Learning to Talk

The many contexts of children's language development

Gee Macrory

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781529730067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Inklusive Bildung

There is a pressing need for new teachers to understand the wider context of language development and to know how best to support children in learning to talk. This accessible text introducesyou to the numerous contexts of language development. Ithelps youunderstand the many ways in which children acquire language skills. Importantly, it provides a breadth of learning about language not offered by other texts exploring typical language development, atypical language development and learning more than one language. The book alsoexplores the current literature and research on language development for primary aged children, supporting trainee teachers with their academic study.

Part I Introductory concepts

1 Learning to talk: how do they do it?

Introduction

Students of child development cannot fail to observe the remarkable progress that human infants make from the moment they are born. By the time they are two years old, generally speaking, they can boast of many accomplishments, including learning to sit, stand and walk, eat food, observe and engage with the world around them, and of course, learning how to talk. Consider this exchange between a mother and child, aged just two:

Mother: Tell Daddy we’re playing in the sandpit.

Child: Look, Daddy, I’m playing in the sandpit.

At first glance, this may not seem particularly remarkable. But what has had to happen here for this exchange to be successful? First of all, the child has to discriminate between the different sounds of the language to understand the words that are being produced; she has to map the language onto concepts such ‘play’ and ‘sandpit’; and she has to understand that she is being asked to relay this information to a third person. What she is able to do is attract her father’s attention by use of the word ‘look’, and change the ‘we’re playing’ to ‘I’m playing’, suggesting some kind of understanding (albeit unconscious) of how language has to be manipulated in order to convey meaning. On this occasion, of course, the words came out just right. However, any interaction with young children quickly reveals the myriad utterances that do not in fact come out just right! In the same week, this child also produced:

1. ‘that’s my one toe’;
2. ‘my come’;
3. ‘I’m wash my hands’;
4. ‘no roll it’;
5. ‘is daddy make the tea?’;
6. ‘daddy clean soap face’.

We typically find such utterances endearing and, at times, amusing. But they tell us much about the challenges that language – in this case, English – presents to the child seeking to master it. As adults, we use language with such facility that many of us are unaware of the sheer complexity of it. Furthermore, literacy is hugely influential in telling us where the word boundaries are, such that it is easy to forget that the young child has no such advantage and has the considerable task of figuring out what the words are from the stream of speech. The nearest most adults come to this is listening to people talking in a language they do not speak at all. Taking the examples above, we can of course only speculate about what is going on. With any of the examples shown, it is possible that all or some of each utterance is heard as one item. For example, ‘my one’ or ‘roll it’ may be perceived as one ‘word’ or item. The examples illustrate some of the things that have to be learned.

First, in example 1, we cannot have ‘one’ and ‘toe’ – one word has to be substituted for the other. However, somehow the child has to work out that ‘my’ and ‘one’ are separate words that can be used in different combinations. Yet, we could hypothesise that this has begun to happen as the child produces ‘my come’ (example 2), as this is unlikely to be something she has heard. The frequency of ‘my’ in the input (what the child hears) may be instrumental in what is available to her when she attempts to communicate. Learning that we say ‘my’ to refer to something we possess, but ‘I’ before a verb is a tricky business. In example 3, we can see that, in English, ‘-ing’ is required as we can have ‘I wash’ but after ‘I’m’ we need ‘washing’. The rules of negation in English are complex, so it is little wonder that in example 4 the child opts for a ‘no’ at the beginning of the utterance! Equally, the rules that govern questions in English are also highly complicated, but of course many questions do indeed start with ‘is’ so example 5 appears to be a rather sensible move on the part of a two-year-old! In fact, this particular two-year-old produced many questions starting with ‘is’. I am not, of course, suggesting any conscious strategy on the part of the child, but pointing to one of the most commonly observed features of child language, namely the way in which they produce utterances that they clearly have not heard. This suggests some creativity at work in their attempts to communicate. Finally, in example 6, the utterance ‘daddy clean soap face’ is quite typical of the way in which young children marshal the language they have in pursuit of conveying meaning.

This brief look at a two-year-old needs also to be considered within the context of where she has come from and where she is travelling to. Only ten months earlier, at the age of fourteen months, the same child had a repertoire of ten items that could be described as a ‘word’. Scroll forward three years or so and the utterances are noticeably more sophisticated, such as ‘I want to find a clean picture that hasn’t been coloured in yet’ and ‘because we should have been having grown up dinner tonight, can I stay up late?’ Yet, as we shall see in later chapters, there is still much to learn, as illustrated by such utterances as ‘that’s what I’ve been teached, not to fall it out’ and ‘this is uncomfortabling me’.

So far, I have hinted at a number of issues that are highly pertinent to the study of child language development. One is the task facing the child who has to somehow decipher the stream of speech, and understand what she is hearing, which perhaps raises the question as to what her interlocutors are doing that might facilitate this. Another issue which I have alluded to is the creativity of children, who regularly produce utterances that they clearly have not heard in the input. The other issue that has been raised by the preceding section is that of progress and development over time. A pressing concern, particularly among early years’ practitioners, is knowing what is to be expected and when.

In the UK, recent reports have alerted practitioners to possible problems, indicating that children are arriving at school without age-appropriate language skills. The Bercow Report of 2008 reminded us that communication is a fundamental human right and a key life skill, and stated that approximately 50 per cent of children and young people in some socio-economically disadvantaged populations have speech and language skills that are significantly lower than those of other children of the same age. Furthermore, approximately 7 per cent of five year olds entering school in England – nearly 40,000 children in 2007 – had significant difficulties with speech and/or language (Bercow, 2008: 13–14).

In the same year, the Smith report (Gross, 2008) stressed the importance of getting in early. Gross argued for intervention with four- to eight-year-olds, suggesting that:

remedial action even at eight, nine or 10 is too late – given that a child failing to achieve the nationally expected standard at age seven in reading, writing and maths has an almost zero chance of later getting five good GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education, taken at age 16 in the UK), including English and maths, compared with a 46% chance for a seven-year-old achieving the standard in all three areas and 10% for one achieving it in just one area.

(2008: 18)

This is reiterated by a recent report from the charity Save the Children (2018), arguing that the most important factor in reaching the expected levels in English and Mathematics at seven was children’s language skills at age five, which they found to be greater than the link to poverty or poor parental education. Compared with their peers, children who struggled with language skills at age five were significantly less likely to reach the expected standards in English and Mathematics, regardless of family background, while children who struggled with language skills at age five scored on average 34 per cent worse in English and 26 per cent worse in Mathematics at age seven than children who had been at the expected level at age five. A Newcastle University report for the Early Intervention Foundation (Law et al., 2017), however, reports that 5–8 per cent of all children in England and Wales are likely to have language difficulties, but that children from socially disadvantaged families are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with a language problem. They note that, in the UK, approximately 85,000–90,000 children between the ages of two and six are referred to speech and language therapists each year, and 18–31 per cent of children aged 19–21 months living in disadvantaged communities have been found to have language delay that warrants referral for specialist assessment (Law et al., 2017: 7).

Roulstone et al. (2011) stress the vital importance of the first 24 months; their findings suggested that children’s understanding and use of vocabulary and two–three word utterances at 24 months was very strongly associated with their school readiness at age four to five, even when adjusted for social class. They found a strong relationship between the elements of the child’s communication environment (such as the number of books available) and their ability to use words at 24 months. A follow-up report in 2018 to the 2008 Bercow Report suggested that more than 10 per cent of all children and young people, over 1.4 million in the UK, have long-term speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) which create barriers to communication or learning in everyday life: of these, 7.6 per cent have developmental language disorder and 2.3 per cent have language disorders associated with another condition such as autism or hearing impairment. SLCN includes conditions such as speech difficulties, stammering and many others. The report also affirms the crucial role of communication, but notes that there is insufficient awareness of children and young people’s speech, and that there is far too much variation in the support children and young people receive for their SLCN. Furthermore, it emphasises how important it is that people working with children and young people with SLCN must have the s...