Post #10 Language

Theories in educational psychology promote the idea that language plays a critical role in cognitive development. Examine Table 2.2 (p. 51), paying particular attention to the age range that you are interested in teaching. Consider how you might incorporate or adapt the strategies presented for use with your own students.

Although I am not sure what specific grade level I would like to teach in the future, I am currently interested in interning in either a third or fourth grade classroom. According to Table 2.2, children in this age range have unique strengths and weaknesses in language development. Specifically, children have an increasing understanding of temporal words and comparatives, have an increased awareness of when sentences are grammatically correct, can correctly pronunciate all sounds in their language, can have sustained conversations about concrete topics, can construct stories with plots and cause-and-effect relationships, and have linguistic creativity and word play. Unfortunately, students still struggle by confusing the and a and have an incomplete knowledge of irregular word forms.

Table 2.2 gives suggested strategies for this age range that I can easily adapt or incorporate into my future classroom. The first suggestion the table gives is teaching irregular word forms such as that the past tense of ring is rang. One way I could incorporate this in my future classroom is by creating a spelling list one week with common irregular word pairs (ring, rang, begin, began, bring, brought, think, thought, etc.) .To help my students study these words, I could write all of the words on index cards and have them play a memory game where they had to turn two cards over at a time until they matched all of the irregular words. The second suggested strategy on the table is to begin instruction about parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.). One way I could incorporate this strategy into my future classroom is by having students make a parts of speech book. Students would look through magazines and newspapers and cut out ten nouns for the noun section of their book, ten verbs for the verb section, and so on. Students could then find or create illustrations that went along with their words. The third suggestion from the table is to use group discussion as a way to explore academic subject matter. One way I could do this in my classroom is by placing students' desks in groups and having them discuss solutions to math problems or controversial issues in social studies before presenting their group consensus to the whole class for discussion. The fourth suggestion from our textbook is to have students create short stories that are presented orally or in writing. One day this semester, I was able to observe a classroom in an arts-integrated school, and they incorporated storytelling into their history lessons by having students create their own comic strips of historical events. I think this is a great way to incorporate the suggested strategy into my future classroom because children learn about historical events while also being creative and putting the story in their own words. The fifth suggestion from Table 2.2 is to consult with a speech-language pathologist when articulation problems are evident in upper elementary students. I think the best way to incorporate this strategy is to include a lot of discussions and questioning in my lessons so I can observe students' speech patterns and get them any help they may need for speech problems. The final suggestion made in Table 2.2 is to encourage telling jokes and reciting rhymes that capitalize on double meanings and homonyms. This is probably my favorite suggestion in the table because I think reading a joke or a rhyme out loud before class each morning would be a great way to start our school day. I think this would be a fun way to introduce children to the concept of puns and homonyms, and I think kids would really enjoy coming up with their own jokes.  

I really like the website I found this week for language development, It can be found at http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/communicationdevelopment.htm This website is broken down by grades K-5,and it tells what the average child's speech and language development is for each grade level.  For example, when you click on "Third Grade" the website redirects you to a page that lists what listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills students in this grade are expected to be able to do.