Emergent Literacy:
Language

Whether you are raising a bilingual, multilingual or monolingual child, it is important that your child receive the kind of stimulation that will encourage language development. Start Today! Find ways to incorporate these tips, suggestions and ideas into your baby’s life every day!

Did You Know?
“Feed your child a diet of rich language experiences throughout the day. Talk with your infants and young children freequently in short, simple sentences... describe the world around them to expose them to words.”
Start Early, Finish Strong. U.S. Department of Education. America Reads Challenge, 1999.

Basic findings: The stages children move through in learning to speak.

• They babble in syllable combinations, typically from 7 to 18 months, exploring sounds to experiment with oral language.
• First words are usually spoken from 10 to 18 months. A naming explosion also occurs around this time.
• Two words are usually combined around 18 months.
• First sentences frequently occur from 24 to 30 months.
• Eventually children acquire phonemic awareness, the ability to recognize spoken words as a sequence of sounds.

Tips for parents to increase a child’s vocabulary:

1. Talk directly to your child beginning at birth.
   Describe daily events.
2. Sing songs, tell stories, recite nursery rhymes or poems to your child.
   Read books and point out and repeat the names of things.
3. Name objects in the child’s environment.
   Listen to your child’s attempts at words and reinforce them by repeating words or phrases that the child says.
4. Encourage your child’s speech with positive responses such as “yes, that is a ball.” using the correct word and then add a phrase to expand on it such as “Let’s play with the red ball.”
5. Play word games to link words with actions. Tickle, touch toes, point to head, hands.
6. Engage in dramatic play with your child.
   Provide opportunities for your child to interact socially and talk to other children.
7. Participate in story times for all ages and other early childhood programming with your child at your local library.

Books/Media:

“How Babies Talk; the magic and mystery of language in the first three years of life” by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. Dutton, 1999.

“Parenting Guide to Your Toddler” by Paula Spencer. Ballantine, 2000.

Web Sites:

Building Baby’s Brain: Learning Language.
The University of Georgia/college of Family and Consumer Sciences.
www.fcs.uga.edu/extension/bbb/

The Why Files.
Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin.
whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk.html

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Information on this page reprinted with permission from the Urbana Free Library website: www.prairienet.org/buildingblocks/index.shtml

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