school with a wide variety of experiences. The goal of an educator is to get to know each child as a unique learner and work with the family to promote language and literacy both at home and at school. Fostering Oral Language Immerse children in rich language—both oral and written—beginning at birth. We need to speak directly to our young children every day; researchers suggest that for optimal development, infants and toddlers should hear 30,000 words per day. Children learn not only from language that you address to them, but also from language they overhear around them (Au et al., 2002). Linguistic interaction has additional positive effects on linguistic development (Pinnell, 2018). Although exposure to language is essential, explicit “drilling” is not needed for the normally developing child. Parents don’t so much “teach” the child, as the child discovers and builds language. Children are “spontaneous apprentices” (Miller, 1976); they latch themselves to their caregivers and learn from their every move, including absorbing the almost innumerable ways in which adults use language, both oral and written (Klein, 2014). Read to children, encourage them to ask questions and to talk about what is read, and surround them with language through literacy. Reading aloud to children is tremendously important but reading and discussing the reading is even more potent and beneficial (Whitehurst et al., 1988; Laminack, 2016; Pinnell, 2018; Allyn and Morrell, 2016). Closing Thoughts David Dickinsen and Patton Tabors (2002) address the three dimensions of oral language experience linked to later literacy success: Exposure to varied vocabulary. Knowing the “right word” is vital if one is to communicate information clearly. We have long known that large vocabularies are instrumental to reading success. A robust vocabulary also signals that children are building the content knowledge about the world that is so critical to later reading (Neuman, 2001; Hiebert, 2019; Scharer, 2018). Opportunities to be part of conversations that use extended discourse . Extended discourse is talk that requires participants to develop understandings beyond the here and now and that requires the speaker to use multiple sentences to build a linguistic structure, such as in explanations, narratives, or pretend talk. Home and classroom environments that are cognitively and linguistically stimulating. Children are most likely to experience conversations that include comprehensible and interesting extended discourse and are rich with vocabulary when their parents are able to obtain and read good books—and when their teachers provide classrooms with a curriculum that is varied and stimulating.
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EARLY READERS ORAL LANGUAGE—THE FOUNDATION OF LITERACY
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