linguistic diversity

• At 5 years


  • 6,000-word vocabulary
  • Can produce and understand complex sentences
  • Starting to read
• At 6 years (1st grade)


  • Expand vocabulary
  • Begin writing
• At 7 years (2nd grade)


  • Continue developing language skills
  • Become "more interactive participants in conversations and discussions"
  • Use of figurative language begins to develop
• At 8 years (3rd grade)


  • Begin to use critical-thinking skills
  • Able to "read fluently enough to compose and write stories, and their vocabulary skills continue to develop"
  • Acquiring about 3,000 words per year, largely through acquisition of derivational morphemes
  • Begin to be able to edit their work
  • Write more complex sentences
  • Average of 6.5 words per sentence
• At 9 years (4th grade)


  • Begin to use more and more derivational morphemes in spoken and written language (affixes like "pre-," "dis-," "-ment," or "-ary")
  • Proverb understanding develops
• At 10 years (5th grade)


  • Subordinating conjunctions such as as, as if, unless, than, whereas, whether, in order, since, etc. begin to appear in speech and writing
  • Masterful control of figurative language realized
• At 11 years (6th grade)


  • Refinement of social behaviors
  • Ability to resolve conflicts
  • Significant growth in social competence
  • Increased language refinement
  • More complex syntax abilities
  • Continued increase in vocabulary through use of derivational morphemes
• At 13 years (8th grade)


  Average of 7.7 words per sentence
• At 16 years (11th grade)


  Average of 11.5 words per sentence
• Drivers of language development

  • Input
  • Interaction
  • Interest
  • (Instruction)
• Drivers of language development - early language development

  • Input & interaction with adults (mother)
  • Particular importance of recasts
• Drivers of language development - language development in early grades

  • Stories in groups
  • Access to a wide variety of texts
  • Chances to write
  • Conversations with peers and class discussions
• Drivers of language development - later language development (9 through adolescence)

  • More complex language input
  • Textbooks
  • Cognitively challenging discussions
  • Discussions on a broad range of topics
  • Changes in cognitive processing
  • Growth in social experience and pragmatic knowledge of how to use language
• Perhaps the single most important factor in the continued and expansive development of vocabulary in the older school-age child and adolescent is reading skills
• Take EDU 285, The Reading Process
• Move from careful 'decoding' to automatic decoding

  1. When decoding becomes automatic, learner focusses on developing comprehension skills

  2. Reading in earlier grades lays the foundation for reading in higher grades
• By 9 to 19 years of age, children rely on written language for a great deal of input about vocabulary, figurative language, and complex sentence structure
• Writing includes more complex sentence structures, more figurative language, less common vocabulary, etc.
• Language development results in greater access to input


  This shapes and spurs cognitive growth
• Cognitive growth allows wider range of language abilities


  Example: abstraction
• Need to maintain L1 development
• L1 development in academic contexts!
• Implication for bilingualism
• Levey & Polirstok

  2011
• Levey & Polirstok: 'Language Development: Understanding language diversity in the classroom'
• The term "language" is used to refer to the entire system of communication, including grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and other aspects.
• Main point


  Examine some transcripts
• How many words in the child's longest utterance?
• What are the topics?
• Who introduces new topics, the baby/child or adult?
• Is there a lot of repetition?
• Who repeats whom?
• Sit Dolor Amet
• Child Directed Speech


  The special mode of speech, or register, adopted by adults and older children when speaking with young children. Parents, in particular, simplify and adapt their speech to meet the needs of very young children in a wide variety of ways. Phonology, vocabulary and grammar, and features of interaction, are all simplified and clarified in various ways
• Input


  The language a person hears, or, later, reads
• Interaction


  When two people communicate, often taking turns and responding to each other's utterances
• Recast


  Repeating someone's utterance, while fixing any mistakes
• Register


  A style of speech appropriate for certain interactional contexts, e.g. an informal register is appropriate in informal settings
• Child Directed Speech


  • Exaggerated intonation, a higher pitch, slower speech with longer syllables, longer pauses
  • The pitch becomes especially high when the child shows interest
  • Phonological adaptations figure most prominently in the child's first year
  • Adults use this speech mode to grab the infant's attention and, in the process, convey a mood of positive affect
• Child Directed Speech


  • The topic tends to be about the here-and-now, rather than topics distant in time or space. This means that the words chosen by the adult are likely to be more easily comprehended by the child
  • The child tends to select the topic
  • If you want to maintain a toddler's attention, you have to talk about what interests them