English for Children Aged 8-12 Essay

The Welsh Government has categorised the different stages of language development that an EAL child can be assessed at.

At the age of 3 months we see early signs of phonology; children will turn their heads, and stop crying once hearing parent’s voices. They indicate contentment and amusement by smiling, and repeating sounds (e.g. cooing). (Berk, 2003). In addition babies 4-7 months notice new sounds such as the telephone. They also respond to “no” and changes in tone of voice. Early sound discrimination skills are beginning to emerge. At 6 months of age, long before they are ready to talk, babies start to organise speech into the phonemic categories of their own language. (Berk, 2003). Semantics develops at the age from 8months-1 year old as they respond to sounds such as doorbells and telephones. And begin to babble repeated consonants and vowels. The Nativist theory states that language acquisition is a biological phenomenon such as the child’s ‘inner clock’ theory and any role play between child and carer and by the environment is something less important, which theoretically means that nature will take its course and the child will develop its own

Between 6-9 months the baby’s brain will start to develop faster and faster at any other time during their life. Their memory will become quite strong they will repeat things over and over again. They will also learn what they are hearing which could be songs or rhymes or whilst they are being spoken to by parents siblings or strangers.

Children’s language development usually begins in their first three months. They will begin by learning to use their voice and enjoying vocal play. Babies will watch faces and mouths to try and copy movements and sounds.

In early years at school young students sometimes find basic concepts hard to grasp, difficult to master and a challenge to recall. Young children are also very keen on playing games. Can we use this enthusiasm to help them master the basic concepts which they will need for their future education?

the games that they play with, including puzzle games should be to do with words, for example,

Children are now beginning to learn letter-sound associations and are able to expand on there auditory understanding. By the age of 6 90% of children would have mastered being able to use a variety of blends and self-monitored speech. Children are able to stabilize the correct usage of irregular plurals and past and tense/ irregular verbs.

315-317) was used throughout the lesson in order to give the students an example of how to use the strategies that were taught. Before children would work on assignments alone, the teacher would model exactly what is expected of them, and keep examples of what was modeled during the lesson so the students could look back to it if they need to. Read-alouds (Cooper, 2015, p. 37) were used in this lesson to really help children to focus on certain topics of the text. “Sometimes the best way to help children understand a particular piece of text is to read it aloud to them and discuss it with them” (Cooper, 2015, p. 37). Think-alouds (Cooper, 2015, p. 30) were incorporated into this lesson when trying to explain how to use the strategy of character mapping. Think-alouds are a great way to explain to students how to use a specific skill or strategy so that they can have a better time comprehending it. Semantic maps (Cooper, 2015, p.83) were used in this lesson for brainstorming ideas from the text to later reference when making illustrations and creating short responses to the text. This strategy is also a great tool for second-language-learners because it helps to narrow down the specific parts in the text to help create more details of the topic being taught. Cooperative “popcorn” sequencing(Annenburg Learner, 2015) was used in the lesson to allow a variety of students to participate in the

It allows us to review with the class before our tests. It can do Kahoot and other fun class games. We use it for our tests. They can also be used for homework.

Using a set of words will allow the teacher to give assessment throughout the week to determine which students are able to move to a new set of words, or requires more time on this set. By using groups of words, it also make it easy to send a list home with the students each week. If the teacher chooses to use pre-made card this will allow the use of a sentence containing the word, and also an opportunity to provide words for the students to choose form. This strategy will be beneficial for the special needs and ELL students, and yet still allow them to use the same card that the regular students are

It is thought therefore, that the stimulation of adults and older children communicating with them, even though the baby cannot yet understand, it just as important as everything else done with them. Language is part of the everyday sounds that babies listen to, even though they may not participate, and songs can be a lovely and effective element of language that they are thought to enjoy. Around 1 year old they will start to attempt to speak, but often their pronunciation is unclearand the words are typically used singly, by themselve, rather than in sentences. In the 12 months following , they start bringing words together into short phrases and sentences, and as they use language more, their vocabularly rapidly increases. Concepts such as plurals and negatives come in the next 12 months, and sentences become better formed, although grammatical errors in speech are also likely, especially as English is a fairly 'irregular' language, so verbs such as eat become eaten, ad can be commonly mistaking by

The developmental stages of language are; pre-linguistic stage, one-word stage, two or three-word utterances, more complex sentences, further development between 3-4, and further development between 4 and 5. In the pre-linguistic stage from birth to 1 year, babies can tell the difference between voices and other sounds, they can start to use sounds such as ‘dadadadada’ or ‘mamamamama’. In the one-word stage from 12 to 18 months young children can have a variety of

The pre –language or the pre-speech stage is the period from about three months to six months. We can call this period the zero stage because in this period the child is only a listener and he does not produce understandable sounds. The only sounds that the child produces in this period are crying and screaming. At this stage, the child usually reacts to any speech

However, Pinker (1994) then goes onto note that the particular sub-stage of reduplicated babbling occurs around 7-8 months, and states that the children will exercise phonemes and syllable patterns that are not specific to a singular language, but rather are seen as common across a variety of languages. Yet, Pinker (1994) does also argue that the children are able to distinguish between phonemes of their own mother tongue, which has been seen from birth, and this is seen to be more prominent by the time the child reaches the age of around 10 months. Pinker (1994) refers to this as the children no longer being ‘universal phoneticians’, and states that the children will no longer distinguish foreign phonemes.

Then, cooing appears when the child is between six to eight weeks old, where the infant demonstrates happy vowel like sounds (Hoff, 2006). At age sixteen weeks infants begin to demonstrate laughter and vocal play (Hoff, 2006). Between six and nine month old babies begin to produce babbling sounds, then they utter their first word around age one (Hoff, 2006). When children speak their first word it is usually as an isolated unit (Goldin-Meadow, 2006), and not considered a major step in phonological development (Hoff, 2006). Children then learn that their first spoken word is composed of smaller parts, which is known as morphology, and that the word can be used as a building block for larger sentences called syntax (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). A child’s first word goes farther then communicating a message between the child and communicative partner, the word retains symbolic meaning (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). At age eighteen months phonological processes develop, in which the child’s speech characteristics begin to transform (Hoff, 2006). Subsequent to eighteen months the child’s vocabulary grows and with this growth the child is able to phonemically represent a sound with the mental representation of every word that possesses a sound (Hoff, 2006).