Language Development in Early School Years and Adolescence

1. Language Development in Early School Years and Adolescence

2. Most of our language acquisition occurs throughout our early toddler and preschool years, but language development definitely continues throughout the lifespan.

3. During the school aged years, you will see growth in vocabulary, growth in cognition, growth in syntax and morphology, growth in pragmatics, growth in metalinguistic abilities, and growth and development in reading and writing.

4. Language skills in school-aged children and adolescents display for others their level of cognitive development and social development.

5. And even through adulthood, we continue to make note of language competence!

6. How do we monitor, assess, and observe language skills in school-aged children and in adults?

7. Extended Discourse • Language Play and Verbal Humor • Narratives

8. Extended discourse: discussing/conversing/using an extended number of utterances about events, experiences, or phenomena not currently present

9. Language play and verbal humor: - use of metalinguistic skills - interactive language play (riddles) - humor (irony and sarcasm) - teasing

10. Narratives • A series of utterances that relates an event or idea. • A coherent sequence of utterances with a common theme • Stories we tell about things we know.

11. Narratives • How do we learn them? • How do practice them? family settings, fairy tales, nursery rhymes

12. Development of Narratives • Structure of narratives: 1. Two-event narrative or heap stories • A sequence that involves two actions; generally produced by children under 4 years of age • It consists of labels and descriptions of events • Around 3 years of age the child will include a theme

13. Development of Narratives 2. Leap-frog narrative or primitive narratives • A narrative about a single experience that consists of more than two events not presented in logical or chronological order • It is characterized by omission of salient information • Generally produced by 4-year-old children • Usually has 3 elements: people, objects, event

14. Development of Narratives • Leap-frog narrative • Text organization comes from whatever attracts attention • No story macrostructure • No relationship or organization among elements • The child unsystematically jumps from one event to another

15. Example of a Leap-frog Narrative • C: I just said, I said, Hi, hello, and how are you? And then, and then, they go to someplace else, and then, and then, I had a party, with, with, with, with, candy and…hmmmm… My, and my, um, I don’t know. • A: And you what? • C: I don’t know what I did. I sure had a party!

16. Development of Narratives 3. Chronological Narrative or chain narrative • A narrative that is characterized by recounting a sequence of events • Commonly seen between ages four and eight • Begins to involve cause and effect • Begins to involve temporal relationships

17. Development of Narratives 4. Classic Narrative or true narrative • A narrative that contains all of the necessary information for a coherent story • Has a theme, characters, and a plot • Constitutes 60% of the narratives of eight and nine year olds • Events build to a high point, are briefly suspended and evaluated, and then resolved

18. Example of a Classic Narrative • You know Danny Smith? He’s in third grade, you know and when he was doing jumping jacks in the gym, you know, his pants split and in class you know his teacher said, “Danny Smith, what are you doing? He said, “I’m trying to split my pants the rest of the way.” It was only this much, and he had this much in class. On the bus he was going like this, you know, splitting it more, and he was showing everybody. We told Danny he was stupid, and he said, “No, I’m not. You guys are the stupids.”

19. Observing the changes in a developing child • Cohesion • Story art (sparkle)

20. Four Basic Types of Narrative Discourse (Content of Narratives) • 1.Recounts • The speaker talks about a past or personal experience or about an event she has seen or read about. • Are common in the homes of middle-and upper-middle socioeconomic children whose parents often ask the questions, “What did you do in school today? , “Tell us about your trip to the zoo.” • They are commonly used at school.

21. Four Basic Types of Narrative Discourse • 2. Eventcast • An eventcast is a narrative that describes a future event or something happening now. • “Tomorrow, we’ll all go to Manuel’s house after school. He has a big yard, so we can play football, and then Manuel’s mom can give us some milk and cookies like she always does.”

22. Four Basic Types of Narrative Discourse • 3. Account • An account is a narrative in which a child spontaneously shares her experiences, usually beginning with “You know what?” • The difference between an account and a recount is that an account is initiated by the child, and a recount is initiated by a request from someone else, usually an adult.

23. Four Basic Types of Narrative Discourse • 4. Fictionalized narrative • Content variation • Have a known and anticipated pattern or structure • The usual pattern is one in which the main character must overcome some problem or challenge.

24. Narratives Across Cultures • Topic-centered narrative • Commonly used by European-American children in North America • It is fixed in a given time and place • It has a beginning, a middle, and an ending

25. Narratives Across Cultures • Topic-associating narrative • Commonly used by African-American children • This narrative shifts in time, place, and key characters • Children put together several anecdotes thematically. • Michaels (1990) reported that teachers see it as “rambling,” “unplanned”, “skipping from one thing to the next”, and as having “no point”.

26. Narratives Across cultures • Bilingual Spanish-English Narratives • Vásquez (1989) • Story retelling • Main communication event used in the home • Used for entertainment • The role of parents was to maintain conversation, rather than to teach or correct their children’s attempts. • Latino people place value on participating in discourse more than relaying specific information or describing a series of events.

27. Narratives Across Cultures • Topic Maintenance • The narrative may include frequent mention and descriptions of family members. • Reference to family members is a means of providing cohesion within the narrative and of specifying time and place. • Outsiders may consider that the topic was not maintained in the narrative because of the tendency to specify family members in lieu of sequencing events.

28. Narratives Across Cultures • Latino children • Cazden (1987) found that Hispanic children’s narratives about significant personal events often include both their reactions and those of the family members to whom the event was recounted. • Teachers may find this information “off the topic”.

29. Example from 7-year-,5-month-old bilingual boy from El Salvador • Interviewer: (Tells brief personal narrative about bee sting) What about you? Have you ever gotten stung by anything? • Child: All the time in the brown house when I lived here. Got stung, stung, and stung. Because I was, my room was by the porch and all the bees come in and stung me… I don’t know how they get in, but the do somethin’ how to get in… I woke up and I saw me all stinged. I was all stinged.

30. Example from 7-year-,5-month-old bilingual boy from El Salvador • Interviewer: You were all stinged. Then what happened. Tell me more about that. • Child: Then my brother got stinged. He got, he got a little bit on him and me too. But it didn’t hurt when he got all pinched… I scratched it all the time and it growed because it hurts.

31. Key points regarding this narrative are: • The child was asked to elaborate the story about himself getting stung and chose to tell about his brother’s contrastive experience instead. • There is no resolution about what was or was not done to medicate the stings. • He prefers to speak of a similar experience that happened to his sibling. • Sequencing of events is not emphasized here.

32. Narratives Across Cultures • Asian culture • A preference for combining two or three similar incidents into a single story. • A preference for conciseness. • Omission of pronouns, which listeners are expected to infer. • A valuing of implication rather than explication.

33. Example from 7-year-old Chinese boy living in the United States • Words in parenthesis were not spoken by the child • That is… I was originally very afraid. Then, (I had a) checkup. The dentist filled up my tooth. After filling up, I did not feel painful. But I came the second time. I felt painful here. Then the dentist said that (one tooth) must be pulled out. So he pulled it out. I was afraid. Then he used drugs…Then I was very pained. Pain was gone- he asked me. Then he asked me to rinse the mouth. After rinsing, he pulled it out again. Finally, once more. This time (he) put the tooth in my mouth. Gold Tooth. This one (shows interviewer).

34. Some key points about this narrative include: • Use of ellipsis (pronouns and nouns are often omitted because listeners can easily infer such information) • Several experiences are combined in the narrative • Chang (1994) found that about a third of the Chinese children interviewed ended their narratives at the climatic moment. • The high point is clearly the gold tooth he received.

35. Example from 4-year-old Japanese girl (Ellipsis is noted by including English items in parentheses) • [This child gives a succinct recount of an injury experience.] • “(I) bled. (I) had (it) cleaned. That was good. (I) was all right.”

36. Literacy Development

37. Emergent Literacy Skills- Children’s understanding about reading and writing before they actually acquire these skills; this understanding is enhanced in households that engage in many reading and writing activities.

38. Stimulating Literacy Acquisition • Important emergent literacy skills: • Semantic knowledge • Need to have large and varied vocabulary knowledge base

39. Stimulating Literacy Acquisition 2. Environmental print awareness • When children can recognize familiar symbols and demonstrate knowledge that print carries meaning. • Familiar logos and signs for fast food restaurants • Street signs (STOP, EXIT), movie theater signs, logos on cereal boxes and toys. • Familiar words in environmental contexts (e.g. “milk”, on a milk carton: “happy birthday” on a greeting card

40. Stimulating Literacy Acquisition 3. Conventions of print- are demonstrated when children show that they recognize print conventions and accepted standards or practices for interacting with printed materials. • Practice book handling activities that highlight • A. the left-right orientation of English print • B. the front-back directionality of book reading by asking (for example, “Show me where I should start reading”) • C. Different forms of writing (for example, a letter versus a recipe) • D. Spaces between words by pointing them out and talking about them • E. Punctuation in printed materials

41. Stimulating Literacy Acquisition 4. Concepts of phonology and skill in phonological processing • Sound play activities such as: • Nursery rhymes • Finger plays • Chants and television jingles • Rhymes for children’s names

42. Stimulating Literacy Acquisition 5. Alphabetic/letter knowledge • Learning the alphabetic principle • Matching sounds with graphemes • Naming letters, numbers, and frequent words • Using letter blocks, finger painting, or sponge letters to make words • Sorting pictures that begin with the same letter • Making lists of words that begin with the same letter

43. Stimulating Literacy Acquisition 6. Sense of story • Can be developed by using • Wordless pictures books that provide awareness of story, character, and other plot elements • Predictable stories with repetitive themes and rhyme sequences (e.g., Brown Bear, Brown Bear) • Familiar daily sequences of events (e.g., Clifford’s Birthday Party) • Familiar stories and tales

44. Reading • Components of reading • Letter recognition • Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules • Word recognition • Semantic knowledge • Comprehension and interpretation

45. Reading • 1. Letter recognition • Detection of visual features of letters • The child must be able to recognize the important features of letters

46. Reading • 2. Knowledge of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules • Which is the ability to use sound-letter correspondences to decode new words. • Graphemes-”the actual graphic forms or elements of the writing system.”

47. Reading • Shallow orthographies • A spelling system in which there exists a close relationship (one-to-one) between graphemes and the phonemes they represent (e.g., Italian, Spanish). • Deep orthography • A spelling system in which there is a relatively variable relation (e.g., more than one-to-one) between graphemes and phonemes (e.g., English).

48. Reading • 3. Word recognition • Recognition of string of letters separated by spaces corresponds a conventional word • Logographic stage • Children construct associations between spoken words and one or more salient graphic features of the printed word or its surrounding context • Transition stage • Children partially use phonetic cues to recognize words, typically the initial letter or the initial and final letters

49. Reading • Word recognition (con’t) • Alphabetic stage • This stage is characterized by the ability to use sound-letter correspondences to decode new words • Orthographic stage • The child can use letter sequences and spelling patterns to recognize words visually without phonological conversion.

50. Reading • 4. Semantic knowledge • All of the information a child has for a particular word • Grammatical category • Phonological production • Relations to other words • Referents it labels