Chapter 7

1. Chapter 7 Preschool: Building Literacy upon Language

2. Focus Questions This chapter is designed to address the following questions: • What major language development milestones occur in the preschool period? • What major achievements in language content, form, and use characterize the preschool period? • What factors influence preschoolers’ individual achievements in language? • How do researchers and clinicians measure language development in the preschool period?

3. Introduction • Preschool period: two years prior to a child’s entry into elementary school ~ 3 and 5 years of age for children in the U.S. • “Firsts:” • _____________________________________ _____________________________________ • Gain important abilities in ________________; transition to comprehension and expressing language in multiple modalities, oral and written • ______________________________________ ______________________________________

4. What Major Language Development Milestones Occur in the Preschool Period? • ________________________________ ________________________________. • Acquisition of ______________ language • Exposure to language in the __________ __________ and acquisition of important emergent ____________ • Crowning achievement of the preschool period

5. Decontextualized Language • Incorporate decontextualized language in conversations in addition to contextualizedlanguage • Contextualized language: __________ __________________________________ • Relies upon ___________________ that a speaker and a listener share, and upon gestures, intonation, and ___________________ situational cues

6. Decontextualized Language, cont • Decontextualized language: relies heavily upon ___________________ in construction of meaning • May not contain _____________ and does not assume that a speaker and listener share background knowledge or context as is the case for contextualized language • Cannot rely on the _______________________ to help communicate to the listener • Use highly precise ________________________ to represent events that are beyond the here and now • Fundamental to ________________

7. Emergent Literacy • Emergent literacy: _______________ ________________________________ • Children’s literacy abilities depend upon the _______________ skills they began to acquire in infancy and toddlerhood • Need well-developed ___________________ before they are able to make sense of the grapheme (letter) to phoneme (sound) correspondences and need well-developed vocabulary to derive meaning from text

8. Emergent Literacy, cont • Metalinguistic ability: _____________ _______________________________ • Correlates with children’s success with ___________________ instruction, both of which depend upon the ability to focus on language as an object of attention

9. Emergent Literacy, cont • 3 important achievements in emergent literacy for preschoolers: • Alphabet knowledge: ____________________ __________________________________ • Print awareness: ______________________ ____________________________________ • Phonological awareness: _________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________

10. Alphabet Knowledge • _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ __________________________

11. Alphabet Knowledge, cont • 4 complementary hypotheses that characterize the order by which preschool children learn the names of individual alphabet letters: • Own-name advantage: __________________ _____________________________________ • Letter-name pronunciation effect: _________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________

12. Alphabet Knowledge, cont • Letter-order hypothesis: letters occurring _______ in the alphabet string are learned before letters occurring _____ in the alphabet string • Consonant-order hypothesis: letters for which corresponding _____________ _________ are learned early in development are learned earlier than letters for which corresponding consonant phonemes are learned _______

13. Print Awareness • Achievements that children generally acquire along a developmental continuum • Print interest: ________________________ • Recognize that print exists in the environment and in books • Print functions: _________________________ ______________________________________ • Print conventions: _______________________ ______________________________________ • Print forms: ____________– words and letters • Print part-to-whole relationships: __________ _______________________

14. Print Awareness, cont • Children’s oral language abilities and the interactions they have with print exert influences on how they develop ___________________ • Adult references to print during book reading sessions

15. Phonological Awareness • Sensitivity to the sound structures of words • Emerges incrementally, beginning at _______ of age, • “Shallow” level: implicit and rudimentary sensitivity to large units of sound structure • __________________________________ • __________________________________ • __________________________________ • __________________________________ __________________________________ • __________________________________

16. Phonological Awareness, cont • “Deep” level: explicit and analytical knowledge of even smaller phonological segments of speech • ______________________________ • ______________________________ ______________________________ • ______________________________ ______________________

17. Achievements in Content • Learn an average of 13,000 words by the time they enter ____________ • Fast mapping: ____________________ • Knowledge of semantics and syntax: _____ ___________________ • Learn new words through shared ________ ____________ • New language content: _______________ ____________________

18. Fast Mapping as a Means to Acquire New Words • Fast mapping: acquire a general representation of a new word with as little as a single exposure • Slow mapping: refine representations over time with multiple exposures to a word in varying contexts • Dale’s 4-stage vocabulary knowledge development: • Stage 1: ___________________ • Stage 2: ___________________ • Stage 3: ___________________ • Stage 4: ___________________

19. Using Knowledge of Semantics and Syntax to Infer the Meanings of New Words • __________ object names on the basis of information about other objects, but shift to weigh an object’s function more heavily than its perceptual appearance • Use knowledge about objects’ _______ when inferring the meaning of new words

20. Using Knowledge of Semantics and Syntax to Infer the Meaning of New Words Cont. • Select animate objects as referents for _____ ______________ and inanimate objects as the referents for ____________ • Recruit ____________ that signal a novel word’s form class (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) to narrow the possibilities for that word’s referent

21. Shared Storybook Reading as a Means to Acquire New Words • Maternal language in storybook reading activities contains a more diverse array of _________________________ and tends to have a higher level of ___________ than in other language contexts, including play • Frequency with which parents and children engage in book reading interactions and the quality of the language children hear as they engage in storybook reading interactions may impact ________________

22. New Language Content: Deictic Terms • Deictic terms: ______________________ __________________________________ __________________________________ • Ex. Here and this: proximity to the speaker and there and that: proximity to the listener • Children must be able to adopt the perspective of their conversational partner • Generally mastered by the time they enter schools

23. New Language Content: Relational Terms • Relational terms: interrogatives (questions), temporal terms, opposites, locational perspectives, and kinship terms • Understand and use once they are able to _____________________________ _______________________________

24. Interrogatives • Understand _______________ words: what where, who, whose, and which, before understand and use ________ ______________: when, how, and why

25. Temporal Terms • Order of events (before, after) • Duration of events (since, until) • Concurrence of events (while, during) • Understand order before concurrence of events • Preschoolers do not understand the meaning of _____________; tend to interpret sentences according to word order or according to their experience

26. Opposites • Learn opposites that they can perceive ________ (such as big/small) before they learn more _________ opposites (such as same/different)

27. Locational Prepositions • Describe spatial relations • Include: _______________________ ______________________________

28. Kinship Terms • Initially interpret kinship terms such as mommy, daddy, sister, and brother to refer to ________ _____________ • Come to understand general meaning of these and other kinship terms, including son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, and parent • Complexity of each term has the greatest impact upon the _________________________, followed by children’s familiarity with the family member to which each kinship term refers • Difficulty with the ____________ that some kinship terms possess

29. Grammatical and Derivational Morphology • Grammatical morphemes: _____________ __________________________________ __________________________________ • Derivational morphology: _____________ __________________________________ __________________________________ __________________________ • Common derivational morphemes: pre-, -est, -ness, -ly • Children acquire morphemes in roughly the __________, even across different _______

30. Grammatical and Derivational Morphology, cont • Influences on the order by which children acquire grammatical and derivational morphemes: • ____________________________ • ________________ • _________________________________ • ______________ • ______________ • ___________________

31. Grammatical and Derivational Morphology, cont • Greatest area of development in the preschool period occurs in ______________ • Inflect verbs with tense, to provide information about time • Verb beserves as an important marker of time • Copula: when the verb ____ or any of its derivatives serve as the ___________ in a sentence • Auxiliary: when the verb __ or its derivatives serve as a ____________ in a sentence

32. Achievements in Phonology • By the end of the preschool period, most children will have mastered _________ of the ______________ of their native language • Two patterns that may persist past the 5th birthday include ____________________ • _______________ continues to develop- important to children’s _______ development.

33. Discourse Functions • Toddlers’ 6 communicative functions: instrumental, regulatory, personal interactional, heuristic, imaginative, and informational • Preschoolers’ expanded functions: • Interpretive functions: ________________________ ___________ • Logical functions: _____________________________ • Participatory functions: _________________________ _________________________________________ • Organizing functions: __________________

34. Discourse Functions, cont • Continue to detect and use the ___________________ that others convey in order to understand messages • Children better understand _________ requests when the speaker uses _______ __________in addition to the _________

35. Conversational Skills • Most preschoolers are able to maintain a conversation for _______________ turns, particularly when _________ the topic for discussion • Understand that they should _________ _________ and discover that to speak ________________ as another person makes for ____________ conversation

36. Narrative Skills • Child’s ________ and _________ descriptions of real or fictional events from the past, the present, or the future • Minimally contains __ sequential independent clauses about the _____ past event

37. Narrative Skills, cont • 2 types of narratives: • Personal: ___________________________ • Fictional: ____________________________ • Causal sequence unfolds following a _______ _________ chain of events or provides a reason or rationale for some series of events • Temporal sequence unfolds _________

38. Narrative Skills, cont • Most children are not able to construct true narratives with a problem and resolution (or high point) until around age ___ • Preschoolers’ narratives become clearer as their ability to consider the __________ _______________________ • Narrative skills are one of the best predictors of later ____________ for preschoolers at risk for _____________________________

39. Theory to Practice • When talking on the telephone, we lose many of the cues that support face-to-face conversation and must use conversation that is more ________ to _______________ • Talking on the telephone can boost children’s _______________

40. What Factors Influence Individual Preschoolers’ Achievements in Language? • Children acquire competence in different areas at _________________ • Influences such as _____________ status and ________ continue to exert effects on children’s language development in the preschool period

41. Language Profiles • Grow more rapidly in some areas and may grow more slowly in other areas • _______________________________ • _______________________________ _______________________

42. Early Literacy Profiles • Illustrate how children can exhibit varying levels of performance across _____________________________ • Knowing preschoolers’ strengths and weaknesses can help educators tailor early ________________ to children’s individual needs

43. Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Language Development • Quality of ________________________ in the classroom and the quality of teacher ___________________ can positively impact children’s own language growth in preschool • Teachers can be trained to incorporate _____ _________________________

44. Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Language Development, Cont • Benefits of classrooms with mixed SES backgrounds: • Experience more ________________, fewer __________________, and fewer _____________ interactions than children in homogeneous classrooms (low SES)

45. Effects of Gender on Language Development • Differences between girls and boys remain stable throughout the preschool years • Issues that could account for gender differences in language development: • _______________ • ________________ • ________________ • __________________________________ __________________________________ • __________________

46. Language Sample Analysis • Measures of _____________: • Total Number of Words (TNW) • Number of Different Words (NDW) • Type-Token Ratio (NDW/NTW) • Measures of ___________: • Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) • Developmental Sentence Scoring • Assess _____________________: • Communicative functions the child uses (requesting, commenting, responding to questions) • Communication acts (repair strategies, interruptions, and false starts)

47. Language Sample Analysis Cont. • Language samples should be representative • Reliable: _____________________________ _____________________________________ • Valid: ________________________________ _____________________________________

48. The Preschool Language Scale, 5th Ed. • _______________ measure of vocabulary, grammar, morphology, and language reasoning that contains 2 scales • Auditory Comprehension Scale: children’s language comprehension abilities • receptive vocabulary, comprehension of concepts and grammatical markers, and ability to make comparisons and references • Expressive Communication Scale: children’s language production • expressive vocabulary, using grammatical markers, word segmentation, completing analogies, and telling a story in sequence

49. Multicultural Focus • Norm referenced measures developed for English-speaking children may fail to paint an accurate picture of bilingual children’s competencies • Structured interviews with parents, caregivers, or teachers • Inquire about: • ______________________________________ • _______________________________________ • _______________________________________ • __________________________________________