Exposure to loving chatter = explosion of language skills

Brain connections that begin to form in the first months of life are critical. Young children who are exposed to lots of loving chatter will experience an explosion of language skills as toddlers. Without early stimulation, the architecture of the young brain won’t develop in the same way and will provide a much poorer foundation for the future ability to learn.

Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff, director of Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, met with Colorado policy makers on Thursday and spoke to children’s advocates at the annual luncheon for the Colorado Children’s Campaign.

His message was clear: intervene early; intervene now; and pool your resources.

http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2012/10/05/49206-early-experiences-smoking-gun-for-school-success

Early childhood development

Early childhood development is a fragmented system in Australia and in need of an integrated approach, warns a Canadian academic.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-25/australia-urged-to-boost-child-development-efforts/4278874?section=sa

THEORY ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN

In the half-century since Chomsky's theory was first proposed, debate about the origins of language has shifted away from an emphasis on innate capabilities and toward a greater awareness of the role of learning. Language acquisition is now perceived as a process more complex than binary choices that requires more cognition, or thinking.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/224250-chomskys-theory-on-language-development-in-children/

Early experience affects brain development

By Simon J Makin | October 1, 2012 |  

Humans are born to a longer period of total dependence than any other animal we know of, and we also know that mistreatment or neglect during this time often leads to social, emotional, cognitive and mental health problems in later life. It’s not hard to imagine how a lack of proper stimulation in our earliest years – everything from rich sensory experiences and language exposure to love and care – might adversely affect our development, but scientists have only recently started to pull back the curtain on the genetic, molecular and cellular mechanisms (which is strongly affected by early experience) that might explain how these effects arise in the brain.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/10/01/the-story-of-a-lonely-brain/

Two articles on extensive reading

What is Extensive Reading?
http://erfoundation.org/wordpress/

Self-assessment tool in extensive reading programmes

http://blog.matbury.com/2012/09/24/using-the-c-test-generator-for-self-assessment-in-extensive-reading-programmes/

For young learners, join the highly interactive English program in Le Beaumont Language Centre, once or twice a week. Le Beaumont English program uses impromptu dialogue with participants to familiarize learners with important sentence patterns. The one hour conversation covers so many varieties of sentence patterns that it is like the spoken version of the extensive reading program. Children from English speaking families will benefit enormously from the focus drill in sentence patterns and usage.

Le Beaumont English program helps deepening knowledge of given forms in English

By Professor Richard Day, Chair and Co-founder of the Extensive Reading Foundation
SEPT 25, 2012

Our course books concentrate on introducing new language items each appearing in new chapters, with new topics all the time. For example learners may been copula be and jobs in Unit 1, and in Unit2 the present simple tense and simple actions, in Unit 3 frequency adverbs and hobbies and are taught and so on. Each chapter has something new – new grammar, new vocabulary, new reading skills, new pronunciation points, and so on. Thus the structure of course books shows us that they are not concerned with deepening knowledge of a given form, only introducing it or giving minimal practice in it beyond a token review unit, or test. They do not concentrate on the amount of revisiting and revising necessary for acquisition. The assumption underlying most courses and course books is that our learners have ‘met’ or ‘done that now’ and we don’t need to go back to it, so we can move on. Adopting this view of language teaching (that ‘teaching equals learning’ implicit in these materials) is a massive mistake if that is all we do. We have seen we need to meet the language features a lot in order to learn them. We also must meet them under the right conditions.

Very often in language programs I see teachers using native materials with the intention of exposing the learner to ‘authentic’ texts. This is fine if, and this is a huge if, if the learner can deal with it. If not, then the text is noise and frustrational (for the teacher and learner) and not instructional but interfering with instruction.

Learners also must meet these items in real contexts to see how they work together, to see how they fit together. In other words learners must get a ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ for how the language works. This can only be done by meeting the language items very often and by seeing them work together in actual language use (i.e. from their reading or listening). This depth of knowledge gives learners the depth of language awareness and confidence to feel comfortable with the language that will enable them to speak or write. Thus any program that does not allow learners to develop their comfort zone of language is denying them the chance to progress to productive language use.

This depth of knowledge of language must, and can only, be acquired through constant massive exposure. 

[For older children, this massive task requires massive amounts of reading and listening. For younger children, or for slow starters, the best way is to join Le Beaumont's English program once or twice a week. We build up this depth of knowledge through focus use around topics of interest to children.]

Even after several years of English education, Japanese learners cannot make even simple sentences. Simply put, they did not meet enough language to make sense of what they were been taught in school. The endless drudgery emphasizing only abstract knowledge for tests, at the expense of language use, compounds this problem.
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Learning English, vocabulary

English is made up of a very few extremely common words that make up the bulk of the language we meet. In written text, we know that about 2000 word families (words including the inflections e.g. helped, helping, and common derivations e.g. helpless unhelpful) cover about 85-90% of general texts (Nation, 2001). However, vocabulary learning is more than just learning words. There are the shades of meaning, the nuances, the pronunciation to learn as well. 

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http://erfoundation.org/wordpress/