Article Evaluation
The article Baby sing language is not well rated, it has a rating of C-class and it is definitely a work in progress. At the talk section there are many claims and errors founded for its improvement, for example there were suggestions of the article being too scholarly and ad like in some sense.
Something that was brought to my attention was at the pros and cons part of the article on suggested benefits where it states that “They will not however, during infancy, babble without making a gesture”[1] Either that reference is worded incorrect and it is made unclear on what it is trying to convey, or it is just plain wrong since babies in actuality begin babbling at the age of 6 months or even 4 months in addition to even comprehending a few words, and it was stated above in the article that babies start to gesture between the age of 9 and 12 months. Which means that babies begin to speak before using hand gestures.
In general there is not a lot of information about the way babies communicate and it lacks basic information about the development of a baby’s speech and understanding as well as perhaps a different approach. All in all parts of the article, were if not difficult to follow, underrepresented.
The article is well cited and appears to support most of the claims but the credibility of the cites can be challenged seeing that some of the references come from websites and articles and can be thought as outdated, since some of them date back to 1978, 1988 and 1999.
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Article Evaluation 2
The article speech community has a rating of C and there is not a lot of information on the talk section of how to improve it, however, the way it was written is a bit confusing and not very informative. The impression of the article seems to be focused more as to define speech community rather discuss the different theories that surround speech community. Also, the section where it says "History of definitions" it would make more sense if it were just history of the speech community. The structure of the article seems defected to our understanding of the subject.
A few correction or parts to perhaps include in the article is in the section of history of definitions there is no mention of the famous linguist Saussure who even though focused on the proficiency of language he asserted: “in order to have language, there must be a community of speakers”[2](Ahearn, 103-104). In addition, it is believed that “The concept of speech community, while initially defined by linguists as de Saussure (1916) and Leonard Bloomfield (1933) in the first part of the twentieth century, began to be more widely used and more carefully defined in the 1960’s and 1970s”. (Ahearn, 105). Lastly, there is also no mention of Hymes and his textbook: Foundation in Sociolinguistics and his ideas upon speech community, for example, Hymes mentions, “the natural unit for sociolinguistic taxonomy (and description), however, is not the language but the speech community” (Ahearn, 105). So there is clearly a fair amount of information missing about speech communities.
On another note community of practice was greatly influenced by speech community and speech community was not necessarily cast aside, moreover there have been other” alternative terms, such as linguistic community, speech area, speech network” (Ahearn).
- ^ "Baby sign language". Wikipedia. 2017-08-19.
- ^ Ahearn, Laura M (2012). Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-40512441-6.