| At present, only a limited understanding of the full range of children's communicative and conceptual competence exists because most data are derived from teacher reports and test results. More extensive observation of children's language in the classroom, using ethnographic methods, is needed to reveal competencies not previously identified. To facilitate the identification of these competencies, a setting in which children's language production can be monitored is essential.;Competencies identified by area included kindergarteners' sociolinguistic competence in awareness of regularities of classroom speech, and their facility in varying the components of ways of speaking; linguistic competence in demanding and providing clarification of lexical and semantic terms; social competence in the use of knowledge of the roles and rules of society for the integration of personal and group requirements; and cognitive competence in the application of high levels of mental activity in domains of personal interest and for problem solving in interaction.;The students lacked competence with patterns of speech particular to schooling. Their lack of competence with the morphological system did not affect communication and was not a factor in determining linguistic competence.;In all areas, the children were not just naive recipients of new school knowledge but active processors of that material. Suggestions for further research and for teachers include the use of broader frameworks for observation to capture or develop sensitivity to the richness, complexity, and variety of children's competencies in school.;In this investigation, entire sessions of a middle-class public kindergarten were observed, audio-taped, analyzed, and reported. Transcriptions were repeatedly reviewed for emergent categories. The category most revealing of communicative and conceptual competence, namely, children's language for problem solving, was used for analysis. The problems and competencies were found to be distributed among the sociolinguistic, linguistic, social, and cognitive areas. For the sociolinguistic area, Hymes's (1972) framework was used. Through this analysis, a conflict between the children's and the teacher's communicative goals was identified. In the cognitive area, Piaget's approach to determining competence could not be used because there were so few diagnostic examples produced spontaneously by the children. Instead, Hughes's (1967) hierarchy of mental activity was used. |
