Chapter 10 - One Career, Two Career Narratives

Summary

My work has been primarily located in two fields, both characterized by heated disagreements when I entered them. In child language research the nativist view was the default position in the late 1960s and through the next couple of decades. But in 1967 I studied adult input to children, in service of understanding its contributions to language acquisition. By the 2020s the notion that certain features of adult-child interaction are instrumental in language development has been robustly supported by multiple lines of work. I first got involved in thinking about literacy development in the mid-1990s during a time of conflict between what was then framed as “phonics” versus “whole language.” That conflict resurfaces with depressing regularity and is currently characterized as a struggle to implement the “science of reading.” The complexities in the reading domain are far greater than in language acquisition because of the larger role of educational publishers and school administrators in determining a course of action.