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Chapter 7
Taking Language from Home to School
Chapter Overview
Although much of language acquisition occurs from birth through the preschool years, development continues
throughout the school years, especially during the primary grades. It is also true that people continue to add to their
language knowledge and their communication competencies into their adult years, perhaps all their lives. In this
Learning Outcomes
• Describe the challenges that students and teachers face when students are learning English as a second
language.
• Discuss the characteristics of the forms of language expected in classrooms as students communicate with
teachers and one another.
• List the gains students make in the development of learning about words.
• Describe the changes school-age children make in syntax and morphology.
• Trace the art of conversations and narratives.
• Outline the development of metalinguistic skills and learning to read and write.
Key Terms and Concepts
• School or classroom curriculum, p. 272
• Variations of teacher-student dialogues, p. 272: IRE model, known-information questions, revoicing,
instructional conversation
• Language of behavior management, p. 273
• Hidden curriculum, p. 273
• Word retrieval, p. 279
• Decontextualized, p. 280
• Types of word definitions, p. 280-281: operational/functional, descriptive, categorical, dictionary
• Idioms, p. 282
• Irony, p. 283
• Morphing, p. 292
• Morphophonemic alliteration, p. 292
• Relevance, p. 294
• Shade, p. 294
• Adverbial conjuncts, p. 296
• Phonological awareness, p. 303
• Phonics, p. 307-308
• Reading fluency, p. 308
• Vocabulary instruction, p. 308
• Text comprehension, p. 308
• Prephonemic stage of spelling, p. 316
• Early phonemic stage of spelling, p. 316
• Letter-name stage of spelling, p. 317
• Transitional stage of spelling, p. 317
• Preparation phase of writing, p. 318
Points of Emphasis
1. We would not expect a child’s speech and language abilities to be better than the models to which she is
predominantly exposed.
2. By the time a five-year-old child enters school. We expect him to have well-developed receptive and expressive
3. The language environment at school differs radically from the language environment at home.
a. The difference reflects the overall purpose served by school.
2. 8% of people have limited English proficiency, including about 5 million children, and that number is predicted
to increase to 6 million by the year 2020.
a. When children are learning English as a second language during their school years, they have the difficult
job of learning English while being required to learn the content of the curriculum in English at the same
time.
students.
c. Any program designed to help teachers prepare for culturally diverse students bodies must include three
components: awareness, knowledge and skills.
d. Children from diverse cultures may be over-identified or under-identified for language and learning
disabilities.
3. Children entering school encounter three new forms of language, including the language of academic subjects or
curriculum, behavior management and personal identity.
a. These forms of language are not clearly identified or explained for children and their rules are usually not
delineated or discussed.
b. Language of academic subjects of curriculum involves the use of academic vocabulary and the ability to
i) Some students with unique backgrounds will have more to learn.
d. Students are expected to learn the language of academics including the forms of teacher-student dialogues in
an implicit fashion. This is sometimes referred to as the school or classroom curriculum.
e. The language of behavior management is a language of control that establishes who is allowed to talk, what
one is allowed to say and how one is allowed to say it. This is often referred as the hidden curriculum.
f. The language of personal identity is a rare opportunity for a child to talk about himself and to hold the
communicative stage for several uninterrupted minutes. Examples are show-and-tell or sharing something
about your life with a teacher you adore.
g. Children must also develop and use appropriate styles of language for interactions with peers, also known as
the underground curriculum.
4. Throughout the school years, the child makes impressive gains in her knowledge and use of words. This
expansion of language occurs in tandem with maturation of the cognitive shift from concrete to more abstract
levels of thinking.
a. The primary influence on language development generally and vocabulary growth specifically during the
early years is spoken language. Another powerful influence is written language.
e. At least three strategies are used in vocabulary retrieval: semantic categorization, auditory cues and visual
cues.
f. Children are able to retrieve words effectively and efficiently due to a process known as phonological
encoding.
g. Word finding is a two-part process consisting of successful word storage and successful word retrieval.
h. There is no single way to define a word. Types of word definitions include operational/functional,
descriptive, categorical and dictionary.
i) The dictionary definition of a word is the most abstract and decontextualized.
ii) As a child gains more experience with life and language, the child’s definitions become more
conceptual, more abstract.
5. Children are able to understand some figurative language at age 5.
a. Idioms are the most common form of figurative language used in conversational and classroom contexts.
i) They are acquired very gradually and are very difficult for nonnative speakers to learn.
6. During the school years, the child improves her language skills by expanding the forms she has already acquired,
by increasing her language knowledge and by learning how to use language creatively.
a. Passive sentences remain troublesome throughout most of the child’s elementary school years. It is not until
8 years or even as late as 11 years that they will produce full passive sentences.
b. The child learns general rules first, and then over time he gradually sorts out and masters the exceptions to
the concepts underlying conjunctions before he is able to comprehend and produce conjoined
sentences that include these conjunctions.
(a) For example, the child who is accustomed to interpreting cause/effect on the basis of order of
mention is likely to be confused by causal conjunctions.
iv) The same persistent, if occasionally stumbling, improvements we observe in conjoining are observed
in embedding during the school years.
d. As the child moves through the school years, she produces longer and more elaborate noun and verb phrases
by refining forms, adding new forms and learning which forms must be retained and which forms can be
eliminated because they are redundant.
i) As the child moves through elementary school, he learns to retain function words, including the
articles, to eliminate redundant negative terms, and he gradually learns the exceptions for verb tense,
plurality and other language forms.
ii) The child also completes her sorting of pronouns and learns to recognize the antecedents of pronouns
even when the nouns and pronouns are in different sentences.
iii) During the school years, the child will develop a more complete understanding of the attributes
(a) First graders understand a very basic morphophonemic alteration related to plurality.
(b) Vowel shifting is not mastered until the child is at the end of the school years, when he is perhaps
17 or 18.
ii) At about age 7, children understand how to produce gerunds, understands the agentive forms of
common verbs, and also understands and is able to produce the adverb forms of common adjectives by
adding the bound morpheme –ly.
7. The most dramatic changes in language development during the school years are in the area of pragmatics.
a. Gradual changes occur as the child becomes more capable of maintaining a conversational topic.
i) She becomes increasingly sensitive to the issue of relevance, which guides the conversations of adults.
ii) The school-age child learns how to shade conversations by moving from one topic to a different but
related topic.
iii) After the age of 8 years, the child recognizes the need to be polite in making requests when she is
interrupting her listener or when she is asking the listener to do something that is difficult or
inconvenient.
iv) By adolescence, he responds to indirect requests as well as adults do.
e. Logic and reasoning are directly applied to language constructions in the form of what are called adverbial
ii) By the time a child is in first grade, she is able to determine the gender of the speaker based on their
vocabulary and vary her conversational style depending on the partner.
iii) One researcher asserts that the difficulties men and women sometimes have in communicating to each
other can be traced to the way boys and girls grow up, and how they interact with each other.
iv) As children grow older, they are influenced
less by their caregivers and more by their peers and we
ii) Emergence of narrative skills happens gradually. The art of expressive elaboration in fictional
narratives develops incrementally from 5 to 12 years of age with increases in length and sophistication.
(a) Young children add a beginning and middle to heaps, making them event sequences.
(b) Approaching the fourth year, children talk about events, the central character or topic, and
cause/effect relationships in primitive narratives.
8. The most noticeable and dramatic increase in metalinguistic awareness occurs between the ages of 5 and 8 years.
Beginning at this time but continuing even into adulthood, the child notices and develops an understanding of
each of the basic components of language, including phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.
a. The ability to realize and reflect upon the sounds and syllables that make up words is called phonological
awareness.
i) Phonological awareness has received a lot of attention in recent years because studies have shown a
direct link between its development and vocabulary size and speech perception, as well as the
acquisition of reading and spelling.
b. In contemplating a child’s developing awareness of semantics, researchers have considered word meanings
and sentence meanings.
i) By the time a child is 6 or 7 years old, she is able to separate words from their referents, as evidenced
by her ability to understand multiple meanings of words and to recognize the arbitrary connection
between words and the things they represent.
ii) The ability of elementary school children to create correct formal definitions depends on the
opportunity to practice definitions.
d. In regard to pragmatic awareness, we know that by the time the child is 5 or 6, she is able to make
judgments about whether enough information is contained in a message, such as whether instructions are
adequate.
i) By age 8, the child understands that the speaker is sometimes responsible for a communicative failure.
ii) By the time the child reaches adolescence, she has fairly well-developed pragmatic skills, at least as
they are applied in the most common social experiences she is likely to face, and she purposely
violates the pragmatic skills we would categorize as common rules of courtesy.
9. Environmental factors are more crucial in the emergence of reading and writing than in the emergence of speech.
a. Knowledge about books and print lays the foundation for reading and writing.
b. Systematic analysis of research on reading instruction by the National Reading Panel provides guidance on
the components that lead to successful learning:
i) Phonological awareness skills offer the child an understanding that spoken words have sound
segments.
ii) Phonics allow the child to link sounds to letter symbols and combine them to make words.
iii) Reading fluency reflects the child’s ability to read with accuracy, speed, and comprehension.
iv) Vocabulary instruction is a critical outcome that teaches children to gain meaning from words and the
words within the context of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.
c. Children who grow up in households where reading and writing occur come to school knowing a great deal
about literacy because oral and written language are interwoven within everyday interactions. Children who
do not have written language exposure in their homes and do not attend preschool are at a disadvantage
upon entering school, because they have not had the opportunity to develop these skills.
d. Three broad categories of readers are identified:
i) Emergent readers (between 30-48 months) are pretending to read, which sets the stage for
10. Reading and writing are closely related processes, sharing language as a common bond.
a. In the development of reading and writing, the knowledge of each process is enhanced by the knowledge
gained in the other.
b. The proactive and self-directed process is sometimes referred to as self-regulated writing, and includes
taking into account the audience and select literary style he believes is most appropriate.
c. Real writing is not the same thing as handwriting practice or penmanship. The process of real writing is far
more important.
d. Children have a natural inclination to write. They show evidence of a strong desire to write even before they
enter school.
e. By the end of kindergarten, children demonstrate a variety of skills in steady progression, beginning with
writing alphabet letters to real-word spelling exceeding that of nonsense-word spelling.
i) The first word the typical child learns to write is his own name. Shortly thereafter, he will probably
learn to write other words with which he is familiar.
f. Early sound/letter associations lead to what is called graphophonemic awareness.
g. Earliest spelling risks and experiments result in some pretty interesting sequences of letters, often called
invented spellings.
h. The journey from invented to conventional spelling moves through the following four stages, each of which
involves progressively more sophisticated spelling: prephonemic, early phonemic, letter–name, and
transitional (see Table 7.3 on p. 317).
Discussion Topics
• Wilhelm (1994) suggests that schools are the dominant force in the socialization of children and that it is in the
schools that students and teachers engage in a kind of “social negotiation,” systematically sharing an
understanding about the attitudes, values, and knowledge that underlie the major institutions of their society.
Invoke a classroom discussion with the following types of questions: What are your thoughts about this? Do
you feel that this is accurate? Do you feel that this should be the function of schools?
• Discuss the possible ways that vocabulary growth parallels Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.
• Discuss the role of culture in the construction of narratives. Do you feel that these cultural influences may affect
how teachers’ perceive the quality of their narratives? If so, brainstorm ideas to support teachers in
year: 1) an upper middle-class child who attended preschool and whose family reads with her frequently, and 2)
a student who lives in poverty with working-class parents that are self-reportedly illiterate. How would a
difference in the students’ skills affect their overall learning?
• How does knowledge of morphology assist children in word learning?
• Explain the minimal distance principle and discuss how this principle relates to the difficulties children may
have in interpreting sentences. Brainstorm the specific sentences that may be challenging for younger children
or children with language-learning difficulties and strategies to support teaching these types of sentences.
• Describe the major changes that occur in the child’s narratives as he moves through the school years. How are
the communication responsibilities for generating narratives different from the responsibilities for engaging in
conversation? Discuss the role of culture in the construction of narratives.
• Review the historical changes that have occurred with regard to the development of literacy in children.
Discuss the role of parents in facilitating literacy development in their children.
• Compare the primary ways that vocabulary is learned prior to school with the influences that effect vocabulary
acquisition in school-age children and adults.
• Identify what you believe teachers in training must learn about the three forms of language used in the
classroom: (1) the language of academic subjects, (2) the language of behavior management, and (3) the
language of personal expression. In regard to these different forms of language, how can teachers promote
students’ learning?
Suggested Activities
• Create an informatory handout for parents describing reading strategies they can use in their home that reflects
the current view about how literacy should be developed. Include specific activities and/or books that could be
used.
• Visit a Kindergarten, 1st grade or 2nd grade classroom and identify the following: 1) the extent to which the
reading and writing instruction reflects the current view of how the development of these skills should be
facilitated, and 2) a lesson plan for 1 additional reading and 1 additional writing activity that the teacher could
use with the class. Be sure the lesson plan reflects the level of skills that you observe in the students.
• Review a video recording from a 3-year-old child and a 7-year-old child. Transcribe the samples and compare
them for the following: 1) presence or absence of grammatical features, 2) type and number of embeddings in
the utterances, and 3) types of conjunctions they used.
• Recall a tasteful joke you heard recently or look up a joke online. Analyze the joke according to what language
skills and background experience one would need to understand the joke. Would children understand the joke,
and if so, at what age? What about an English language learner or someone from another culture?
Assignment Suggestions
• Video Reflection 7.1 (p. 268): Watch the video to gain perspective from a professor in bilingual education and
English as a second language regarding language diversity, then answer the question.
• Video Reflection 7.2 (p. 300): Watch the video to observe the personal narratives of a six-year-old and a nine-
year-old, then answer the question.
• Video Reflection 7.3 (p. 300): Watch the video to focus on the content of two fictional narratives, then answer
the questions.
• Readers may assess their understanding by completing these brief, self-check quizzes:
o 7.1 (p. 271): challenges faced by students and teachers in diverse classrooms
o 7.2 (p. 274): language of school
o 7.3 (p. 285): semantic development
Websites to Explore
• The ASHA website offers a page titled “Typical Speech and Language Development” that shares parent- and
teacher-friendly resources regarding typical communication, pragmatics and literacy skill development for
school-age children.
• The Reading Rockets website discusses phonological and phonemic awareness, and shares what these
difficulties might look from the child’s, parent’s and teacher’s perspectives. See the page titled “Phonological
and Phonemic Awareness.”
• LD Online shares the article “Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines” as a resource
for how and why phonological awareness skills can be developed.
• The website English Daily 626 offers a list of English proverbs.
