The mistakes shown by the boys are non-standard which shows a greater informality where they try and invent some words to make the story sound good. This invention of new words shows that the boys are trying to sound more intelligent by using their logic to say words which sound like they fit in to the English language "and then someone eated it and it was a frog". These creative errors are particular kinds of features, which are found in childrens' language. "Eated" shows that the boys have visually remembered spellings of other words and tried to fit it in to make it sound grammatically correct.
There is a point in the story where Mark says "and my frog went up-rode round-round into this lady's knickers (laughter) and then this lady was going "aagh! aagh! Help me! Help me!"" The reference to the lady's knickers causes the children to laugh because they think that it is something naughty to say which would enhance the story. Use of taboo words in childrens speech often is used to create humour and also in this case, where Mark says it, it could be used to try and gain status in the conversation. The interjections used by the children such as "ugh!" and "aagh!" create an audible sense of disgust, fear, excitement and shock which builds up the attention of what’s happening in the story.
The simple language and lexical choice are mainly small words that are often polysyllabic, which shows the age of the children and their stage of development in learning vocabulary. Also purposely choosing small words helps the boys to get to the point of the story out more quickly.
2) In what ways would the language of the story be different if the boys had to write it down?
Robin starts off the dialogue with "One day we went for a trip to Chester Zoo and". The start of this sentence shows that the passage is most likely going to be a story of some sort and brings in the fact that some of the things about to be mentioned in the story are going to be partly fiction. If the boys were to write this story out, then they would use some sort of beginning such as the one in the transcript.
The boys when writing on paper could add more detail to the story as they would have more time to think what they would write unlike speech where it is mostly spontaneous. The piece of writing would be more formal because the child would take more time over grammar and punctuation. The boys who were lower in status in the group may find it easier to write it down because they wouldn’t have any interruptions from Robin so the other two boys would have more control over the outcome of the story.
There would be far more adjectives in the written version because the piece of writing would be more planned and structured elaborating the content. There may be use of longer words in the written version because of more time to think about what they are writing. As the children in the transcript try and invent words that sound grammatically correct, in the written version, they could write down difficult words the way that they are spoken trying to elaborate their writing and making it sound more impressive.
The non-verbal signals such as laughter or hand movements and gestures would have to be replaced by more detail to show what was going on. This would mean controlled use of verbs and connectives to show clearly a movement. There would be no non-fluency features such as pauses or hesitations because when someone writes, they don't tend to write as they speak, although an increase of connectives could show hesitations in thinking what to say next.
As the piece of writing is being recorded down, then there would be less repetition of phrases and words as the child would tend to only record facts once but may and try to describe them in more detail. If the child knew that the piece of writing was to be read by a teacher or an older person, then they would concentrate more on how they would be constructing sentences and might even be constructing more complicated sentences.
