialization of Zinnia Mae’s children “holds little promise that they will enter school with the wide range of language uses, varieties of performance, types of genres and perspectives on self-as-performer that Trackton’s children had."

Heath suggests that Zinnia Mae’s case study points to the power of groups and allegiances beyond the immediate family to give a sustaining ideology of cultural membership. Whereas the children of Trackton had a common foundation for language and socialization from the black church, as well as the dynamic conversations of community members who gathered on the porches, Zinnia Mae’s children did not have the contacts or interactions necessary for complex language socialization.

As was evidenced in the case study, Heath writes that sociological research underscores the importance of dynamic verbal contacts to the academic and mental health of young minorities – especially African American children. Indeed, alienation from family and community (like that experienced by Zinnia Mae’s children) appears to play a more critical role students’ academic success than the socioeconomic markers of income level or educational attainment of parents.



End note

[1] While the chapter details the case studies of both Zinnia Mae and Sissy, this summary will treat only Zinnia Mae as the evidence from both cases points to the same conclusions, and Zinnia Mae’s case will serve the purposes of illustrating these conclusions for this summary.