Language and Literacy for the Early Years

9780857257413

Sally Neaum

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857257420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Shortlisted for the 2013 Nursery World Awards! This is a focused text on early years? language and literacy for all students studying for degrees and foundation degrees in early childhood, early years and related disciplines and for candidates on EYPS pathways. It discusses language acquisition and development and covers development theory, talking with babies and the factors that affect development. Practical guidance on how to support children?s language acquisition through rhymes, songs, story books and storytelling helps students see how theory links to practice. The text also examines the question ?what comes before phonics?? and includes interactive activities and theory focus features.

About the Early Childhood Studies Series

This series has been designed to support students of Early Years, Early Childhood Studies and related disciplines in popular modules of their course. Each text takes a focused look at a specific topic and approaches it in an accessible and user-friendly way. Features have been developed to help readers engage with the text and understand the subject from a number of different viewpoints. Activities pose questions to prompt thought and discussion and ?Theory Focus? boxes examine essential theory close-up for better understanding. This series is also applicable to EYPS candidates on all pathways.

Other titles in the series include Early Childhood Studies, Childhood in Society for Early Childhood Studies, Child Development for Early Childhood Studies and Exploring Play for Early Childhood Studies.

Part 1

Language acquisition

1	An introduction to language acquisition

This chapter enables you to understand:

• why the acquisition and development of language is important;
• ways in which we understand children’s language acquisition, as both a positivist development theory and a socio-cultural process.

The importance of language acquisition

Language acquisition and development refers to learning spoken language. Within the first few years of life human beings move from being only able to cry and make involuntary sounds to being able to communicate with others using a complex language system. This ability to acquire and use language is vital to our participation in society. Language can be spoken, heard, read, written or signed. Language enables us to communicate with others and it enables us to think and learn.

Spoken language enables us to form and maintain relationships with other people and to participate in the social world. It is what we use to engage with others in all spheres of life.

Spoken language is the precursor to literacy skills. In our highly literate society children need to become literate; that is to read and write. Literacy enables full participation in society. It enables us to communicate with others in a variety of different ways across time and space.

Language is also the pre-eminent tool for thinking. It is a sophisticated and flexible way to take in information and to process and store all that we know. Language enables us to hold and manipulate knowledge and concepts beyond our direct experiences and so be flexible and creative in how we use and develop knowledge.

ACTIVITY 1

As you work through this activity try to observe your thought processes.

1. Think of a book, a cup, a ball.
   How did you recall these things? What was ‘in your head’? An image? A word?
2. Think of home, friendship, beauty.
   How did you recall these things? An image? Words?
3. Think of justice, love, equality.
   How did you recall these things? How important was language to your recall of these concepts?

• Look carefully at the three tasks above. Notice how important language is in understanding, processing and storing some concepts.
• What does this tell you about the importance of language acquisition and development?

Language also enables us to go beyond our own experiences. Through language we can enter the experiences of others; language as talk and discussion, as stories, poems and plays and as commentary, gives us access to the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of other people across time and space. Language also allows us to create and communicate imagined people, places and worlds.

ACTIVITY 2

Read the following extracts. Notice how, through words, you can enter into places beyond your experience, enter into other people’s thoughts and perceptions and visualise imagined worlds.

THE KITE RIDER

Further along the harbour wall, a great commotion started up, as a ship, newly arrived from the South, disembarked its passengers: a travelling circus. For the first time in his life, Haoyou saw elephants, ponderously picking their way across the gangplank, while tumblers somersaulted off the ship’s rail and onto the dockside. There were acrobats in jade-green, close-fitting costumes, twirling banners of green and red, and jugglers and stilt-walkers, and a man laden from head to foot with noisy bird cages.

McCaughrean, G (2007)

CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yeats, WB (1899/2009)

THE WIND SINGER

Inside there was a wide open space, completely full of muddy babies. There were tiny ones lying on mats and crawling ones scurrying about like small dogs, and toddling ones toppling into each other, and wailing ones, and ones that ran about yelling at the top of their voices. They were all completely naked, though of course also completely coated in mud. And they seemed to be having the time of their lives. They were forever colliding and trampling on each other in the most chaotic way, but somehow none of them ever came to any harm, or even made much complaint. They just bounced up again and got on with their infant concerns. In the midst of this writhing mass of babies there sat a number of very fat old ladies. Unlike the children they remained motionless, like mountain islands in a seething sea.

Nicholson, W (2000)

Language and thinking

The relationship between language and thinking is one articulated by a number of theorists. However, while theorists may agree with the fundamental point that there is a link between language and thought, they differ in their understanding of the nature and direction of this relationship.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language that we speak dominates and shapes our perception of reality. The words that we have to articulate the knowledge and concepts within a society determine what it is possible to know and understand within a given society. This is referred to as linguistic determinism: it assumes that language determines thinking.

In contrast, Piaget articulates a relationship in which thought exists before language and it is thought that provides the structure for language. Piaget argues that activity creates mental structures, known as schemas, and it is this cognitive structure that makes language possible and necessary. So, for Piaget, thought in its earliest stages, determines language.

Vygotsky also considered the relationship between language and thought. He theorised that thought and language are powerful but independent elements in young children’s development. He proposed that thought and language had different routes; the earliest thinking is action based, for example reaching for toys or posting shapes, and the earliest language is sounds that have the function of maintaining the attention of others but are not speech, for example coos, gurgles, giggles and cries. When this pre-verbal thought and pre-cognitive speech have reached a certain level of development they come together to form verbal thinking. This occurs at approximately two years of age (Whitehead, 2010). When young children’s thoughts can be verbalised it is evident in their development as egocentric speech. Vygotsky proposed that children’s egocentric speech (talking out loud to themselves about the processes that they are engaged in) is self directing; it is literally thinking out loud. He theorised that this talking through what they are doing as they engage in activities enables children to plan, order and organise their thinking and eventually this speech is internalised and becomes what we know as thinking: silent internal contemplation.

Learning language

Babies and young children have to acquire language; they have to learn and develop their language skill, first in the form of listening and speaking (or signing) then later reading and writing. David Crystal (1997) describes language acquisition as ‘Climbing the Language Mountain’. He observes that in order to produce speech and communicate with others, a young child speaking English will need to combine phonemes into syllables, syllables into phrases, clauses, sentences and dialogue, and construct this according to the grammatical rules that govern the English language. They will need a wide range of vocabulary and be aware of its appropriate usage. They will have to have knowledge of appropriate pitch, loudness, speed and tone of voice (prosody) and the social rules that govern conversation. Children who are growing up bilingual or multilingual will need to acquire this range of knowledge and skill for each of the languages spoken. Despite the seeming complexity of this process most children, by the time they enter school, will have a good grasp of the language, or languages, that they have been exposed to within their community. They will be able to use language for a variety of purposes, employing a range of vocabulary and with a high level of grammatical correctness. This acquisition of spoken language will have taken place with apparent ease, with very little direct instruction and in a relatively short period of time. How does this happen?

DEFINITION

Grammar: the rules governing the use of a language.

Understanding language learning within child development

Our understanding of how children learn language is part of wider understandings about children and childhood. From the eighteenth century onwards there were profound political, economic, technological, social and cultural changes in societies throughout Europe. Societies were changing from predominantly rural, agricultural-based societies to ones based on industrial capitalism. The move was strongly influenced by advances in science and technology. These advances precipitated a strong belief in the power of the scientific and technological as a way to understand and control the world, including an aspiration to understand and mould our own species: human beings. Within this context, encouraged by the work of Charles Darwin, emerged the Child Study Movement. The aim was to highlight the role of the biological processes in human development. The approach was scientific: the belief in, and use of, testing, observation and experimentation to discover universal laws expressed as theory. The movement demonstrated, and popularised, the view that children’s conception and mental processes differed from those of adults. The development of children, therefore, became an area for scientific study and understanding, the outcomes of which, it was hoped, would identify focused interventions that would shape and mould children’s lives.

Paediatric medicine and the child psychology movement

Prout (2005) identifies two important disciplines that strongly influenced the Child Study Movement and focused attention on biological aspects of being a child: the development of the science of paediatric medicine and the child psychology movement.

Paediatric medicine
The development of the discipline of paediatric medicine was an important part of the rise of the scientific study of children. The understanding of childhood disease as a separate branch of medicine became formalised in 1901 by the foundation of the Society for the Study of Diseases of Children. A medical model of children and childhood, in which children’s development can be measured, monitored and managed, thus became part of how children’s development, including language learning, was understood.

Child psychology
Alongside paediatrics a discipline emerging from the Child Study Movement was the development of child psychology. Prout (2005) argues that there were multiple strands of research and investigation that came together to support the understanding of children and their development, namely the work of Skinner on behaviourism, Bowlby’s work on attachment, Freud and psychoanalysis, the work of Piaget and the cognitive psychology movement, and an emerging understanding of language development.

These psychological understandings came together to create a discipline of child psychology. In this eme...