7.3 Language Advances

By age 6, children have mastered the basic vocabulary and grammar of their first language. Many also speak a second language fluently. These linguistic abilities form a strong knowledge base, enabling some school-age children to learn up to 20 new words a day and to apply complex grammar rules. Here are some specifics.

Vocabulary

By age 6, children know the names of thousands of objects, and they use many parts of speech—adjectives and adverbs as well as nouns and verbs. As Piaget recognized, they soon become more flexible and logical; they can understand prefixes, suffixes, compound words, phrases, metaphors, and figures of speech. This is a major accomplishment.

The humourist James Thurber remembered “the enchanted private world of [his] early boyhood”:

Homework This 7-year-old is learning vocabulary related to science as she does an experiment with her father. Children learn most of their vocabulary with friends and family, not in class.

RADIUS IMAGES/PHOTOLIBRARY

Adults may not realize that some figures of speech, or even words, are culture-specific. For example, Canadians are known for saying “eh,” particularly at the end of sentences, to mean “right?” or “you know what I mean.” Similarly, Canadians, as well as others, have their own set of metaphors connected with ice hockey. “They were ready to drop the gloves” indicates that two people have reached a crisis point in their argument. “She stickhandled that situation very well” tells us that this woman has finely tuned diplomatic skills. In an article in The New Yorker, Canadian writer Adam Gopnik even used a hockey metaphor to describe the political savvy of the country’s prime minister: “[Stephen] Harper is no pylon, as Canadians call a hapless defenseman whom you can go around at will” (Gopnik, 2009).

Because school-age children are able to create as well as understand metaphors, asking them to do so reveals emotions that might not be expressed in other ways. For instance, one 11-year-old said that his asthma is like

That boy felt that he alone had to fight his disease, which he considered evil and dangerous—and beyond help from his parents. Other children in the same study had more benign metaphors. This suggests a strategy for teachers who want to know how a child feels about something: Ask for a metaphor.

Adjusting to the Context

One aspect of language that advances markedly in middle childhood is pragmatics, the practical use of language, which includes the ability to use words and other devices to communicate well with varied audiences in different contexts. As children master pragmatics, they become more adept in all domains.

Learning the CodesMastery of pragmatics allows children to change styles of speech, or “codes,” depending on their audience. Each code includes many aspects of language—tone, pronunciation, gestures, sentence length, idioms, vocabulary, and grammar. Sometimes the switch is between formal code (used in academic contexts) and informal code (used with friends); sometimes it is between standard (or proper) speech and dialect or vernacular (used on the street). Many children use code in text messaging, with numbers (411), abbreviations (LOL), and emoticons (:-D), as well as with spellings that teachers might mark as wrong but which actually are right in context (r u ok?).

Choice of Language Like children everywhere, these siblings, from Bordeaux, France, are texting their friends. What abbreviation do you think they use for LOL? (EDR, which stands for “écroulé de rire,” or “falling down laughing.) For L8R? (A+, which stands for “À plus,” or “See you soon.”)

BSIP/SCIENCE SOURCE

Children need instruction from teachers to become fluent in the formal code because the logic of grammar (whether who or whom is correct or when a sentence is incomplete) is almost impossible to deduce. Peers teach the informal code, with curses, slang, gestures, and alternate grammar.

Code changes are particularly obvious when children speak one language at home and another at school. Every nation includes many such children; most of the world’s 6000 languages are not school languages. In Canada, more than 200 languages were reported as the home or mother language in the 2011 census. Specifically, 20 percent of the Canadian population, or more than 6 million people, speak a home language other than English or French (Statistics Canada, 2012a). This includes more than 200 000 people who speak an Aboriginal language (Langlois & Turner, 2012). Similarly, English is the language of instruction in Australia, but 17 percent of Australian children speak one of 246 other languages at home (Centre for Community Child Health, 2009).

Learning Another LanguageThe questions of when, how, to whom, and even whether schools should provide second-language instruction are answered in different ways from country to country. Some countries teach several languages throughout elementary school, while others punish children who utter any word that is not in the majority language.

In some European countries, such as Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, almost every child speaks two languages by age 10. In Africa, children who are talented and fortunate enough to reach high school often speak three languages. In Canada, about 15 percent of youths 15 to 19 years of age can speak both official languages. In the United States, less than 5 percent of children under age 11 study a language other than English in school (Robelen, 2011).

All the Same These five children all speak a language other than English at home and are now learning English as a new language at school.

AP PHOTO/DANIEL SHANKEN

How do children learn a second language in school? One option is immersion, in which instruction occurs entirely in the new language. Another approach is the opposite: Teach in the children’s first language for several years, and then teach the second language as a foreign tongue. Between these extremes lies bilingual schooling, with instruction in two languages.

In North America, there are ESL (English as a second language) programs for students whose first language is not English. In these programs, non-English speakers are taught together intensively and exclusively in English to prepare them for classes with native English speakers. More recently, some have re-termed ESL to EAL, English as an alternative language, or ELL, English Language Learning, as English may in fact be someone’s third or fourth language.

In middle childhood, children sometimes successfully master a second language and sometimes fail: The research is not clear as to which approach is best (Gandara & Rumberger, 2009). Success is affected by context: Home literacy (frequent reading, writing, and listening in any language), cultural values, national attitudes and policies, and the teacher’s warmth and skills all make a difference. Success is also affected by personality, ability, expectations, background, and SES.