Children 's Knowledge Of Vocabulary

Multnomah County had a survey done for kindergarten teachers. The results suggested that 19.4% of their students were not headed toward literacy success, due to a lack of necessary language and pre-reading skills. There is a 90% probability of a child that is a poor reader in first grade, still being a poor reader three years later, in fourth grade (http://www.co.marion.or.us). As Early Childhood Educators, we must help our students.

“Oral language is a skill that is acquired naturally by the young. The importance of its development in early childhood cannot be overemphasised. It underpins the whole scope of learning and is employed to question, to seek information and to proffer ideas. A child who has a well – grounded ability in oral language will usually be nicely poised to cope with reading and writing. Anyone who lacks this will be at a disadvantage.” (J.Fellowes & G.Oakley, 2010, pp4) It is a vital component of every human beings life as it is a means of communication and interaction with their family, friends and

Respond to prompts 4a–c below by referring to children’s range of vocabulary development related to the learning segment—What do they know, what are they struggling with, and/or what is new to them?

The level of a child’s communication skills can have an effect on most areas of development. If a child is struggling with communication and language they

In this essay I will be talking about speech, language and communication skills and how they affect several areas of development. I will talk about the impact of speech, language and communication (SLC) difficulties and how adults can support children and extend their SLC. I will also talk about the positive effects of adult support and the different levels of speech and language between children entering an early year’s provision.

According to a research, children are more capable of acquiring language if the book has repetitive words that would help them familiarise with words. At the age of 4, most children are not able to read by themselves yet (DeBruin-Parecki, Perkinson, & Federer, 2000). Therefore, to help their progression regarding their language and literacy skills, the book’s word limits per page are kept to its minimum, by using repetitive words in the story.

“Literacy learning has a profound and lasting effect on the social and academic lives of children. Their future educational opportunities and career choices are directly related to literacy ability. Since early childhood is the period when language develops most rapidly, it is imperative that young children are provided with a variety of developmentally appropriate literacy experiences throughout each day, and that the classroom environment is rich with language, both spoken and printed. Early childhood teachers are responsible for both understanding the developmental continuum of language and literacy and for supporting each child’s literacy development.

Through this week learning resources, I have learned that there are evidences that demonstrate that when a child has limited experiences he or she is more likely to have difficult comprehending what is read. It is why early childhood professionals affirm that oral language is the foundation for literacy development. Everything that children learn about speaking and listening they use for writing and reading and what they learn from writing and reading they use in listening and speaking. In other words, oral language and literacy develop simultaneously. When parents provide rich language and literacy reinforcement at home, children do better in school than those who do not. It is also known for early childhood professionals that for a child with limited experiences is more difficult comprehending what is read. For example, a child who has being exposed to many environments like a farm or like a museum will have more mentally engagement in classrooms activities about things he or she already know that children who have not had experience in those environments. Many researches showed that children that have not have a literacy development or an oral language development years before formal schooling, are less likely to be successful beginning readers, opening an achievement lag that might last through the primary grades. Some of the reasons why parents are not actively involved into their children’s educations are their socioeconomic or legal status. For example, in an immigrant family sometimes both parents have to work and sometimes they have to work two shifts. I have known families where children are the whole day in school and with nannies. Those children do not develop any skills that help them to succeed at the time of attending forming school.

The study solidified the theory that social interaction is key to a toddler developing his language. This study proved that children with mothers who talk and text frequently, or disengage from their children, are less likely to learn the new words. This disengagement distracts the toddler and thus interrupts the important cognitive processes occurring in the brain to map the new words. This study was effective because of the intention and concern in its design. The researchers did an amazing job explaining the material and taking great pains to control as many

Numerous studies have been done in this area as there are many children living in poverty in North America and all across the world. There are roughly over one billion children living in poverty around the world (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2010). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United describes poverty as “Lack of knowledge and good skills in herding was widely given as a main cause of poverty.” Living in poverty can seriously affect a child’s life as the child would not be able to go to school or would do poorly because there was nothing to eat at home so they would not be able concentrate. The child when old enough would have to work all day to make money for the family and many other harsh realities throughout their lifetime. Throughout the course of this paper I will be explain how poverty effects language development of a child because of the reasons of parental education and having a low socioeconomic status. In this paper, I do talk a lot about school statistics a number of times but that is because I believe if one does not have their language skills fully developed the results will show in their work ethic and grades in school. It is important to understand that poverty does not have a direct consequence to language development but it is things associated with poverty such as parental education, health care, child care, low socioeconomic status and many other variables that play an influence in

At 18 months, the virtual child had over 50 words at her command that she was able to use to make two-word sentences such as “Mama up” and “Doggie outside.” In their effort to further encourage the child’s development of her language skills, the parents applied B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory (Berk, 2012). They would respond, using slightly longer sentences such as “Yes, the doggie is outside” before introducing descriptive and useful new words. The parents would encourage imitation and respond with positive reinforcement, which would further enthuse the child to develop her language skills (Berk, 2012). When the child was 2 years old, the parents would converse with the child at any given opportunity and would read books of her choice which further influenced her language development. Research has found that when mothers are more responsive during the first few years of a child’s life enable their children to achieve language development milestones at an earlier stage than children whose mothers were less responsive (Leigh, Nathans & Nievar, 2011). The mother had a more influential role in the virtual child’s language development as she would allow the child to explore the surrounding environment through daily walks and teach the child new words as they did. It was due to parental involvement and an encouraging, safe environment, the virtual child developed her language skills not only due to influence but to a desire to learn new

Children rely heavily on the input of their surrounding environments to develop these skills further (Eileen Allen & Marotz, 2003). The communication strategy used by children over the first year of life is predominately non-verbal before development progresses to include verbal communication (Rodnick & Wood, 1973). McDevitt and Ormrod (2010) suggest social emotional, physical and cognitive development is facilitated by the experiences children have in their “family, school and community” (p. 5). This raises the idea that the level of communicative development may differ greatly between children depending on experiential exposure. Rodnick and Wood (1973) expand on this further suggesting children will actually develop a level of grammatical and language understanding which is essential to communication, long before they commence schooling. In research conducted by Rodnick and Wood (1973) it was noted in their findings that the children subject to their research demonstrated a lower level of communication than expected at around the age of seven and suggest it may be due to environmental factors. This then draws some attention to the educator and their ability to teach a developing child not only the importance of communication, but also the skills of appropriate and effective communication.

From the moment we are born, our environment prepares us for this journey we call life. We learn to communicate both verbally and non-verbally. In my opinion and based on three studies, socioeconomic status, the child’s gender, the amount of language they hear from their caregivers, word mapping, and social intent all effect the child’s vocabulary size. According to Spencer, Clegg, & Stackhouse, “the links between socioeconomic disadvantage and early language development are well documented with reports of up to 50% of young children from areas of socioeconomic is advantage having language delay. According to Pasek, Golinkoff, and Hennon (2006), research states girls showed a quasi-linear positive gain in language across secondary school, while boys began with a decline and then accelerated.

Early language development predicts the amount of vocabulary knowledge as the child develops and is a key factor that is linked with later academic achievement (Pungello et al., 2009; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Also, background factors must be analyzed and assessed, in order to understand how language growth differs from one child to the next. Exposure to speech is very important and helps influence early development of language and the processing speed (Fernald, Marchman, & Wielder, 2013 as cited by Weisleder & Fernald, 2009). A study done by Kwon et al., (2013), found that play has a significant effect on the language complexity for children’s language use pertaining to the structure of play or activity setting (free play), however the gender of the parent did not influence the language growth for the child. Furthermore, children are able to identify familiar words when speech is directed towards the child and not over heard, facilitated vocabulary learning at the age of 24 months (Weislder & Fernald, 2013). For example, over hearing adult conversation is not as beneficial towards the child’s vocabulary learning.

When students enter into the kindergarten classroom, they are greeted with a plethora of new knowledge that they may have previously not had exposure, such as phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Within these, vocabulary is often a major struggle for many children in kindergarten. Young children are often exposed to vocabulary through conversations, but not in a manner of teaching it explicitly. Through this literature review it was my goal as a researcher to find primary studies that focused on high quality instruction in the field of emergent vocabulary, especially in the kindergarten classroom. This topic came into fruition through wanting to understand literacy practices in kindergarten classrooms, since the implementation of Common Core State Standards.