How to Provide Language Enrichment to Children

First of all, language stimulation should begin very early: by just three years of age, children are already headed down vastly different paths of verbal achievement as a result of their cumulative experience with language. Ideally, language stimulation should begin at birth, since we know that newborns' brains are already attuned to human speech and immediately start learning the sounds of their mother tongue. In fact. Fowler's group found that babies who entered their program between six and eight months of age were not as successful as those who began at the earliest age, three months, so clearly earlier is better.

Secondly, the quantity of language is critical: the more words a child hears, the larger her vocabulary will be, and the faster it will continue to grow. But it cannot be overemphasized that this quantity means the number of words addressed to the child. Mothers aren't doing their kids any favors by talking on the phone all day; day-care workers don't help by conversing only with other workers; nor is television an adequate way to increase young children's language exposure. (Indeed, at one point deaf parents were advised to leave the TV on for their hearing babies, but it never succeeded in teaching them spoken language.) A baby can begin to make sense of language only when it refers to something she can directly relate to. Parents and other caregivers should thus talk frequently to their babies and try, whenever possible, to focus on the here and now: pointing out and labeling the objects, people. and events in their immediate environment, especially the babies' own actions, feelings, and attempts at speech.

Which brings us to the quality of language to which a child is exposed. Language addressed to young children needs to be simple, clear, and positive in tone in order to be of maximum value. Fortunately, most caregivers already use a special style when speaking to infants and young children. As noted in Chapter lo, babies clearly prefer the higher pitch, highly intonated style, and slower pace of "motherese," and recent evidence suggests that it even helps them in the earliest stages of phoneme-learning. But it's important to avoid the kind of muddled baby-talk that tums a sentence like "Is she the cutest lit¬ tie baby in the world?" into "Uz see da cooest wiwo baby inna wowud?" Care¬ givers should try to enunciate clearly when speaking to babies and young children, giving them the cleanest, simplest model of speech possible.

Of course, it's easy to say that speech should be at a level your child can understand, but it's not always easy to figure out what that level is. For instance, older babies understand much more than they can say, so you need not limit your speech to single syllables or words. On the other hand, there's evidence that even Sesame Street does more harm than good for children under eighteen months, probably because it comes at the expense of more direct, positive parental interaction. (But it is great for preschoolers.) At every age, parents need to seek out that happy medium of speaking to their child in a way that is largely within his reach of understanding but also stretches him just a bit beyond it.

Notes:

Begin stimulating the child early, provide as much quantity of language stimulation as possible, and pay attention to the quality of language, making it age-appropriate and clearly enunciated.

Folksonomies: grammar education language child development

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 What's Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Eliot , Lise (2000-10-03), What's Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life, Bantam, Retrieved on 2011-07-18
Folksonomies: parenting babies development infants physiology


Schemas

14 JUN 2011

 Raising Well-Adjusted Children

Memes on parenting and activities to encourage intelligence and good behavior in children.
Folksonomies: parenting child rearing
Folksonomies: parenting child rearing
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