Session 8: Reflections on language acquisition

Introduction

You have reached the end of your journey, following children from when they were in the womb, to stringing their first words together, to holding conversations and telling stories. Learning language is a remarkable skill that we carry with us for the rest of our lives and is part of the normal development of only one in 8.7 million species. It gives children the power to express their immediate desires, share their regrets of the past and their plans for the future. Over the course of development, the language children use ratchets more complicated thinking, which in turn demands more complicated language to express those thoughts in a never-ending cycle.

Children will learn to use the power of language to form relationships, manage their own reputation and collaborate with peers in ever more sophisticated social endeavours. The basic nuts-and-bolts of all these abilities are acquired in under 2,000 days with a large proportion of that time spent asleep. That doesn’t mean language development is over by this point – the way people use language will continue to develop over the course of their lifetime. But by many measures of language – phonology, meaning, vocabulary and grammar – the early years see the greatest rate of change. This final session will spotlight some of the big issues that underpin the research you have looked at and, finally, the session will draw together some lessons you have learned along the way.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• provide a general overview of how children learn language
• understand some of the big themes that underpin research in language development
• reflect on how your knowledge and understanding has changed.