Introduction and guidance

This course explores a remarkable human journey: in a few short years children progress from babbling and uttering single words to stringing sentences together and holding conversations. They begin to use language to understand others, to change the world around them, and to tell the story of their own lives. It is a journey that begins while they are still in the womb and sees astonishing change in the first years of life. Drawing on the latest research from psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, this free course reveals the secrets of how children acquire the power, subtlety, and complexity of language.

There are eight sessions of content and these are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:

1. Making the ordinary extraordinary
2. The social foundations of language learning
3. The birth of language
4. Comprehending and producing language
5. Putting words together
6. The shape of development
7. The rules of conversation and how to break them
8. Reflections on language acquisition

Each session should take you around 3 hours. There are a number of activities throughout the course where you are asked to note down your response. A text box is provided for you to do this, however if you would prefer to record your answers in another way that is fine. If you choose to use the text boxes, please be aware that no one else will be able to see what you write. Your answers are only visible to you.

At the end of each session there is also a quiz to help you check your understanding. And, if you want to receive a formal statement of participation and digital badge, at the end of Sessions 4 and 8 there is a quiz which you need to pass. The quizzes for Sessions 1–3 and 5–7 are designed to help you practice and gain confidence in the types of questions used in the badge quizzes.

After completing the course, you should be able to:

• describe how children’s language develops
• explain how children learn sounds, words and grammar
• compare language learning in different languages and cultures
• identify the social and cognitive foundations of language development
• understand the reasons children’s language develops differently.

Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.