Syntactical skills in preschoolers  Age 2-3: move from telegraphic speech to more complicated sentences  Syntactical errors such as “I runned” aren’t really errors—show knowledge of usual grammatical rules. Just overgeneralized.  Age 5-6: start to use syntax more correctly; vocabulary increases dramatically.

Talking done by parents  The more parents talk to their children, the greater the children’s vocabulary growth (Huttenlocher et al., 1991)  SES is linked to quantity of talk by parents (Hartley & Risley, 1995).  More complex sentences spoken by parents correlated with greater syntactic complexity in children

Advances in Pragmatics  Age 3-4: children can talk about things/people who aren’t physically present—called “displacement”  Age 4: become sensitive to others’ needs in conversation; use “a/an” and “the” correctly  Age 4-5: change style of speech depending on audience

Development of Literacy  How quickly child learns to read depends on his “print-related interactions” (exposure to books; being read to)  Mom’s education level related to how many books are in the home  Single-parent and welfare families have fewer books in the home  Reading to children more than 3 times a week  better language skills

Stages of reading (Chall, 1979)  Stage 0: Birth to 1 st grade; master of prerequisites to reading  Stage 1: 1 st and 2 nd grade; most learn to read  Stage 2: 2 nd -3 rd grade; more fluent at reading, but reading not used much for learning  Stage 3: 4 th -8 th grade; can read to learn  Stage 4: High school; fully competent readers

Whole-language approach  Stresses that reading instruction should parallel children’s natural language learning  Reading materials should be “whole and meaningful” and in their whole forms (whole stories & poems, not fragments)  Reading should be integrated with other subjects, such as history & science  Beginning readers are taught to recognize whole words or even entire sentences, not phonics.

Basic skills-and-phonics approach  Emphasizes that reading instruction should teach phonics and its basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds.  Early reading instruction should involve simplified materials.  Only after child has mastery of basic phonics should he be allowed harder material to read.

Which approach is better?  National Reading Panel (2000) strongly supports phonics approach over whole language.  If kids don’t learn basic phonological skills early in school, they’re unlikely to ever have the ability to automatically decode words; reading comprehension will suffer.  Phonics training is best done in small groups instead of with the whole class.

Vocabulary development and reading comprehension  Good vocabulary is linked to reading comprehension in 2 nd grade.  Teachers who require students to read a lot for homework (11 pages or more daily) have students who are more proficient in reading.

Writing skills  2-3 years: early scribbles  Age 4: most can write their name  Age 5: can copy short words  Reversing letters (b and d) are common mistakes until early elementary school and do not predict literacy problems.  Children often spell phonetically; these misspellings should not be criticized.