Role of the Family in Oral Language Development
Families and caregivers have an important role in a child's language development and should strive to do the following:
- Provide love, food, and clothing
- Talk to their children
- Use sophisticated vocabulary
- Use complex sentences
- Use complete sentences
- Respond to cries, smiles, and baby talk
- Be playful with language, such as using rhymes
- Play with different toys
- Sing songs
- Read books
- Play many different types of music
(Morrow, 2005)
The first words that a child hears are from his or her immediate family and caregivers. This verbal information forms the initial building blocks from which a child begins to recognize words and build language. Kuhl (1994) asserts that by age one, neural pruning has eliminated the ability to hear and respond to sounds they have not heard during that first year. Thus, it seems logical to say that families and caregivers have the awesome responsibility of providing the foundation for a life of language learning.
This foundation can be built in many ways, but perhaps the most important is simply surrounding and immersing the child in language. This means that family members and caregivers should talk about all that is going on around the child, provide the child with sensory objects, and talk about the objects and the child's interaction with them.
For example, when giving a child a rattle, a caregiver could talk about what the object is called, how it feels, what happens when the child moves his or her hand, and how it sounds. By equating action of the movement with the word “shake” and noise with the word “rattle,” a child learns to associate sounds to objects and experiences. As we will see in Module 3: Decoding Words Using Phonics, this association between sounds and objects is critical when it is time for a child to associate sounds with letter combinations.
Children should be read to beginning very early in their lives. In fact, some parents begin reading to their child before he or she is even born! Reading to a child should always be a fun and pleasant. While most parents and caregivers only think of reading a limited number of children’s storybooks, reading a wide variety of narrative and expository (nonfiction) texts will enhance the child’s language development and may motivate the child’s interest in reading. Therefore, reading to children provides the foundation for building concepts about how print and "book language" works.