EDUC-1
LINGUISTIC AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
I. Natural history of Language Development.
The traditional learning view holds that language development depends upon the principle of
reinforcement.
From the point of view of other learning theorist, language primarily is learned through
imitation.
Noam Chomsky espouses the nativist approach to language development which assert that
children have an innate Language Acquisition Device ( LAD) that enables them to learn language
early and quickly.
Modern theorist holds an interactionist view that recognizes children as biologically prepared
for language but requires extensive experience with spoken language for adequate
development.
Jerome Bruner emphasizes the critical roles parents and other early caregivers play in language
development. Bruner proposes the Learning Acquisition Support System ( LASS). This can be
done by playing non-verbal games with them, using the technique of expanding children’s
statements and recasting children’s incomplete sentences in grammatical form.
The Antecedents of Language Development
Pseudodialogues - the give and take of conversation is one of the early training infants
acquire in the language development.
Protodeclaratives - skilled in nonverbal communication, using gestures to make some sort
of statements.
Protoimperatives - Can make statements about things and get other people to do things fo
them.
II. Bilingual Language Development
Bilingualism where children learn two languages simultaneously, puts children to an
advantage in term of language proficiency.
Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism
1. Bilingualism does not impact to early language milestone like babbling.
2. In bilingual homes, infants readily discriminate between the two languages phonologically
and grammatically.
3. Learning a grammatical device as using to denote plurals in one language facilitate learning
corresponding devices in the other language.
4. Bilingualism is associated with an advantage in metalinguistic ability, or capacity to think
about language among preschool and school age children.
5. Most bilingual children manifest greater ability than monolingual children when it comes to
focusing attention on language tasks.
Cognitive Disadvantages of Bilingualism
1. Limited vocabulary. The words they know are divided between two languages resulting into
more limited vocabulary which continuous into the school years.
2. Think more slowly in the language in which they have lesser fluency. Bilingual children are
fluent in both languages and thus, encounter fewer problems, but they do not attain equal
fluency.
3. Parents who chose bilingualism should consider whether they can help their children
achieve fluency in both languages.
4. Children who speak their immigrant parents’ language tend to be attached to their parents’
culture of origin and therefore are able to speak the language.
Learning a second language is a constructive process similar to learning a native
language. This is made possible through interactions with the children and adults.
Parents find a way to understand the children’s special words for a thing. This is called
motherese.
Code switching, students learning English as a second language tend to mix English with
their native language. A special linguistic and social skill.
Language and culture have important implications for how children learn language I school and
how teachers teach language. Some implications are:
1. Children use the four language systems at the same time in the process of communicating.
2. Children bring their unique backgrounds of experience to the process of learning.
3. Children’s cultural and linguistic diversity impact on the students learning process.
III. Emergent and Early Literacy:
Holophrase - A single word used to represent a phrase or sentence; typical of the
first stage of language acquisition.
Bootstrapping – Using their knowledge of word class and syntactic clues to learn the
meaning of new words.
Fast mapping – a child’s ability to map the meaning of a new word onto a referent
after hearing the word used on context just once.
Vocabulary explosion – the rapid addition of new words to a toddler’s vocabulary
usually occurs late in the second year.
Literacy – a process that begins well before the elementary grades and continues
into adulthood and even throughout life.
Emergent literacy - a new approach to language arts instruction in kindergarten.
Teale and Sulzby – describe young children as active learners.
Metalinguistic – the ability to think metalinguistic ally is developed by their
experiences with reading and writing.
According to Juel (1991 as cited by Tompkins, 2002) children move through three stages as they
learn to read, namely; emergent reading, beginning reading, and fluent reading.
In emergent reading – the purpose of communicative print is understood by
children. They start to notice environmental print, can dictate stories for the
teacher to record.
In beginning reading - the children learn phoneme-grapheme correspondences
and start to decode words.
In the Fluent reading - children have learned to read, decode unfamiliar words
and recognize words automatically.
NOTE: Do more readings about this topic for additional learning
_____________HAPPY LEARNING________________
QUESTIONS TO ANSWER.
1. Why teacher needs to internalize the linguistic and literacy development of children and
adolescents?
2. Describe bilingual development.
3. Explain the natural history of language development.
4. Discuss the significance for teachers in learning the different terms under emergent and
early literacy.
5. Explain the importance on the application of antecedents of language development in
teaching learning processes.
6. Make a reflection (150words)
