The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) report on the effectiveness of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention is a welcome further step to guide practitioners, parents and carers in ways to help young children develop their understanding and use of different styles of language and vocabulary.
Emphasis on language development during the very early years is vitally important for young children’s well-being and holistic development if they are to enjoy the first years of primary education and achieve their potential. Lev Vygotsky explained that language is not only a means of communication, it is also a tool for thinking.
It is now time we turned our attention to the important years before the age of four. Are we giving very young children the best opportunities to absorb and use language? Methods to develop children’s ability to use language are within each adult but are often under-used, as they have not been understood or their importance valued. It is said mothers are their children’s first language teachers!
THE HUMAN VOICE
Humans are a social species and need a social partner to develop their language and grow their brain. The process starts from birth with infant-directed speech (IDS), often termed ‘baby talk’ or ‘motherese’, a product of the hormonal changes that occur during pregnancy and are responsible for the development of maternal qualities including the use of voice for educating.
Babies are born with an intrinsic motive to acquire language, and adults have a personal ‘tool’, their voice, to help them as social partners acquire language irrespective of the world language the adult speaks.
The voice, and the way humans use it, is a powerful educator. By ‘tuning in’ to listen carefully and take part in ‘back and forth’ communication exchanges, babies and very young children grow their brain as they develop strategies to self-educate (see More information).
However, many adults neither recognise the innate qualities of their unique voice, nor know how to use them to respond to the social overtures of babies and young children wanting to communicate. In any exchange, young children unconsciously absorb adult language and work out how to blend sounds into utterances that adults can understand.
A ‘tuned-in’ social partner
For the brain to grow, the baby or young child needs a ‘tuned-in’ social partner who shepherds growth through their voice and facial, or even body, gestures at times of joint attention – when an adult and child focus on each other and to a third object or event.
Every adult has a unique voice, but in today’s fast-moving society, time and patience for face-to-face, and even eye, contact within working young families is limited, making focus on the voice as an early years practitioner even more vital.
It is natural that parents compare their young children’s development. They feel satisfied when their child meets the physical and language milestones at the ‘usual’ age. At 12 months, they say their first word and at 18 months they babble ‘mama’ or ‘dada’, which excites their family, and their enthusiasm motivates and shows the baby a way to communicate successfully. But without regular face-to-face language exchanges, the foundations formed up to the age of two years in this ‘silent period’ (communication without words) are weak. A weak language base may not show up at two years, but becomes noticeable in the child’s third year, when many children become non-stop talkers.
Feeling secure
To acquire language easily, young children need to ‘feel good’ and secure in an emotional relationship with their social partner. This entails transferring and sharing emotional and social security from home to the key person and the nursery environment. Nursery has to become another ‘inside’ environment where the child ‘fits in’ and can transfer their strategies to self-educate. To ‘feel good’, physical health and well-being also need to be included, as any minor cold can be uncomfortable and impede listening.
The young child’s ability to transfer and share emotions, strategies and trust should not be underestimated, as it is a big developmental step for the child and also for their mother or carer. It is interesting that adults often name their first nursery teacher as their most influential teacher.
Each child is unique, but all need focused joint attention with an older person’s more advanced input to grow their brain. Young children’s ability to communicate depends on the quality and frequency of the input supported by their relationship with their key person and their ability to adapt input to meet the child’s interests and language acquisition needs. Ask any mother, ‘tuning in’ needs close observation and willingness to adapt, nearly hourly, to meet young children’s changing interests and moods.
JOINT ATTENTION: IN ACTION
Joint attention is the time when the young child, unconsciously, acquires language. Young children’s subconscious minds actively absorb English language if it is presented in an easy-to-pick-up, caring way to which they can respond. Strategies to acquire language are developed and refined by the young child during this period, when the unconscious brain is dominant and the child mirrors and absorbs what is happening around him – the good and the sometimes undesirable.
Taking a lead from research on the value of back-and-forth exchanges and ‘motherese’, practitioners need to adopt and adapt these techniques to maximise the developing young child’s ability to absorb language.
‘Back and forth’ – or ‘serve and return’ – exchanges between adult and child can occur throughout the nursery day, be it in nursery routines, learning activities or shared reading.
During an exchange, the adult:
- ‘serves’ (throws/starts off) the exchange with a statement about the activity (or object)
- enlarges on the child’s first statement, shows interest in the activity and builds on the earlier statements
- automatically builds in (scaffolds) new words and cognitive ideas
- uses playful language to remotivate the child when necessary
- respects a child’s silences as they give the child time to self-reflect – mulling over an experience is an important part of consolidating learning.
How to use your voice
Adults have a key to a child’s progress in the way they use their voice to shepherd learning. Children need to feel they are being talked with, and not talked at or to if they are to have the self-confidence to absorb and use new language. Young children know when they are doing well; by the age of three years they also know, and can tell you, who else is doing well.
Young children can be made to repeat new language like a parrot, but cannot be made to absorb (acquire) it. Absorbing new language, and unconsciously using it correctly, is rarely immediate. After a week or more, you can be suddenly surprised to hear a child using it correctly grammatically and mirroring your pronunciation.
ADULT TALK
Learning is optimal during focused joint attention sessions, but during the day children can learn from exposure to input from other uses of the adult voice.
This broad category that comprises a general ‘continuous commentary’ on all activity in the nursery exposes children to all-day meaningful English-language input. Young children are familiar with this social input as parents use it, even with babies: ‘Look at Joe. He is putting the books back on the shelves. Thank you Joe. Look, Richard is going to help him.’ This technique is a form of gentle instruction, shepherding rather than giving direct commands.
Management language involves gentle suggestions and comments that increase to match the child’s growing levels of understanding. Negative commands – ‘Don’t put it there. That’s not right’ – need to be avoided as they demotivate the child.
Mediating language is when an adult introduces and explains unknown language to go with a new activity, game, story or rhyme and, most importantly, a picturebook. With very young children, the adult needs to speak slowly, include more body language and repeat words and phrases in a natural way to facilitate the child’s understanding.
Motivating language is used to acknowledge success, but also to encourage effort to try again and do something even better – ‘That’s great, but have another go.’
Questions have two main functions – language development and thought development – but need to be used sparingly, otherwise experiences become like assessment tests rather than activities that stimulate creative ideas.
Closed questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ replies at this stage test children’s knowledge, but diminish their opportunities to think, reflect or speculate. Much more important in developing children’s thinking are open-ended questions, such as ‘What is it? What do you think? Which are best?’
Adults asking and answering their own questions, using a quieter voice, models for three-year-olds how to make decisions (think critically) while finding out more about how they feel and think, which increases bonding.
Making comments encourages children to think and add their own opinion. ‘I like cats, but I don’t like dogs.’ ‘Green is my favourite colour and red is my next favourite colour.’
Self-talk is when adults think aloud – ‘Now, what shall I do next?’ It is spoken in a softer voice and is often about personal feelings or projects, how to do things or making decisions. This type of modelling helps children to think for themselves and also think about others and what they do – ‘Oh, I forgot to get an extra plate’; ‘I’ll wait a bit as May hasn’t finished yet.’
Using playful language in a surprising way helps to extend an activity or game and to remotivate children – for example, a change of volume, an exaggerated silence or a quick repetition of a word: ‘Go, go, go.’
Tutor talk is used to focus attention when explaining something new or something that needs care in use.
UNDERSTANDING ADULT TALK
Young children understand more than they can say (verbalise) and adults imagine. From very young, they find out how to use the strategy of ‘gist understanding’ – understanding only a few stressed words and gestures in an utterance to get the general meaning (gist). This technique lasts for life.
Children at this stage do not break speech into words, so do not expect to understand every word, as is the case for some adults who learned language later in life.
Translating
Young bilingual children transfer from one language to another with ease and may replace a word they do not know when speaking in one language with a word from their other language (code switching). This is not a mistake, and children soon self-correct if the listening adult repeats the entire same sentence in the major language. Some parents worry that their child might be mixing languages but, in fact, this is an accepted skill used even by adults.
It may be easier not to translate for bilingual children but to encourage them, through extra mediation, to develop their own life-long gist strategies in order to understand English or any other language.
If adults translate:
- their translation may not be correct
- they encourage the child to be lazy and always wait for the translation. When there is no translation, some young children wait and watch, and after a few seconds delay, they copy another child.
Mistakes
When a child uses or pronounces a word wrongly, it is important not to label this as a mistake. Children have an innate drive to match (mirror) language perfectly, so adults need to mediate certain words again in meaningful language to enable the child to use their self-correcting strategies.
Usage mistakes show us that the young child is working out the patterns in language and applying them to words, without knowing about the exceptions (for example, ‘go-ed’ instead of ‘went’; ‘sheeps’ instead of ‘sheep’).
Pronunciation mistakes show us that the young child is trying to work out how to make the sounds and needs an adult to represent words in face-to-face joint attention, so the child can observe the lip movements and self-correct.
EVERY OPPORTUNITY?
As young children gain confidence in using their self-learning strategies, their ability to communicate develops. But the question remains, are young children given sufficient opportunities, however small, to take part in language exchanges? And are we introducing sufficient new and interesting activities in which children can acquire a wider vocabulary? Young children are naturally curious and through our voice we can make even the simplest object interesting. Every ‘back and forth’ exchange counts.
Joint attention: with picturebooks
Picturebooks provide a permanent platform for developing and using language. They can be revisited many times during shared reading and by a child or children when book browsing alone. Shared reading should, therefore, be part of a nursery’s routine as it offers children opportunities to get close to adults and talk, as well as listen to adult talk.
Tips for shared reading
- Dramatise the text, using exaggerated facial language as you make face-to-face contact and even eye contact.
- Read more slowly than usual, stressing the first syllable in important words.
- Pause to give time for the child/children to finish off words, favourite phrases or join in the chorus.
- Talk about the pictures using a different voice from your shared-reading text voice and make comments about them – ‘I like… What do you think?’, for example, rather than challenging questions such as ‘What colour is….? What is the dog doing?’.
- Extend conversations by linking them to with what goes on in the nursery, at home and beyond.
- Choose books that will expand a child’s experience beyond their safe inside environments of home and nursery to outside, and back again to inside safety.
- Take turns to turn the page carefully. Talk about the new spread, linking it to the last and later predicting what happens on the next spread.
- Give young children time to scan the spread. Children generally indicate they are ready for the page to be turned by glancing up at your face.
MORE INFORMATION
- www.nuffieldfoundation.org/project/nuffield-early-language-intervention
- 5 Steps for Brain-Building Serve and Return, https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/5-steps-for-brain-building-serve-and-return/
- Child Psychology: A Very Short Introduction by Usha Goswami. Oxford University Press
Opal Dunn is an author and specialist in bilingualism and early language