[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMzwAEI56-4[/youtube]

Turns out, you don’t even need words for effective oral communication…just the ability to participate in a particular speech genre. Since I can’t stop watching this video, I am featuring it, and a couple of other babies, here in my first blog post. Mini Preacher (MP) is interesting on a number of levels, most immediately though in terms of speech genre (see Bakhtin). In the absence of language, an analysis of MP’s sermon is in large part necessarily an analysis of genre. Did you see how Mini Preacher (MP) used his chubby arms to sum up his toddler point? MP’s performance makes explicit the dialogic and collaborative nature of audience, both real and imagined (“addressivity”). The audience’s applause, cheers, and calls to “preach on!” are integral to his speech. He doesn’t need actual words to whip the house into a frenzy as the audience fills them in for him, closing his presentation with “in the name of Jesus.”

As audience for BPL groups, we are also dialogic partners,  interlocutors in the Bahktinian sense. I am a stand in for faculty and class mates, who are themselves stand in’s for the board of investors out in the “real world.” As a new Fellow working with BPL courses, about to run the gauntlet of my first rehearsal season (my first 2 are scheduled for today in fact), the MP video also asks me to consider the business speech genre in my own (non-evaluative) assessments of student group presentations. The basic characteristics of evangelist speech are clear and recognizable in MP’s performance, even if not explicitly catalogued here. What though are the specific speech genres of the business world and transactions? Are they captured in the cool confidence and rational assertiveness of the E-trade baby? Are they catalogued somewhere? And if so, would such genre characteristics prove useful standards to judge the BPL presentations by?

As a parent I am interested in oral communication and social development. Specifically the raced/classed/gendered ways in which I/we consciously and unconsciously facilitate the social and dialogical process that consciousness develops from. Babies are also our mirrors. Children tell us a lot about our specific language-mediated proclivities, from Mini Preacher’s screaming exertions, to my toddler’s constant asking of questions he already knows the answer to (clearly a parenting pedagogy of mine in need of revision!). Thus an analysis of infant (and student) speech is also an analysis of self (and of discipline).

As a social psychologist, I am reminded of the vast literature on persuasion that exists (under the umbrella of social influence) that could usefully be applied to the prepping of oral presentations.

As all three, I am looking forward to more opportunities to consider the cute side of language and social development.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vupEpNjCuY[/youtube]