Oral Language Development

Early Years (Birth-2)

Children:

Cry for basic needs.

Make sounds such as coughs, burps, sneezes and wheezes.

Coo, laugh, gurgle and babble.

Smile and respond to their names.

Listen to and respond to voices around them.

Employ various sounds and body movements to get attention and to say "hello."

Repeat a few simple words or syllables.

Indulge in vocal play and use syllables consisting of a consonant and prolonged vowel sound.

Mid Years (2-4)

Children:

Extend single word utterances into phrases and complex sentences.

Extend their oral vocabularies.

Ask many questions.

Mimic adult voices.

Use modifiers such as adverbs and adjectives.

Learn negation through the words "no" and "not."

Employ pronouns, prepositions, plurals and possessives.

Can follow oral directions and can understand oral stories.

Name items in pictures.

Learn how to participate in a discussion.

Later Years (4-6)

Children:

Employ all of the basic rules of grammar.

Develop extensive oral vocabularies

Compose oral stories

Employ language to think and to share experiences with others

Talk in complete sentences that communicate information, ideas and feelings.

Use oral language imaginatively and creatively.

Emergent Reading

Early Stage

Children:

Like to touch, chew, hit, rub and turn books.

Enjoy looking at books with another family member. They also like to turn Pages.

Enjoy being read to. They like to hear the same stories over and over.

Like to look at and handle books by themselves as well as with others.

Children:

Become aware of print in their environment

Learn that print stands for spoken language

Like to listen to stories and have them repeated. They like to hear rhymes and songs.

Like to interact with the story by pointing to pictures or responding in some way to the story when prompted.

Can turn pages in the right order.

Can go to the library and select books.

Can follow a story and can relate to it if prompted.

Children:

Develop phonemic awareness

Recognize the front and back of a book and the top and bottom of a page.

Know the difference between letters and words.

Recognize upper and lower case letters.

Recognize story elements and can retell a familiar story.

Recognize some familiar words within the context of known stories.

Read memorized stories.

Emergent Writing and Spelling

Prescribal (age: birth to 1 or 2)

Children:

Develop and strengthen hand and finger muscles.

Reach out & handle objects.

Develop initial dexterity.

Begin to make marks with crayons.

Scribbling and Drawing (age: 3, 4)

Children:

Seem to make random marks on a page.

Scribble and draw in patterns that reveal certain principles of writing.

Repeat certain scribble patterns over and over again such as loops and lines (recurring principle).

Learn that by repeating a few basic shapes they can "write" a lot (generative principle).

Learn that their marks are symbols that represent something (sign principle).

Learn to arrange their scribbles in patterns such as rows that go from left to right or from top to bottom (principles of linearity and directionality).

Prephonemic (age: 4, 5)

Children:

Write strings of letters, usually capitals, that represent syllables or meanings.

Write letters that do not represent speech sounds.

Are usually not reading yet.

Early Phonemic (age: 4, 5)

Children:

Have learned that letters represent speech sounds.

Use one or two letters to write whole words; they do not represent all of the sounds in a word.

Know how spelling works, but have difficulty in applying this knowledge to an entire word.

Letter-Name Spelling (grade: k, 1)

Children:

Use several consonants and one or more vowel letters to spell words.

Use letters to represent phonemes based on the sounds of the letter names.

Use invented spellings.

Are not yet independent readers, but are very familiar with text.

 Transitional (Grade: 1,2)

Children:

Write and spell in a way that resembles traditional orthography, but many words are not spelled conventionally.

Use correct spellings, phonemic spellings and invented spellings.

Are aware of the features of spelling, but don't apply them consistently.