February 24, 2016
New parents often wonder, “What can I do to make my child smarter?” The answer is startlingly simple, and it doesn’t even cost anything. All you need to do is talk to your child!
Language is a uniquely human skill, and the basis of most learning in school and elsewhere. So the larger a child’s vocabulary and more complex his/her sentences and understanding of speech, the faster s/he will acquire the knowledge and skills that grow intelligence. Verbal language predicts a child’s progression to reading, so the child who has a lot of words and can recognize rhyming and letter sounds will also have an easier time learning to read and write.
Parents, caregivers and teachers should take every opportunity to engage each child in one-on-one dialogue, shared singing and reading stories. Language learning begins at birth (if not before) so make this a habit from day one.
Here are some other tips for promoting language and literacy development in your daughter or son:
• More speech addressed to your child. Children don’t pay attention to conversation among adults or from an adult to another child. So be direct and make eye contact.
• Listen! Many parents now understand the importance of talking to their infants and young children, but be sure to pause in your conversation to let your child respond. Even young babies understand the give-and-take of conversation and will coo and gesture in response to a parent’s speech. Listen carefully and you can pick up and affirm first words that are buried within your baby’s babbling.
• Baby-talk helps. Around the world, adults instinctively speak in a special way—higher pitch, slower rate and with lots of emphasis—when talking to young children. Researchers call this “parentese” and have shown that this style actually promotes children’s discrimination of different speech sounds, which is crucial to both speaking and reading skills.
• Model, don’t correct. Children inevitably make a lot of errors in their early speech—pronunciation and grammatical mistakes like “We goed to the park yesterday.” Don’t worry about these mistakes and don’t correct your child by saying “No, we went to the park.” Instead, respond positively to any successful communication and respond affirmatively, “Yes, we went to the park and had fun on the swings!”
• Reading together is the best. Reading with your child is the best possible language stimulation. First, it’s cozy, entertaining and creates an ideal emotional context for learning. Second, books broaden the vocabulary we use with children, taking us outside our daily life and into exciting places with different people and events that don’t normally come up in everyday conversation.
• Picture books make words concrete. As much as we keep moving toward digital reading, I hope that real picture books never go out of fashion. They create the perfect space (your lap), fine motor practice (turning pages, pointing at pictures and words) and vivid, colorful images to fuel your child’s imagination and expand his/her vocabulary. The best books for young children are those that use repetition with expansion of concepts and vocabulary, such as “Goodnight, Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?” by Eric Carle.
• Use shared books as a stepping-stone for conversation. Research into a method called “dialogic reading”—literally, using books to promote two-way dialogue—shows that parents do their best language teaching when reading to children. This includes asking children to name the objects in pictures, asking questions about the story and characters, and listening to their thoughts about the story. Once a story is very familiar, you can also ask your child to “read” to you. Well before s/he can recognize and sound out words, your child will take great pleasure in reciting a story from memory while pretending to decipher written words.
• ABC and rhyming books teach the phonemic skills that children need to progress to independent reading. Yes, a child can learn these from computer apps, but the learning is much richer in the context of a story shared with a loving parent or teacher.
Language is a uniquely human skill, and the basis of most learning in school and elsewhere. So the larger a child’s vocabulary and more complex his/her sentences and understanding of speech, the faster s/he will acquire the knowledge and skills that grow intelligence. Verbal language predicts a child’s progression to reading, so the child who has a lot of words and can recognize rhyming and letter sounds will also have an easier time learning to read and write.
Parents, caregivers and teachers should take every opportunity to engage each child in one-on-one dialogue, shared singing and reading stories. Language learning begins at birth (if not before) so make this a habit from day one.
Here are some other tips for promoting language and literacy development in your daughter or son:
• More speech addressed to your child. Children don’t pay attention to conversation among adults or from an adult to another child. So be direct and make eye contact.
• Listen! Many parents now understand the importance of talking to their infants and young children, but be sure to pause in your conversation to let your child respond. Even young babies understand the give-and-take of conversation and will coo and gesture in response to a parent’s speech. Listen carefully and you can pick up and affirm first words that are buried within your baby’s babbling.
• Baby-talk helps. Around the world, adults instinctively speak in a special way—higher pitch, slower rate and with lots of emphasis—when talking to young children. Researchers call this “parentese” and have shown that this style actually promotes children’s discrimination of different speech sounds, which is crucial to both speaking and reading skills.
• Model, don’t correct. Children inevitably make a lot of errors in their early speech—pronunciation and grammatical mistakes like “We goed to the park yesterday.” Don’t worry about these mistakes and don’t correct your child by saying “No, we went to the park.” Instead, respond positively to any successful communication and respond affirmatively, “Yes, we went to the park and had fun on the swings!”
• Reading together is the best. Reading with your child is the best possible language stimulation. First, it’s cozy, entertaining and creates an ideal emotional context for learning. Second, books broaden the vocabulary we use with children, taking us outside our daily life and into exciting places with different people and events that don’t normally come up in everyday conversation.
• Picture books make words concrete. As much as we keep moving toward digital reading, I hope that real picture books never go out of fashion. They create the perfect space (your lap), fine motor practice (turning pages, pointing at pictures and words) and vivid, colorful images to fuel your child’s imagination and expand his/her vocabulary. The best books for young children are those that use repetition with expansion of concepts and vocabulary, such as “Goodnight, Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?” by Eric Carle.
• Use shared books as a stepping-stone for conversation. Research into a method called “dialogic reading”—literally, using books to promote two-way dialogue—shows that parents do their best language teaching when reading to children. This includes asking children to name the objects in pictures, asking questions about the story and characters, and listening to their thoughts about the story. Once a story is very familiar, you can also ask your child to “read” to you. Well before s/he can recognize and sound out words, your child will take great pleasure in reciting a story from memory while pretending to decipher written words.
• ABC and rhyming books teach the phonemic skills that children need to progress to independent reading. Yes, a child can learn these from computer apps, but the learning is much richer in the context of a story shared with a loving parent or teacher.
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