| Sumario: | The paper aims to understand how a person's previous experience (of which his social class is simply a rough and composite index) interacts with factors in the momentary situation to affect his behavior. At any one moment, a child decides to speak or be silent, to adopt communicative intent a or communicative intent b, to express idea x or idea y, in form 1 or form 2. The options the child selects will be a function of characteristics of the situation as he perceives it on the basis of his past experience. The authors observed that a particular child in a particular situation either makes or fails to make a particular utterance. Traditionally, that utterance is related only to characteristics of the child, such as his social class, while ignoring characteristics of the situation. The next section is a survey of research on child language which includes aspects of the speech situation as independent variables, regardless of the social class of the subjects. The purpose is to illustrate the idea of situational relativity and to suggest significant variables which should be explored more systematically. While the research is all about monolingual children, the notion of a diversified speech repertoire applies even more obviously to bilinguals. The final section of the paper raises questions about other necessary ingredients of a theory of oral language education.
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