Refining my coursework

Upon further research in the area of my coursework investigation, particularly with regards to Piaget's theory of linguistic development I have decided to adjust the scope of my investigation. Where previously I had decided to look at children from ages 4-11, I now intend to widen it to include children up to 16 years old. This is because at 11 years old, many key CLA theories would suggest that the child has still yet to master the nuances of language, meaning that it may be possible to observe further lexical development across that age range, painting a more complete picture using the data collected. Finally, the somewhat abstract nature of the image I selected for the descriptive task means that there is potential for a huge difference in the way a young child would describe it than an older teen. For example, a child might say what they see (a man, a forest, a girl), but a teen might be able to infer more detailed information or use alternative synonyms (a prince, a grove, a maiden)

I also found it very interesting to find that supposedly some children never leave the third stage of Jean Piaget's theory, the 'concrete operational stage'. I have been faced with many teens and adults who seemed barely literate in even their first language, and I would be interested to see if I could find some of these people and see if the data supports this fact or not.

I also think that Jean Aitchison's theories on CLA could bear relevance as well, particularly the network building stage. I am interested to see how likely children over different ages are to describe how elements of the picture relate to each other, for example, upon seeing that there is a sentient tree man, fairies, and other seemingly magical sprites and critters, someone might determine what they see as an 'enchanted forest' or 'magical grove', or perhaps infer from that fantasy setting that the tree man is an 'ent' or 'treant', that the man is a 'prince' or 'adventurer', that the woman is a 'maiden', or a 'princess'. They may even infer some kind of relationship between the two, perhaps they are 'lovers' or 'king and queen'. Since the image gives no outside context, except that which one can infer from common fantasy tropes and cliches, I believe there will be a good deal of varied language used by all children, but that some key themes may crop up again and again.