School Journal | Log 3 | Language Skills (Before School)
In log 1 I had listed out 7 key skills that children seem to pick up during their first 5–6 years. In log 2 I covered how they seem to develop motor skills, both the timeline and just a little peek into the process of learning. I am now super excited about getting into the second key skill of language. It would appear that children learn the vast majority of their language skills in the first 5–6 years. The idea of learning how to communicate like that mystifies me. So I would like to figure out how this process of learning languages happens.
As detailed in log 1, I would probably be interested in understanding how children build up:
- Their vocabulary (spoken and more broadly understood)
- Ability to read and write (just the basics)
As always, I started off by asking google, “how do children learn language”, and received the following AI generated answer.
Some parts of that answer seem particularly helpful. Most usefully for me, there is a lot of overlap with John Holt’s ideas in his book “how children learn”. Even in his book he focuses a fair bit on how young children learn language, and a large part of his ideology centres around providing children with as much exposure and information as one can. The central idea is that children are inherently interested in being a part of the adult world. They will therefore try to make sense of the world, and one need only give them access to information and ample exposure to language to help them in this endeavour.
I particularly like this view because it makes children seem a lot like a well developed machine learning algorithm. If you give it enough useful training data it will learn whatever is needed. But before I accept this answer that I have been pre-oriented towards, let me have a look at a few more articles.
I read through the following sources which showed up high on the google search:
- UN regional information centre article on how children learn language so easily compared to adults
- Reddit thread on how children learn language effortlessly
- Very well family article on how children learn languages
- National library of medicine paper on how children learn languages — but predominantly on speech disorders and how to detect and prevent them
And I have gathered the following takeaways from the above.
From the UN-RIC article and the Reddit thread the main ideas were:
- Children below 12 years of age predominantly learn languages through implicit or unconscious learning, which is more effective in picking up new language rules and even committing vocabulary to memory
- Adults learn more through conscious learning which is not as well suited for language learning, because of the trouble in managing difference with already known language rules or words (other language)
- Immersion and unconscious exposure to a language help make the process of learning a language easier and more natural
- In the process of learning — explicit correction, leading to embarrassment is an impediment, whereas allowing the learner to recognise patterns and gradually correct themselves helps dramatically
The very well family article detailed out a sort of 3 stage process of learning languages:
Some other key suggestions provided to help children learn a language are:
- Talk to them frequently, normally and clearly— do not change or dumb down language too much
- Talk to them frequently about their own context and actions
- Allow them opportunities to talk without interrupting or explicitly correcting them
- Ask them a lot of questions and engage in a lot of back and forth dialogue
The national library of medicine paper mainly talks about the detection of disorders. However, in the process, they have also outlined a useful timeline of key milestones in language development which I have simply inserted below:
A few other interesting insights from the paper were:
- There may be a bit of delay in language development in boys vs girls, children in bilingual homes, younger siblings. However, these expected delays are minor, and the same rough timeline can broadly be used for reference
- Bilingual children may develop smaller vocabularies in each language initially, but have a comparable combined vocabulary at any point of time (and a larger vocabulary at a more mature stage)
At this stage my overall takeaways are the following:
- The key to develop language skills within the first 5–6 years is immersion and exposure
- As long as children are hearing language, being engaged in conversation (preferably relating to their context), and being read stories to engage them, they will develop comprehension, expressiveness and speech incrementally
This leaves me with 2 more questions:
- What are the resources that one could use to help stimulate and complement language development? (e.g. books / comics to read to children, audio tracks to play, shows to watch etc)
- When and how in this process is reading and writing picked up?
Resources for language development
To identify what resources might be helpful I did a quick google search for “resources for language development in children” and read through the following 3 articles from:
The consensus across these articles and the previous ones seems to be that the big sources of language learning for children are:
- Parents talking to their children
- Hearing conversation in their normal environment
- Pre-schools with their language development exercise and regular social communication
- Reading books to children (ideally books with pictures and ideally showing them the words as they are read to link reading / writing to language)
- Games, songs and diversified activities which bring language and communication in as a key aspect
Evidently, most of these things will happen organically, and all we can plan to do is provide children with ample exposure. The one dimensions where I feel compelled to dive a little deeper into resources are the books. At any point of time one could always google something like “children’s books by age” to find a list or set of books that they like. For the time being I have done the same and the following 4 lists are ones which came up. They seem pretty good to me, but perhaps only an experienced parent can further refine these lists. And perhaps each child’s needs and preferences will just be different.
- Scholastic children’s books by age group — Of course I have a soft corner for the scholastic book fairs that I so loved as a child in school
- Imagination soup .net — They have links to different book lists for different age groups and purposes
- Book trust .uk.org — They have a pretty granular book finder based on age group and purpose, but I’m not sure how easily available these books will be outside the UK
- Common sense media .org — This is a nice and simple list of 50 great books to read, with classics like the cat in the hat, the very hungry caterpillar and the tale of peter rabbit
And I have no doubt that there’s a plethora of fascinating and fun books out there in any bookstore.
Reading and writing milestones
From the previous few articles, I think it’s clear enough how children develop an understanding of language. It also seems that in this process, a little bit of assisted reading, seeing sign boards in places etc helps children associate writing / reading with language. The only remaining major question for me now is what are the major milestones for learning reading and writing. At first glance, it would appear that only the basics are really picked up before school (1st grade) and refinement of reading and writing skills really happens in school.
As always, I asked google for “early reading and writing milestones” and found the below 3 pages to be useful:
The university of Alabama at Birmingham provided the below really interesting graphic on developmental milestones of early literacy.
The other 2 webpages detailed out a little further what the key milestones are across a longer development period.
At the moment, I don’t think there’s much else I can do in order try re-learning these skills at least in English. However, as I go forward and try to learn a second language, I shall try to reuse some of these milestone to guide my learning.
