Early Childhood Language Development Series: Language Stimuli - The importance of the family and school

Language Stimuli - The importance of the family and school

Early Childhood Language Development Series

Language is a true mechanism to think. Language makes thought more abstract, flexible and independent of immediate stimuli. That is why it allows us to imagine, manipulate, create new ideas and share them with others; is one of the ways by which we exchange information; hence, language plays two roles: it is instrumental in the development of cognition, but it is also part of the cognitive process.

The use of oral language in pre-school education has the highest priority, since in this stage the expansion and enrichment of speech as well as the identification and characteristics of language are competences that children develop to the extent that they are offered communication opportunities everyday

Development of oral language in 4-5-year-old children.

Articulated language is the most distinctive feature among humans and, approximately, it is dominated around five or six years of age in children (Condemarín, Chadwick, and Milicic,1995). Language is one of the most important learning acquired by children in their first years of life, when the first social interactions occur, laying the foundations for future learning, hence the teacher of Early Childhood Education have to pay special attention to the acquisition and development of the language as well as its possible alterations.

The family, as a frame of reference and an essential element of the child's environment is, together with the school, the main agent of the total practice of learning. Linguistic learning can not be subtracted from this principle for two fundamental reasons: on the one hand, it is worth remembering that people (with some exceptions) spend most of their childhood with their family; besides of this, the great influence we exert on children with our attitudes and behaviors, it will be clear the key role played by the family in the communicative development of people. Therefore, nobody better than the family itself, with a series of easy-to-follow principles and guidelines when communicating with their children, become a vital element for the proper development of language.

When there is no relationship and communication between children and adults, the development of communication skills stops, so that, apart from having biological faculties for speech, the child must have an adequate social environment, as affectivity plays an important role in the acquisition of language. The desire or not to communicate is determined by positive or negative relationships with the next persons (parents); When there are affective deficiencies, it can sink into silence.

It is important to consider that when we address the child try to do it as clearly as possible, slowly and without raising your voice, so that we provide our adult language code to your abilities; which does not mean that we impoverish our expression or speak in a childish way, but rather to do it in an adjusted and precise way.

In the same sense, we must let the children express themselves and that they feel comfortable and safe in doing so; we must be patient and attentive to what he tells us, trying to provoke the maximum number of interventions on his part. The language is like an engine that must be constantly put into operation so that its parts are at full capacity.