Oral language development: it is a topic with which I have had many experiences in recent weeks. It seems that in every class, we are asked to examine the manner in which students develop oral language. The first reading assignment for this class, in fact, summarized the development of oral language acquisition. I was beginning to feel that I was becoming an expert on this topic; that is, until I read Chapter 1 from the Freeman text, which states that nobody, not even noted linguist Noam Chomsky, truly knows exactly how oral language develops. In fact, Freeman states that many researchers, although eager to explore this topic, become quickly overwhelmed when studying the language acquisition rate of children in their second year of life and beyond. This is because, during this time, children are learning new words at the rate of two words per second. At that point, researchers simply cannot keep up with the data analysis!
One thing researchers are certain of, though, is that oral language development is a systematic process that each human goes through. The belief of many developmental, sociological, neurological, and linguistic scholars is that it begins as an innate ability and systematically develops over time through exposure and experience along with some explicit instruction. In infancy, children begin to express themselves verbally through the use of babbling. As they mature, this babbling gives way to one-word utterances, then progresses to two-word sentences. These two-word sentences are rich with meaning, although minimally spoken. As children learn and experiment with more sophisticated syntax and grammatical patterns, they employ their own speech and the speech of other, more competent adults to educate themselves on proper grammar and effective communication of ideas. During school, children learn the grammatical names for the parts of the complex sentences they have experientially learned to speak, making their knowledge of language even more comprehensive.
Reading instruction progresses in much the same manner. As very young children, humans experience written text in a way similar to the "babbling" demonstrated by infant speech: pointing to pictures and text in a book and attempting to read it. These children do not understand what message is being conveyed by the text, they merely know, as parents model when reading to them, that the text is meaningful. They may even begin to move their fingers in the direction of the print while babbling and emulating the storytelling they hear their parents reciting during read-alouds. This early print awareness gives way to retellings of repeatedly read stories; well-loved books read numerous times to children begin to worm their way into their cognition and they are able to tell the story without really reading the words. This is somewhat similar to the two-word sentence stage of oral language: The reading is not quite detailed enough to be accurate, yet the meaning is deeply present. Finally, after many exposures and explicit instruction in phonics, children learn to read: word by word, sentence by sentence. Just as through multiple exposures and instruction in speech lead to articulation, experience with text and direct instruction lead to reading.
Although there are similarities between the progression of both oral language and reading development, there is two main differences. First, it is widely believed by linguistic researchers that the ability to learn language, any language regardless of modality, is innately bred. That is to say, all humans are born with some neurological and/or psychological ability to learn the basics of language. This does not seem to be the case with reading. In fact, some children are born with learning disabilities that impede their understanding of the written word and need interventions in order to learn it. Second, it takes quite some time to learn to read, in most cases, years. Oral language, however, is learned rapidly and continues to build throughout life.
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