Sunday, June 10, 2012

Language Development

Today’s topic in the course was language development. Oral language can defined as a socially shared code, or conventional system, that represents ideas through the use of arbitrary symbols and rules that govern combinations of these symbols. From the child development course, I have learned that oral language is crucial in all aspects of life but we are not aware of this fact and we simply overlook oral language. Chomsky claims that children learn an intricate grammatical system almost entirely on their own. All their need is to hear a language spoken, and they will master it. His words also support why most schools emphasize academic skills and not consider oral language as a part of the academic curriculum. Similarly, many teachers believe that most children develop language skills naturally and do not require remediation. I believe that not guiding children to develop their language cause them to have problems related with language in the future such as not speaking well, not understanding grammar of spoken language and fluency problems in reading.
I think that the state of oral language is like a vicious cycle. Children have oral language problems, but parents and children are unaware so schools neglect it. Then, teachers overlook and children continue to have oral language problems. Since schools are interested in academic skills, they don’t mention about oral language skills. However, these skills form the basis of academic skills. Additionally, oral language supports for learning other subject areas such as reading, writing, and content areas. To be able to read questions and answer them (that is, in order to be successful academically), children need to have oral language skills. Communicating with friends about homework, understanding teacher’s verbal directions during exams or worksheets, listening to teacher’s instruction on a topic all require oral language skills. By considering the importance of oral language, activities which can develop these skills should be integrated into the curriculum.
When we consider teachers, they can use strategies for teaching oral language skills. For example, they can use imitations for proper use of language by providing a sentence and asking the child to repeat it. Or they can teach language by forming small groups and connecting interactions between peers about correct use of language. Moreover, they can present games and activities in order to make students enjoy learning oral language. In order to enhance students’ receptive skills (an understanding or comprehension of spoken words) as a part of oral language, teachers can read a story and ask students to predict the end of the story or they can play listening games like “Simon Says”. Similarly, parents can develop their children’s language. In general, it is believed that normal children would have great difficulty learning language on the basis of parental conditioning, because parents are such poor language teachers. However, I don’t agree with this belief. Although some parents’ speech is full of grammatical errors, they mainly tend to speak with their children in a very simple, clear, and grammatical fashion. Also, speaking with children increases their vocabulary. Similarly, Hart and Risley (2003) found when parents talk a great deal to their babies and toddlers, the parents can boost their children’s vocabularies at age 3 years. These gains, in turn, are associated with elevated IQ and reading scores in elementary school.
In conclusion, to be able to enhance oral language skills, teachers should give opportunities students to practice what they have been learned about oral language. Parents should also do more practice with their children in a simple and clear way. Schools also should incorporate oral language into the curriculum. If parents, teachers and schools give importance to oral language by applying the suggestions, then vicious cycle will be broken and we will have students who have highly-developed oral language skills.        

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