Most parents can hardly wait for their baby to say their first word. This usually happens between nine months and a year. From about two years, the child should be able to use simple phrases, and by three, they should be able to use full sentences. By four, they should be fully able to talk, although they may still make grammatical errors. By five, the child should have acquired basic language.
There is little doubt that language acquisition is one of the key milestones in early childhood development. Much of a child’s future social and intellectual development hinges on this milestone. A language delay can lead to isolation and withdrawal, learning difficulties, and poor academic performance. Recent research has revealed a dramatic link between the development of spoken language and written language among children and the importance of language acquisition to basic reading skills.
Many parents believe that the term “language development” implies that the child’s language acquisition is an automatic process. This, however, is not the case. There is nothing that any human being knows or can do that they have not learned, which is especially true of language acquisition.
Children begin to learn language from the day they are born. From the very first moment, parents must lay a proper foundation to enable the child to acquire adequate language skills. Just like parents must ensure that a child follows a healthy and balanced diet for optimal physical development, they must take steps to ensure optimal language development.
How language is acquired
Parents should start talking to their babies from the day they are born. Some mothers are by nature quiet and reserved. Others have the unfortunate idea that it is foolish to talk to their babies, knowing that they do not understand. The mother, who does not continually talk while feeding, bathing, and dressing her baby, lays the foundation for a late talker.
The baby learns language in one way: hearing it as the parents talk to them. The more a parent can speak to a child, often repeating the same words, phrases, and structures over and over, the sooner the child will learn language.
An important thing to note here is that by the time a baby is about nine months old, they should be able to understand simple words and commands. They may perhaps also be able to say a few simple words already. Invariably, however, one finds that the baby understands much more than they can say. In fact, this remains so for any person throughout their life. One can always understand more of any language, even one’s mother tongue, than one can use in active speech. This is even more so of any second or third language that a person can speak.
This shows that we have two more or less separate masses of language knowledge: our passive knowledge (also called receptive language) on the one hand and our active (expressive language) on the other. When we listen or read, we use our passive vocabulary, and when we speak or write, we use our active vocabulary.
An important thing to note is that the child’s passive vocabulary came into being through constant and continual repetition of words, phrases, or structures. Once a word, phrase, or structure has been repeated often enough, it also becomes part of the baby’s active vocabulary. This shows that the active vocabulary can only be improved via the passive. Research has shown that a child just beginning to talk must hear a word about 500 times before it becomes part of their active vocabulary. Long before that, it will already form part of their passive vocabulary. This means parents should create as many opportunities as possible for their baby to hear them talk.
The secret of reading to your child
Parents should read to their children as often as possible. The secret, however, which will lead to optimal language development, is to read the same stories repeatedly.
In the “good old days,” there was not an abundance of storybooks like today. Parents were compelled — it was also part of the child-rearing traditions — to tell over and over to their children the few stories that they knew or to read over and over to their children the few books in their possession. They also spent a lot of time teaching their children rhymes and songs. As I discovered for myself through my son, this over-and-over repetition of the same stories and rhymes was extremely beneficial for language acquisition. In fact, I took this tradition to the extreme, exposing my son to only one book for nearly two years.
Soon after my elder son was born, I bought him a book about Pinocchio. The book was aimed at four-year-olds. Except for talking to him continually, I started to read to him from this book when he was only two or three months old — as often as I could, over and over and over. I found this tedious, of course. My son, however, loved it, and the results of this experiment made all my efforts worthwhile. Not only did he start talking much sooner than most children do, but when he was just over two years old, he could recite nearly all the pages of Pinocchio. When turning to a new page, one only had to read the first word or two on that page, and he would recite the rest of the page like a parrot. In itself, this may seem quite useless, but of great importance was that the vocabulary in this book soon became part of his everyday speech. Regarding language development, he was soon miles ahead of his age group. In fact, to this day, his vocabulary and ability to speak with clarity are pretty astounding.
When a child is older, one should start teaching nursery rhymes. Research has shown that knowledge of nursery rhymes among three-year-olds significantly predicts later prereading skills even after the children’s IQ and their mothers’ educational levels are partialed out.
While an apple a day keeps the doctor away, talking forever makes your child clever.
