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Chapter 8: School-Age Years and Beyond – Developing Later Language
Learning Outcomes:
• Identify major language-development milestones that occur in the school-age years and
beyond.
• Describe major achievements in language form, content, and use that characterize the
I. What Major Language Development Milestones Occur in the School-Age Years and Beyond?
A. People do not usually notice the products of language development unless they know
what to look for.
B. Therefore, this section on major language-development milestones focuses on the process
of language development in the school-age years and beyond.
C. Two processes that differentiate school-age children from their younger counterparts are
shifting sources of language input and the acquisition of metalinguistic competence.
D. Shifting Sources of Language Input
2. As a result of increased exposure to language through reading, children develop
language in an increasingly individualized manner.
4. Reading gives children opportunities to reflect on language because, unlike oral
5. Because oral language plays a crucial role in developing reading and writing abilities,
6. Being able to read requires the child’s successful understanding of grapheme-to-
phoneme correspondence.
8. Between the preschool years and adulthood, children learning to read generally
progress through a predictable series of qualitatively distinct developmental stages.
9. The prereading stage, which spans the period from birth to the beginning of formal
11. Initial reading, or decoding, stage
a. Stage 1 covers the period of kindergarten through first grade, when children are
about 5-7 years old.
12. Confirmation, fluency, and ungluing from print
a. Stage 2 covers the period of second to third grade, when children are about 7-8
years old.
13. Reading to learn the new – a first step
a. Stage 3 lasts from grade 4 to grades 8 or 9, when children are about age 9-14
years.
14. Multiple viewpoints – high school
a. Stage 4 covers the high school period, between ages 14 and 18 years.
15. Construction and reconstruction – a world view: college
a. Stage 5 occurs from about age 18 on.
b. During Stage 5, readers read selectively to suit their purposes.
E. Acquisition of Metalinguistic Competence
1. Although children begin to acquire some metalinguistic competence – or the ability
2. Phonological Awareness
a. Children usually do not master some of the later-developing abilities until
kindergarten or first grade.
b. The later-developing abilities in phonological awareness involve awareness of the
smallest units of sound (phonemes) and include blending sounds, segmenting
3. Figurative Language
a. Language that people use in nonliteral and often abstract ways is called figurative
language.
b. Using figurative language is a metalinguistic ability because children must
recognize language as an arbitrary code.
c. Metaphors
• A metaphor conveys similarity between two ideas or objects by stating that
those two ideas or objects are the same.
• Metaphors consist of a term called the topic or the target, which is compared
d. Similes
• Similes are similar to predictive metaphors in that they contain a topic, a
vehicle, and the ground.
e. Hyperboles
• Hyperbole is a form of figurative language that uses exaggeration for
emphasis or effect.
f. Idioms
• Idioms are expressions containing both a literal and a figurative meaning.
• Opaque idioms demonstrate little relationship between the literal
g. Irony and Sarcasm
• Irony and sarcasm are types of figurative language for which a speaker’s
intentions differ from the literal meaning of the words he or she uses.
• Irony refers to unmet general expectations that are not the fault of an
individual, whereas sarcasm refers to a specific individual’s failure to meet an
expectation.
• Although 5- to 6-year-olds are not yet able to distinguish between speakers’
intentions when they use sarcasm versus irony, 9- to 10-year-olds are able to
h. Proverbs
• Proverbs are statements expressing the conventional values, beliefs, and
wisdom of a society.
• Proverbs are one of the most difficult forms of figurative language to master.
• Proverbs serve a variety of communicative functions, such as commenting
(Blood is thicker than water), interpreting (His bark is worse than his bite),
II. What Major Achievements in Language Form, Content, and Use Characterize the School-Age
Years and Beyond?
A. Language Form
1. Phonological Development
a. In addition to increases in phonological awareness, children make progress in
their morphophonemic development.
b. Morphophonemic development relates to development in the interaction between
morphological and phonological processes.
c. One type of morphophonemic development concerns the use of sound
modifications we make when joining certain morphemes.
d. For example, at around age 5 or 6 years, children correctly use the plural ending
2. Morphological Development
a. Major morphological developments in the school-age years include use of
derivational prefixes and derivational suffixes.
b. When we add a derivational prefix to the beginning of a word, it changes the
word’s meaning.
3. Complex Syntactic Development
a. The most important achievements in form for school-age children involve
complex syntax.
b. Complex syntax refers to developmentally advanced grammatical structures that
mark a “literate,” or decontextualized, language style.
f. Persuasive writing in particular is a vehicle for the expression of more complex
syntax.
B. Language Content
1. Lexical Development
a. School-age students’ receptive and expressive vocabularies expand so much that
upon graduation from high school, they have command over about 60,000 words.
b. Direct Instruction
• Direct instruction involves learning the meaning of a word directly from a
c. Contextual Abstraction
• Contextual abstraction involves using context clues in both spoken and
written forms of language to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words.
d. Morphological Analysis
• Morphological analysis involves analyzing the lexical, inflectional, and
derivational morphemes of unfamiliar words to infer their meanings.
2. Understanding of Multiple Meanings
a. As students develop, they become able to provide multiple definitions for words
3. Understanding of Lexical and Sentential Ambiguity
a. Lexical ambiguity occurs for words and phrases with multiple meanings, such as
That was a real bear, in which bear has several meanings.
b. Lexical ambiguity at the level of the individual word may take one of three forms.
c. Homophones
d. Homographs
e. Homonyms
f. Lexical ambiguity regularly fuels the humor in jokes, riddles, comic strips,
newspaper headlines, bumper stickers, and advertisements.
g. Students with weak oral language skills are often not adept at noticing when
h. Sentential ambiguity involves ambiguity within different components of
sentences.
j. Surface-structure ambiguity results when words within a sentence can be
k. With deep-structure ambiguity, a noun serves as the subject of a sentence in one
4. Development of Literate Language
a. Literate language is the term used to describe language that is highly
decontextualized.
b. To understand literate language, a child must be able to use language without the
aid of context cues to support meaning; he or she must rely on language itself to
articles (a, an, the), possessives (my, his, their), demonstratives (this, that,
those), quantifiers (every, each, some), wh- words (what, which, whichever),
and adjectives (tall, long, ugly).
• By age 5, children can produce simple designating noun phrases, which
include a determiner followed by a noun (e.g., the boy, some candy).
• By age 8, children can produce simple descriptive noun phrases, which consist
g. Adverbs
• An adverb is a syntactic form that modifies verbs and enhances the
explicitness of action and event descriptions.
• Adverbs provide additional information about time (suddenly, again, now),
h. Conjunctions
• Conjunctions are words that organize information and clarify relationships
among elements.
i. Mental and linguistic verbs
• Mental and linguistic verbs refer to various acts of thinking and speaking,
C. Language Use
1. Functional Flexibility
a. Functional flexibility refers to the ability to use language for a variety of
communicative purposes or functions.
b. This flexibility is increasingly important for school-age children, who must be
c. Expository Discourse
• Expository discourse is language used to convey information.
relationships between pieces of information are clear) is generally easier to
comprehend than text that is not as coherent, especially for students with
lower domain knowledge about a topic.
• Additionally, expository text that is highly cohesive (i.e., the text is explicit
with regard to relations within and across sentences) is generally easier to
comprehend than text that is less cohesive.
d. Persuasive Discourse
• Persuasive discourse is language used to convince another listener or an
audience to adopt a certain stance or to take action consistent with a particular
point of view.
• As school-age children and adolescents mature, they exhibit gradual
improvements in at least seven skills required for successful persuasion: adjust
to listener characteristics; state advantages as a reason to comply; anticipate
• To use persuasive discourse successfully, a speaker must be flexible so as to
adjust to relevant interpersonal and situational factors.
• Children’s ability to lie also improves during the school-age years.
2. Conversational Abilities
a. During the school-age years and into adolescence, children gradually improve
their conversational abilities – for example, doing the following.
• Staying on topic longer
• Having extended dialogues with other people that last for several
conversational turns
b. Children also become more proficient at understanding and using indirect requests
as they develop.
c. Likewise, children become more adept at detecting conversational breakdowns
and repairing them.
d. At around age 9 years, school-age children begin to use more sophisticated
3. Narrative Development
a. Types of Narratives
• Younger children (age 5-6 years) can produce at least four types of narratives.
• Recounts involve telling a story about personal experiences, or retelling a
story the person has heard or read.
b. Elements of Mature Narratives
• With respect to causality, school-age children learn how to move both forward
and backward in time as they narrate, whereas younger children can only
move forward in time.
• School-age children’s narratives also begin to describe other individuals’
physical and mental states and motivations for actions.
c. Expressive Elaboration
• The combination of narrative elements in an expressive or artful manner of
storytelling is described as expressive elaboration.
• Appendages: Cues that a narrator is telling or ending a story.
III. What Factors Contribute to School-Age Children’s, Adolescents’, and Adults’ Individual
Achievements in Language?
A. Language and Gender
2. Parents refer more frequently to emotion with daughters than with sons, describing
negative emotions such as sadness and dislike more often with daughters.
3. Gender Differences in Vocabulary Use and Conversational Style
a. Women tend to use more politeness strategies than men, including hedges (I sort
b. By contrast, other research findings suggest context and social status effects on
language use may be stronger than gender effects.
d. One study found that the way in which married men and women talk with one
another may provide clues about their marital satisfaction.
e. Researchers found that greater use of we-words among married couples is related
4. Gender Differences in Conversational Pragmatics
a. Body posture and eye contact tend to differ for men and women in the United
States.
b. Women usually face their conversational partners and make eye contact, whereas
men are more likely to take a more distant stance and make less eye contact.
c. Men also change conversational topics more frequently than women, whereas
B. Language and Aging
1. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon describe the inability to produce the spoken form
of the word one intends to use.
2. Older adults report, and experimental research confirms, that they have more
difficulty producing the spoken forms of familiar words than younger adults.
4. Another noticeable difference between older and younger adults is that older adults
tend to speak more slowly.
6. Naming accuracy is worse for adults in their 60s and 70s as compared to adults ages
7. Adults in their 50s, 60s, and 70s are slower to name pictures than adults ages 25-35
years.
8. Older adults also have more difficulty than younger adults in understanding others’
10. Despite the many differences between language in older and younger adults, many
complex cognitive processes, including language comprehension, remain stable as
adults age.
IV. How Do Researchers and Clinicians Measure Language Development in the School-Age
Years and Beyond?
A. Assessment Types
1. Practitioners may use formative evaluations to inform potential language-learning
activities, or to measure the language-development process.
3. Screenings are brief assessments usually performed at the beginning of the school
year to help identify students who need extra assistance in certain areas.
5. These assessments are typically used to identify the presence of a language disability.
6. Progress monitoring assessments are conducted routinely to document a child’s rate
of improvement in an area and to monitor the efficacy of curricula and interventions.
B. Assessment of Language Form
1. Measurement of Phonological Development
2. Measurement of Syntactic Development
a. To measure syntactic development in the school-age years and beyond, examiners
can use language samples, elicitation procedures, judgment tasks, and
standardized measures.
b. Language samples are useful for measuring advanced syntax.
c. To do so, the researcher or clinician segments the transcript of spoken or written
language into communication units (C units) or terminable units (T units).
d. C units and T units both consist of an independent clause and any of its modifiers,
such as a dependent clause.
e. The difference between C units and T units is that C units apply to oral language
analysis; they can include incomplete sentences and sentence fragments.
h. Elicitation procedures are also useful for examining advanced syntax, including
complements, verb clauses, multiclause utterances, question forms, and negation.
i. There are judgment tasks appropriate for use with school-age children and adults.
j. One such task is the graded grammaticality judgment paradigm.
C. Assessment of Language Content
1. Measurement of Lexical Meaning
a. Examine transcripts for instances in which the child uses a word differently than
an adult would use it (e.g., overextensions, underextensions, and incorrect
referents).
b. Examine transcripts for gestures, pronouns, and indefinite and idiosyncratic terms
2. Measurement of Abstract Relational Meaning
a. With language samples, a researcher or clinician examines language transcripts,
with particular attention to how children use relational terms such as prepositions.
b. Elicitation procedures might involve having a child follow directions, retell
stories, or complete metalinguistic exercises.
3. Measurement of Figurative Language
a. Elicitation procedures are probably the best choice for assessing children’s
understanding of figurative language such as metaphors, idioms, and proverbs.
D. Assessment of Language Use
1. Measuring conversational skills is one way to assess language use in the school-age
years and beyond.
2. One measure is the Children’s Communicative Checklist, Version 2.
4. The Test of Pragmatic Language – Second Edition is a clinician-administered
5. Another measure, which is available for free download online, is the Conversational
Skills Rating Scale.
7. One standardized assessment that measures school-age children’s language use
abilities is the Test of Language Competence – Expanded Edition.
8. The following subtests of the TLC-Expanded measure students’ higher-level
Beyond the Book:
1. Create a list of five idioms. Trade lists with a classmate and try to interpret the idioms on
his or her list. Rate the extent to which you are familiar with your partner’s idioms using
2. Think about a new word you learned recently. Did someone tell you its meaning? If so,
how did this happen? If you used another strategy to learn the new word, describe it.
3. Record a school-age child telling a short story about himself or herself (about 2-3
4. Think about the most recent conversation you had. Which language functions did you use
to communicate (see Figure 8.3 and why?
Discussion Points:
• What other culturally sensitive strategies could educators use to facilitate reading
comprehension for children learning English as a second language?
• Do you think school-age children use hyperbole more than other types of figurative
language? Why or why not?
• How might you assess a school-age child’s understanding of idioms?
