Self Reflection

It is totally understandable that parents are willing to give their

children a proper guidance and a great education. However, since

there are multiple ways for children to develop their language

ability, like environmental factors specify to the visual stimuli or

auditory stimuli, parents do not need to worry too much related to

their children's language development. Also, here are several

recommendations may proffer some effective methods for you to

enhance Tam's language capacity, basing on materials from our

course.

According to the information you mentioned, we have a general

mind about Tam, a twenty-month-old male child. Before given our

recommendations, we would like to specify phases that Tam stays

in, and then we are able to share our perspectives with you and

offer useful suggestions. As the

theory of

Adamson and Chance

goes

, all children are undergoing three major phases related to their

language development (

Adamson & Chance, 1998

):

•

Phase one: 0 – 6 months, where children could notice the

environment around them.

•

Phase two: 6 – 12 months, where children are trying to

engage in communications with simple words.

•

Phase three: 12 months and older, where children could

communicate with others.

So, we could match Tam to the phase three, and it is the right

time

that

Tam should start to incorporate language into their

communicative interactions with other people.

As his parents, you

may consider creating more opportunities for Tam to contact with

different people, like his friends or your neighbors, in order to

promote his language capacit

y. In this way, Tam could develop his

language in practice, and you could understand which level does

Tam involved. Since Tam is only twenty months years old, it is

possible that he cannot use language well as us. However, such

situation does not indicate a harbinger of low ability or

communication disorders. After all, he is a beginner in

communication, so you should encourage him attempting to speak

and correcting any mistakes. Also, maybe he has not shown any

interests linked to social activities or fail to communicate with his

friends for some reasons. Under this situation, parents as you should

force him to

join social interactions and

express views with

his own

words and even complete sentences

. Otherwise, he will miss such

significant period and fall behind, compared with peers who involved

in different kinds of communication. So far, you must notice that

Tam should be able to communicate, at twenty months old, with his

own words or sentences.

Furthermore,

we need to be familiar with the

average language

proficiency of children in Tam's age, in order to evaluate Tam's

language ability. By such comparison, we could understand the

advantages and disadvantages related to Tam's language. For

instance, if other children in the same age are able to communicate

with a simple sentence that contains a subject and predicate verb,

we may take measures to train Tam how to form a sentence with

words he known. Or he may be diffident to communicate. Actually,

according to Pence and Justice, researchers on the child's language

development, children around 20 months as Tam could use 30 single

words, and by the age of two, children can speak with more than 50

words and even arrange those words into sentences (Pence &

Justice, 2011). Therefore, before any measures are taken, I suggest

you pay attention to Tam's speaking, because the more you know

Tam, the better you could specify his performances and offer proper

assistances. Only correcting his mistakes could parents help Tam

make a huge improvement.

After identifying Tam's performances, we may concentrate on

your responsibilities and how you could improve Tam's language

capacity. Among all materials we learned, I would like to introduce

one simple but effective method, that is, environmental impacts. As

a twenty-month-old boy, Tam starts to notice the environment he

involved, and gather information from his surroundings. The result

of a research from the University of Michigan could be a good

example. Researchers found that c

hildren at Tam's stage can

recognize things that belong to them, which strongly emphases the

relationship with children and the environment they involved.

For

Tam's language development, you could ask Tam to read books,

which with simple words or reads stories for him. According to the

theory in our lecture, the child is on an active quest for knowledge,

environment and culture that have a significant impact on cognitive

development (Vygotsky & Skinner, n.d.). Both Skinner and Vygotsky

support the notion that children develop language due to nurture

and environmental exposure, since children are behaviorists.

Skinner has an operant and complete conditioning theory, in which

he reports that language is acquired through modeling and

reinforcement. As for Vygotsky, he tells us that language

development is related to child's life experiences, and thus,

language learning is directly linked to their environment. So we can

determine that children improve their communication ability by

nurture. Take one of our group members as an example. When he

was a little baby, his mother often told him a story before going to

bed and encouraged him to read more books, which help him

recognize more words and talk fluently. These activities from adults

not only could help him form a logical expression, but also guide

him to arrange words in sentences.

Therefore, environmental factors

could be an effective way to improve Tam's language ability.

Professor Bergen from Miami University notes that there is

increasingly evidences to show that high quality imaginative play is

an important facilitator of perspective