What Is Language Development

10-14-05

2.2.3

1

What is Language Development?

McEwan defines the “meaning pieces” of reading as language, knowledge, and cognitive strategies. She describes the facets of oral language as “(a) the meanings of words (lexicon), (b) how words are put together in utterances to convey a message (semantics and syntax), and (c) how discourse, or conversational interactions of various kinds, is carried out” (2002, p. 68). Consider how much of the code most children have absorbed by the time they enter school.They hear and understand the meaning of thousands of words, although many of them on a superficial level.They use many of those words in appropriate contexts (and, sometimes, in not so appropriate contexts).They speak in increasingly complex phrases and sentences, at first to express their needs and feelings and gradually to interact with adults and their peers.

Capute, Shapiro, and Palmer (1986), in their Clinical Linguistic and Auditory Milestone Scale,include these benchmarks for a 3-year-old:uses pronouns discriminately, uses plurals, forms 3-word sentences, and has a 250-word vocabulary.They will understand a great many more words spoken to them, since young children are more advanced in receptive (hearing) language than in expressive (speaking) language. Children at a very early age learn the basics of their native language, leading some researchers to have believed that language development is essentially complete at this young age (Ely, 2005).Language development is the keystone for the development of reading, writing, and thinking skills.Especially in the early years, when young minds are ripe for language learning, it should be a major focus in the curriculum.

While all preschoolers have moved along the continuum of language development, some have progressed much further and much faster than others. What determines these different rates of language acquisition?A great deal depends upon the richness ofchildren’s literacy environments and supports.Factors that have an impact on language development include the following:

• The amount and nature of the language parents or caregivers use with children

• Feedback adults provide as children experiment with language

• Time spent reading to children and discussing books with them

• Opportunities children have to interact with others in social situations

The learning and literacy achievement gap already exists when children enter school.Preschool teachers know that many students are nowhere near attaining the averages cited in the Capute scale. Other research indicates that the average 4-year-old in a low-income family might have had 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than their middle-class peers have had (Hart & Risley, 1995). Limited listening and speaking vocabularies affect what children are able to do as emergent readers and writers. Because oral language provides the underpinnings for developing literacy skills, teachers must make addressing oral language needs a priority.

The first thing teachers should do is assess where their students are in terms of vocabulary, usage (grammar and sentence structure), communication, and other skills such as attending to and comprehending read-alouds.These skills will not develop in a smooth, linear sequence.Children may make progress in one area and lag behind in another, though many of the skills may develop simultaneously. Oral language, including vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, and discourse, should be assessed in the enrollment process or as soon as possible after children begin school.

Language assessments may be informal with the teacher listening, observing, and documenting speech and listening behaviors.Pinnell (1985) has formulated a system of categorizing language functionsoriginally developed byHalliday (as cited in Pinnell, 1985). The categories still provide a useful framework for teacher observation.The seven categories are instrumental language (expressing wants, needs), regulatory language (controlling others’ behavior), interaction language (establishing and defining social relationships), personal language (expressing individuality), imaginative language, heuristic language (exploring the environment, investigating), and informative language.According to Pinnell (1985),two kinds of assessment can be madeby observing a child’s language:

1. An assessment of an individual child’s competence by looking at the extent to which he or she uses the various functions of language and how effectively.

1. An assessment of the language environment by determining which functions occurred and where and which functions are being neglected.

More formal assessments, such as subtests of the ITBS (Iowa Test of Basic Skills), the PPVT (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition), or BINL (Basic Inventory of Natural Language), may be employed to establish a baseline and/or to document growth over time, but formal assessments are not necessary to identify youngsters who need early intervention.Teachers will likely know them by the end of the first day of school.Though some students may just need time to warm up to the school environment, teachers will spot those who articulate poorly, whose word knowledge is limited, and whose grammar and sentence structure is delayed (e.g., “Me like” rather than “I like”). They are the students who will need all that teachers provide to move their more accomplished peers along the language development continuum--and more.

Poor articulators may have phonological and phonemic awareness problems.They should be referred for screening by the school nurse and speech therapist as soon as possible. Meanwhile, in the classroom the teacher should consistently provide very clear and distinct modeling of pronunciations, calling attention to what she is doing with her lips, tongue, breath, and sound box.(Therapists have a repertoire of strategies to share.)

All students need multiple opportunities daily for hearing texts read aloud, discussing them, and retelling. These texts should represent many genres and should definitely include many works of nonfiction. Reading aloud helps all students to add to their listening and speaking vocabularies, to extend the levels of sophistication of their grammar and sentence structures, to develop their sense of text structures, and to develop and use other comprehension strategies. In the best of situations, those experiences of listening, discussing, and retelling are part of routines at home as well. Teachers should do all they can to enlist parents as partners to read with and to children at home.

When reading aloud does not happen regularly in the home, the gap widens.Teachers need to provide opportunities for those children to hear more texts read aloud, especially nonfiction.(Vicarious experiences cannot make up for all the disadvantaged students have missed, but they can help.) Enlisting volunteers to read to them one-on-one or in small groups or using books on tape are two possible strategies.Some of the texts can be classics such as Goodnight Moon, Caps for Sale, The Napping House, along with nursery rhymes and fairy tales that some of these children may never have heard but that are old friends to their peers, and other texts that provide background for curricular studies.

Collaborative activities with structured opportunities for using discourse can develop social and language skills such as listening attentively, taking turns, responding appropriately, and articulating thinking. While working in small groups with the students who are at-risk, the teacher can provide added modeling and guided practice.Volunteer parents or older students can also facilitate such activities.Volunteers or older children can demonstrate for small groups how to make or do something and then monitor the younger students as they do it. This allows for many opportunities for meaningful dialogue, and it can assist the mentor students just as much or more than it helps the young ones.

Another opportunity for teachers to intervene in language and literacy development is when young children are at play. At the housekeeping center, the teacher can model reading the newspaper, making grocery lists, writing notes, looking up numbers in a phone book--literacy events that the child who is at-risk may never have observed.The teacher can scaffold, enlisting students to play at literacy and then withdraw as students are playing at reading and writing on their own.

An activity-rich curriculum stimulates language learning.Real and vicarious experiences help children to develop concepts and the vocabulary to express them.In addition to those activities that are part of the regular curriculum, extended opportunities before and after school and over summer are important for the disadvantaged.

Some language teaching needs to be very explicit. For instance, teachers need to develop direct and systematic lessons to teach key vocabulary necessary to the understanding of literary and content area curriculum.The students who are at-risk will need more intense instruction, repeated lessons, and a wider range of words. Phonemic awareness, phonics, making words, grammar, and sentence structures are other areas that require direct, systematic teaching.Most of these lessons should be small group mini-lessons based on pre-assessments of the skills to be taught.Teaching children what they already know is as deadly to motivation as is teaching them something fro which they have no background. Differentiated instruction is the key to effectiveness, and assessment is the key to differentiation.

Finally, another assessment all teachers should do periodically has to do with who is doing most of the talking in the classroom.Teachers of young children need to be talking to deliver explicit instruction, to guide student activity, to provide a model for using clear and interesting vocabulary and sentence structures. An occasional audiotape or videotape of the classroom can help teachers to assure that children are also doing lots of talkingboth inguided situations and in their independent play and work activity.

Routman (2003) tells us that children must have a base of language understanding before they can go beyond sounding out words to become truly literate. Language development is an important element of daily instruction across the grades and across the curriculum. McEwan (2002) notes that even beginning in preschool, teachers should share rich literature, teach the rules of discourse (staying on topic, taking turns, giving the listener sufficient information for understanding), teach students how to discuss, question, paraphrase, retell, and summarize, and teach the form, meaning, and use of words, phrases, sentences, and texts.

Language development is critical in early literacy classrooms. Teachers have an opportunity to motivate all children to love words and texts through reading, writing, and discourse so that their language development becomes lifelong. Language development can be maximized by educating parents and enlisting their support for listening, talking, reading, and writing activities in the home.

References

Capute, A.J., Shapiro, B.K., & Palmer, F. B. (1986).The Capute scales: Clinical linguistic and auditory milestone scale. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

Ely, R. (2005). Language and literacy in the school years. In J. B. Gleason (Ed.), The development of language (6th ed., pp. 395-443). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

McEwan, E. K. (2002). Teaching them all to read: Catching the kids who fall through the cracks. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Pinnell, G. S. (1985).Ways to look at the functions of children’s language. In A. Jaggar & M. T. Smith-Burke (Ed.), Observing the language learner (pp. 57-72). Newark,DE: International Reading Association.

Routman, R. (2003). Reading essentials: The specifics you need to teach reading well. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.