Summary
Contents
Subject index
Developing Language & Literacy with Young Children, Third Edition, gives parents, teachers, and other professionals who work and play with young children a confident understanding of communication and language development for children from birth to age eight. This resource examines the range of elements that are typical of communication and language activities: thinking, feeling, imagining, talking, listening, drawing, writing, and reading. The author emphasizes the importance of children's relationships and communications with the people who care about them, spend time with them, and share in the excitement of their developing languages and their investigations of literacy. This guidebook covers: Early communication and language Achievements of young bilinguals Stories, narratives, and language play and their significance in literacy development Emerging literacy in homes, early years settings and classrooms
Chapter 1: The Development of Communication and Language
The Development of Communication and Language
The story of language development is a saga which has its share of unsolved mysteries and discoveries and, like all good stories, it helps us to understand more about being human. ‘A miracle’ or ‘a mystery’ are words often used about the development of communication and language, mainly because linguists cannot account in full for the speed and the apparent ease with which almost all babies acquire the essential structure of one or more languages in their first three years. In a previous account of early language acquisition (Whitehead, 2004) I referred to ‘The Big Questions’ in order to draw attention to the important questions that this special kind of linguistic study, called psycholinguistics, ...
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