As you will remember, many aspects of language advance during early childhood. By age 6, children have mastered the basic vocabulary and grammar of their first language. Many also speak a second language fluently. Those linguistic abilities allow the formation of 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.

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 stressed, their thinking soon becomes more flexible and logical; they can understand prefixes, suffixes, compound words, phrases, and metaphors. For example, 2-year-olds know egg, but 10-year-olds also know egg salad, egg-drop soup, egghead, and last one in is a rotten egg. They know that each of these expressions is distinct from the uncooked eggs in the refrigerator.

Metaphors, jokes, and puns are finally comprehended. Some jokes (“What is black and white and read all over?” “Why did the chicken cross the road?”) are funny only during middle childhood. Younger children don’t understand why they provoke laughter, and teenagers find them lame and stale, but the new cognitive flexibility of 6- to 11-year-olds allows them to enjoy puns, unexpected answers to normal questions, as well as metaphors and similes.

Indeed, a lack of metaphorical understanding, even if a child has a large vocabulary, signifies cognitive problems (Thomas et al., 2010). Humor, or lack of it, is a diagnostic tool.

Many adults do not realize how difficult it is for young children or adults who are learning a new language to grasp figures of speech. The humorist James Thurber remembered what he called “the enchanted private world” of his early boyhood:

In this world, businessmen who phoned their wives to say they were tied up at the office sat roped to their swivel chairs, and probably gagged, unable to move or speak except somehow, miraculously, to telephone…. Then there was the man who left town under a cloud. Sometimes I saw him all wrapped up in the cloud and invisible…. At other times it floated, about the size of a sofa, above him wherever he went…. [I remember] the old lady who was always up in the air, the husband who did not seem able to put his foot down, the man who lost his head during a fire but was still able to run out of the house yelling.

[Thurber, 1999, p. 40]

Metaphors are context-specific, building on the knowledge base. An American who lives in China notes phrases that U.S. children learn but that children in cultures without baseball do not, including “dropped the ball,” “on the ball,” “play ball,” “throw a curve,” “strike out” (Davis, 1999). If a teacher says “keep your eyes on the ball,” some immigrant children might not pay attention because they are looking for that ball.

Because school-age children can create metaphors and similes, asking them to do so reveals emotions that they do not express in other ways. For instance, in a study of how children felt about their asthma, one 11-year-old said that his asthma

is like a jellyfish, which has a deadly sting and vicious bite and tentacles which could squeeze your throat and make your bronchioles get smaller and make breathing harder. Or like a boa constrictor squeezing life out of you.

[quoted in Peterson & Sterling, 2009, p. 97]

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That boy was terrified of his disease, which he considered evil and dangerous—and beyond his parents’ help. Other children in the same study responded differently. One girl thought asthma would attack her only if she was not good and that her “guardian angel” would keep it away as long as she behaved herself. Adults who want to know how a child feels about something might ask for a metaphor.

One aspect of language that advances markedly in middle childhood is pragmatics, already defined in Chapter 9. Pragmatics is evident in the contrast between talking formally to teachers (never calling them a rotten egg) and informally with friends (who can be rotten eggs or worse). As children master pragmatics, they become more adept at making friends. Shy 6-year-olds cope far better with the social pressures of school if they use pragmatics well (Coplan & Weeks, 2009). By contrast, children with autism who have learned to talk are usually very poor at pragmatics (Klinger et al., 2014).

Mastery of pragmatics allows children to change styles of speech, or “linguistic 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). Code used in texting—numbers (411), abbreviations (LOL), emoticons (:-D), and spelling (r u ok?)—shows exemplary pragmatics.

Some children may not realize that informal expressions are wrong in formal language. All children need instruction to become fluent in the formal code because the logic of grammar (whether who or whom is correct or how to spell you) is almost impossible to deduce. The peer group teaches the informal code, and each local community transmits dialect, metaphors, and pronunciation.

Educators must teach the formal code. However, they should not make children feel that their neighborhood or family grammar or pronunciation is shameful.

Code changes are obvious when children speak one language at home and another at school. Every nation includes many such children; most of the world’s 6,000 languages are not school languages. For instance, English is the language of instruction in Australia, but 17 percent of the children speak one of 246 other languages at home (Centre for Community Child Health & Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, 2009).

In the United States, almost 1 school-age child in 4 speaks a language other than English at home. Most of them also speak English well, according to their parents (see Figure 12.2).

In addition, many other children speak a dialect of English that differs from the pronunciation and grammar taught at school. All these alternate codes have distinct patterns of timing, grammar, and emphasis, as well as vocabulary, so all require much more than literal translation.

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If a child learns only one language in the early years, but then masters a second language during middle childhood, the brain must adjust. A study found no brain differences between monolingual and bilingual children if they spoke both languages from infancy. However, from about age 4 through adolescence, the older children are when they learn a second language, the more likely their brains will reveal differences that result from the need to accommodate their dual languages.

Specifically, children who learn a second language later have greater cortical thickness on the left side (the language side) and thinness on the right (Klein et al., 2014). This reflects what we know about language learning: School-age children can master a second language they did not know before, but they must work at it.

In the United States, some children of every ethnicity are called ELLs, or English Language Learners, based on their proficiency in speaking, writing, and reading English. Among U.S. children with Latin American heritage, those who speak English well are much better at reading than those who do not. Age, schooling, and SES all have an effect, but even some of higher SES may be less adept at reading than the average European American child (Howard et al., 2014). Culture may be the reason, as their learning style may not be the same as their teachers’ teaching style, even though they speak and understand English well.

Teaching approaches range from immersion, in which instruction occurs entirely in the new language, to the opposite, in which children are taught in their first language until the second language can be taught as a “foreign” tongue (a strategy rare in the United States but common elsewhere). Between these extremes lies bilingual schooling, with instruction in two languages, and ESL (English as a Second Language), with all non-English speakers taught English in one multilingual group. ESL is intended to be a short and intense program to prepare students for regular classes.

Methods for teaching a second language sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, with the research not yet clear as to which approach is best (Gandara & Rumberger, 2009). The success of any method seems to depend on the literacy of the home environment (frequent reading, writing, and listening in any language helps); the warmth, training, and skill of the teacher; and the national context.

Specifics differ for each state and grade level, but the general trends are dismal. ELLs fall more behind their peers with each passing grade, becoming high school dropouts at higher rates than other students their age. For instance, in Pennsylvania in 2009, the percent of fourth graders proficient in reading was 74 percent for the non-ELLs but only 30 percent for the ELLs. The gap in math scores was not quite as wide, but in every subject and every grade, the gap widened as children grew older (O’Conner et al., 2012).

Using an information-processing perspective, scholars have discovered that each aspect of language learning follows a distinct developmental path, and this can help teachers target exactly the learning that each child needs. Between ages 5 and 8, for children who speak Spanish at home and English in school, the length of each sentence in English (average number of words) dips during summer vacation but fluency improves steadily (words per minute). Especially for them, the 3-month-long summer break is destructive of education (Rojas & Iglesias, 2013).

For these bilingual children, knowledge of Spanish follows another trajectory. It does not improve much during kindergarten and first grade (presumably because children focus on English), and then advances markedly at the end of second grade (Rojas & Iglesias, 2013). Schools can affect this by having Spanish classes for all the youngest children, so those whose home language is Spanish will appreciate their mother tongue. These are averages; specifics of learning and effective educational strategies depend on the particular experiences of the child at home and school, just as information-processing theory would predict.

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Learning to speak, read, and write the school language is pivotal for primary school education. Some differences in ability may be innate: A child with a language disability will have trouble with both the school and home languages.

It is a mistake to assume that a child who does not speak English well is learning disabled (difference is not deficit), but it is also is a mistake to assume that such a child’s only problem is lack of English knowledge (deficits do occur among all children, no matter what their background). To discover whether a child has difficulty learning language, it is best to test in the home language—even when the child has been speaking the second language from kindergarten on (Erdos et al., 2014).

Although some children from every language background have disabilities, most of the language gap between one child and another is the result of the social context, not brain abnormality. Two crucial factors are SES and expectations.

Decades of research throughout the world have found a strong correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status. Language is a major reason. Not only do children from low-SES families usually have smaller vocabularies than those from higher-SES families, but their grammar is also simpler (fewer compound sentences, dependent clauses, and conditional verbs), and their sentences are shorter (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2013). That slows down school learning in every subject.

With regard to language learning, the information-processing perspective focuses on specifics that might affect the brain and thus the ability to learn. Brain scans confirm that development of the hippocampus is particularly affected by SES, as is language learning (Jednoróg et al., 2012). That is correlation; many researchers have sought the cause of the connection between SES and language. Possibilities abound—inadequate prenatal care, exposure to lead, no breakfast, overcrowded households, few books at home, teenage parents, authoritarian child rearing, inexperienced teachers, few neighborhood role models … the list could go on and on. All of these conditions correlate with low SES and less learning, but it is difficult to isolate the impact of any specific one.

However, one factor seems clearly a cause, not just a correlate, of language proficiency: language heard during the first five years of life. If it is extensive and elaborate, the child is likely to speak and then read well.

The mothers’ education seems crucial. Many less-educated parents talk and listen much less to their infants and young children than college-educated parents do. For instance, among mothers of 2-year-olds, 24 percent of those with less than a high school education read books daily to their children, but 70 percent of the mothers with at least a BA do so (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009) (see Figure 12.3).

Even independent of income, research has shown that children who grow up in homes with many books accumulate, on average, three years more schooling than children who grow up in homes with no books (Evans et al., 2010), presumably because the parents of the latter group rarely read. Language exposure is the direct cause here, not household income. Indeed, children from high-SES families who rarely hear language also do poorly in school, and some low-SES families encourage language and their children do well.

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Book-reading is not the only way to increase language learning in children (some families rarely read to their children but engage them in conversation about the interesting sights around them), but book-reading often indicates how much verbal input a child receives. Another way to surround children with language is to sing to a child, not just a few simple songs, but dozens of songs, with varied vocabulary in many stanzas.

Ideally, parents read to, sing to, and converse with each child daily, and also provide extensive vocabulary about various activities. For example, as parent and child are walking down the street: “The sidewalk is narrow (or wide, or cracked, or cement) here.” “See the wilted rose. Is it red or magenta or maroon?” “That truck has six huge tires. Why does it have so many?” Children offer comments of their own, and adults can respond with “Yes,” “That’s interesting,” “I never thought of that”—never ignoring the child or commanding, “Be quiet!”

Beyond direct language encouragement, a second cause of low achievement in middle childhood is teachers’ and parents’ expectations. Although substantial research has found that children are influenced by adults’ positive expectations, the relationship between expectation and achievement becomes complicated as children grow older. One crucial factor seems to be whether parents and teachers have shared expectations for the children, rather than working at cross-purposes. Also important is that children internalize those expectations rather than feel the need to rebel against them (Froiland & Davison, 2014).

Expectations need to be explicit, not idealistic. For instance, children should know that they are expected to read for pleasure rather than watch television, to learn advanced academic vocabulary (e.g., negotiate, evolve, allegation, deficit), and to have important ideas that the parent will listen to attentively and with respect. Remember, though, that authoritarian parenting, which includes high standards, can backfire if it is not accompanied by warmth.

Expectations do not necessarily follow along income lines, especially among immigrant families. For low-SES Latinos especially, family expectations for learning are often high. Their children try to meet those expectations because they want to validate their parents’ decision to leave their native land to improve life for their children (Ceballo et al., 2014; Fuller & García Coll, 2010).

The worst result of low expectations by adults is that they are transmitted to the child. Schoolchildren may internalize their parents’ or teachers’ belief that they will not learn. Expectations, motivation, and achievement go hand in hand. Qualities such as grit, resilience, and emotional regulation—all affected by parents, teachers, and the child’s own hopes—are crucial for learning at every stage of life, as A View from Science explains.

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