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How do we help children learn to communicate?
Whichever is the case, the fact remains that adults
treat infants as if they are attempting to communicate
with us long before they actually are. It seems likely
that these responses lead children into making intentional
communicative acts, either verbally or non-verbally.
One of the earliest communication ‘lessons’
that we teach children is the significance of taking
turns. Almost from birth our interactions with children
teach them that communicating is about listening when
someone else is speaking and that after a period of
activity (verbal or non-verbal) there should be a period
of non-activity. We also demonstrate the need to follow
the gaze of the person who is talking. This forms the
basis for conversation later on.
Another thing that we do to help children to acquire
language relates to the way that we speak to very young
children. When we talk to young children we change both
the manner and the content of our speech. We simplify
the way that we construct sentences, dropping ‘redundant’
words, using a special but limited vocabulary of ‘baby
words’, and using names instead of pronouns, as
in the example ‘Baby go bye-byes?’ (instead
of ‘Are you going to sleep now?’). We also
exaggerate the intonation of such sentences, speak more
slowly and use more repetition in our speech to young
children than we do when we are talking to adults. All
these features are suggested to help children understand
language and make their own attempts at constructing
their first verbal communication.
Making meanings
When children are around nine to twelve months old,
their early attempts at communicating with adults fall
into four clear ‘types’:
- the child wants something
- wants someone else to do something
- wants to interact with another person
- is reflecting on their environment in some way
Between 12-17 months we also see children communicating
a desire to pretend.
Around about the age of 18-21 months, there is a dramatic
increase in the number of words that children know,
such that it has been termed ‘the vocabulary explosion’.
In tandem with this rapid growth in word knowledge we
begin to see children’s first attempts at using
adult-like speech. Single words are used in a way to
convey meaning: (‘Look!’) and simple combinations
of words are used, as in ‘Look! Doggy’.
This is followed by an awareness that some words have
special endings that change their meaning. For example
‘s’ added to the end of some words indicates
that there is more than one of that thing. Children
initially use word endings without too much of a problem,
but this seems to be because they have simply memorised
the words and phrases that they have heard other people
use without too much real appreciation of how language
is constructed. Once they have begun to understand that
there are rules to do with language they go through
a phase of occasionally over-applying them, such that
'sheep’ becomes ‘sheeps’ and ‘took’
becomes ‘taked’. Over time this tendency
disappears, although we all make mistakes of this kind
occasionally!
Alongside the rapid development of vocabulary and grammatical
awareness, we see children begin to use language for
conversational purposes. Prior to this point, their
utterances are rather one sided, showing a desire to
communicate their own desires and thoughts, but not
to converse and not to respond to requests for information
from other people. This is now the point at which we
see children begin the so-called ‘why?’
phase of language development that many parents will
recognise.
Ultimately the accumulation of all these different
competencies enable children to use language to engage
in part of an ongoing social process with other people;
to make sense of and to communicate as part of an ongoing
social situation and set of relationships that exist
between speakers. This is seen as the hallmark of adult
language use: to express ideas and sustain interpersonal
communication in a way that is relevant to the ongoing
situation.
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