Lecture 8: Academic Skills in Early and Middle Childhood

Question 1

When do children’s phonological skills improve?

Answer 1

Children’s phonological skills improve rapidly during early childhood
– By age 4, children can be understood by unfamiliar adults

Question 2

By what age do children have a vocab of up to 10,000 words

Answer 2

Age 6

Question 3

What is the hierarchical organization of words?

Answer 3

Children tend to learn the basic level of a category first (e.g., dog rather than mammal or Doberman)

Question 4

What is Morphology?

Answer 4

Rules about how words are formed (e.g., adding ‘s’ to make plurals)

Question 5

What is Use of Clauses?

Answer 5

Combining clauses—the smallest grammatical unit
that expresses a complete thought—with words like ‘and’ ‘but’ etc.

Question 6

What is over-regularization?

Answer 6

The use of a regular morpheme in a word that is irregular, such as saying “taked” rather than “took” for the past tense or “mouses” rather than “mice” for the plural form

Question 7

How do children learn the norms of language use

Answer 7

– Say no more or less than required
– Be relevant
– Avoid ambiguity and confusion

Question 8

What is Emergent Literacy?

Answer 8

It refers to the suite of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are precursors to reading and writing

Question 9

What two main skills do reading and writing require?

Answer 9

1. Oral language skills
   Knowing words
2. Code-related skills: The formalities of writing, sounding out, and reading letters and words on a page (e.g., connecting letters to sounds)

Question 10

What is outside-in reading?

Answer 10

Figuring out the meanings of words,
sentences, and paragraphs

– Conceptual understanding

Question 11

What is inside-out reading?

Answer 11

Decoding letters into sounds, mapping sounds to words, and
discriminating words on a page

Question 12

How can we teach reading?

Answer 12

Through a phonics approach

Question 13

What is a phonics approach?

Answer 13

Focuses on inside-out “decoding” skills

• Phonemic awareness: the ability to identify the sounds that make up words

– distinguishes good and poor readers

Question 14

What are the three phonemic awareness skills distinguish good and poor readers?

Answer 14

• The ability to categorize words by their initial or ending sounds (“ball” starts with a /b/ sound and ends with an /l/ sound)
• The ability to identify words that rhyme (“bat” and “cat”; “pot” and “cot”)
• The ability to figure out the sound that is produced when the first or last letter of a word is dropped, such as dropping “b” from “bat” results in /at/.

Question 15

When do number concepts appear in children?

Answer 15

Number concepts appear between 2 and 3 years of age

• “more than” “bigger” etc.

Question 16

When do children learn the meaning of “one” “two” “three”

Answer 16

By 3.5 years

Question 17

What is the cardinal principle?

Answer 17

each number in a sequence represents
a specific number of elements in a set