ABSTRACT
The independent variables of linguistic medium and conceptual domain test were systematically varied as orthogonal factors, and the dependent variable was the degree of communicative competence displayed by the child. The social framework in which the people elicited the children’s speech was too asymmetrical to be truly representative of general language usage in urban Zambia. Social encounters normally generate a context out of interaction, and the framework of discourse is negotiated between the participants. But even in the constrained setting, the people were able to document a high degree of flexibility in the strategies of communication adopted by the children when dealing with linguistic forms over which their control was incomplete. The design of an adequate school curriculum for supporting and extending the communicative competence of children growing up in a multilingual society continues to pose a significant challenge for applied sociolinguistic research.
