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1
Early Language Development
This chapter focuses on why language is so crucial in young childrenās development. Effective language use gives babies and children power to have a say in what they want and need. To encourage childrenās language development, early years practitioners need to optimise their speaking and listening opportunities through everyday conversation and practical activities. Modelling language through meaningful communication is the key. This chapter offers knowledge and understanding of how, why and what to promote for optimum language learning situations and begins to look at the following three vital questions:
- Why is language crucial to young childrenās development?
- Why is it important to build a relationship with the parents?
- How and why is it useful to analyse young childrenās language.
Language is crucial to young childrenās development; it is the essential key for learning, for communicating and building relationships with others as well as for enabling children to make sense of the world around them. Your role in developing and encouraging language acquisition in children is therefore of the utmost importance. However, it is not solely the province of those working with young children, as it is also a concern of parents, carers, families and even policymakers. There is a need for practitioners to disseminate knowledge and good practice to these stakeholders. Those educating young children should be well qualified, but also knowledgeable and well informed about their role. The ability to reflect on and evaluate your professional role and its practical application when working with young children is fundamental. You need to develop and establish an occupational knowledge base that accounts for both professional and practical knowledge. Knowledge and articulation about how young children acquire language and develop into competent thinkers and language users is key to good practice.
Key Elements in Effective Practice
The Key Elements of Effective Practice (KEEP) (DfES 2005) underpin the professional standards for early years practitioners. These competencies are acquired through a combination of skill and knowledge gained through education, training and practical experience. Practitioners need to develop, demonstrate and continuously improve their:
- relationships with both children and adults
- understanding of the individual and diverse ways that children learn and develop
- knowledge and understanding in order to actively support and extend childrenās learning in and across all areas and aspects of learning and development
- practice in meeting all childrenās needs, learning styles and interests
- work with parents, carers and the wider community
- work with other professionals within and beyond the setting.
These key elements will permeate this book through concentrating on communication, language and literacy.
An exciting journey
Young childrenās early years education should be a quality experience for all, be it in a crĆØche, playgroup, childrenās centre, nursery or reception class in a school, special educational needs (SEN) setting or with a childminder. The provision of a unified curriculum and equity of experience aims to meet the needs of parents and children in whichever setting they choose. The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) brings together the Birth to Three Matters framework, the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (CGFS) and the National Standards for under-8s Day Care and Childminding in a āsingle quality frameworkā for children from birth to the end of the school reception year (DfES, 2007a). Each child and family are seen as unique, with differing needs and concerns. These are identified in the four key themes: A Unique Child; Empowering Relationships; Enabling Environments; Holistic Learning and Developments. The themes are linked to a key principle, each of which has four commitments. Childrenās development is presented through six phases. These overlap and acknowledge that there can be big differences between the development of children of similar ages (DfES, 2007a). Practitioners plan to enable children to achieve the statutory early learning goals (ELGs) in six areas of learning by the end of the reception year:
- Personal, social and emotional development
- Communication, language and literacy
- Problem solving, reasoning and numeracy
- Knowledge and understanding of the world
- Physical development
- Creative development
Language and communication contributes to all six areas and are key to learning and understanding. The EYFS stresses the importance of providing opportunities for children to communicate thoughts, ideas and feelings, and to build up relationships with practitioners and each other. It also affirms the importance of promoting positive relationships with parents and families. Key workers have an important role in establishing these and ensuring children feel safe, confident and independent. Promoting anti-discriminatory practice is also crucial and practitioners must meet childrenās needs in terms of ethnicity, culture, religion, home language, family background, special educational needs, disability, gender and ability. We will discuss these issues further in later chapters.
Children learn most effectively through being involved in rich experiences and practical activities promoted through play. Adults need to join in this play, both talking with and listening to the children, taking into account their interests and previous experiences. Children and their families should be involved in these processes. Children need confidence and opportunity to utilise their abilities in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes. As a practitioner you can record observations of childrenās play, learning and language achievements to determine if your provision is high-quality.
How do young children acquire their language? Studying and promoting young childrenās language development can be an exciting journey. Parents often amuse friends and family by relaying what their children say, yet how do children learn to make these amusing comments, how do they learn to communicate?
There have been several theories about how young children acquire language, but no one perspective on language acquisition tells the whole story. Why not read further about these perspectives in Appendix 1? Each emphasises one aspect or another and there is still a great deal to learn about how it happens and why. We feel the following ideas are the most important for practitioners. Young children acquire language through significant others by interaction in their immediate environment, through responding to sounds, sentences and experiences expressed by their parents, family and other carers. They begin by absorbing, listening and then imitating and practising. Their responses are reinforced by these significant others and patterns begin to emerge, even for the babies, as they try so hard to make sense of what is happening around them. Gradually they learn to reproduce sounds and words and to establish an understanding of how language works, the structure and grammatical sense of putting these sounds and words together. It is generally held that children have an inbuilt language acquisition device (LAD) and/or a language acquisition support system (LASS) that enables this to occur.
Given minimum exposure to language, every child will acquire a sophisticated symbol system to serve its communicative needs. Children gain an understanding about their own particular language and culture, and also knowledge and comprehension of the world around them. Some children will acquire more than one language, sometimes two or three at the same time, sometimes one after another. And among children as a whole, there will be an infinite variety of patterns of language use. Each new experience, whether as children (or adults), extends language skills in some way. Each new creation ā a new word, a new way of expressing something ā extends the system for the generations that follow. In turn, old ways are replaced with new and so it goes on ad infinitum. Such is the power that language offers to children, and such is the power they have over it.
Throughout the book you will glimpse scenarios and case study examples from young children growing up in a variety of linguistic and socio-cultural experiences, in worlds where their first language may not be the national language, in families that are promoting their heritag...
