In Memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar: Introduction to the Special Issues on “Children’s Language and Communicative Knowledge”

This paper is an outline of Grace Wales Shugar’s research approach and some of her main theses in the field of language acquisition and children’s discourse. Her idea of dual agentivity of adult-child interaction shows how to best support children’s communicative skills: It is only when children can show what they know in their own way, and when that child knowledge is received and used in a discourse process, that we can expect a child’s inner motivation to acquire knowledge from others to be maintained and to become a driving force of the child’s further development (Shugar, 1995, p. 233).