Lecture 8: Academic Skills in Early and Middle Childhood Flashcards
When do children’s phonological skills improve? And what are these improvements?
By age 4, children can be understood by unfamiliar adults because they have improved by practice talking, greater control of speech muscles, and motivation
By what age do children have a vocab of up to 10,000 words
Age 6
What is the hierarchical organization of words?
Children tend to learn the basic level of a category first (e.g., dog rather than mammal or Doberman)
What 2 factors improve grammar?
- Morphology
- Use of Clauses
What is Morphology?
Rules about how words are formed (e.g., adding ‘s’ to make plurals)
What is Use of Clauses?
Combining clauses—the smallest grammatical unit
that expresses a complete thought—with words like ‘and’ ‘but’ etc.
What is over-regularization?
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
How do children learn the norms of language use
– Say no more or less than required
– Be relevant
– Avoid ambiguity and confusion
What is Emergent Literacy?
It refers to the suite of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are precursors to reading and writing
What two main skills do reading and writing require?
- Oral language skills
Knowing words - Code-related skills: The formalities of writing, sounding out, and reading letters and words on a page (e.g., connecting letters to sounds)
What is outside-in reading?
Figuring out the meanings of words,
sentences, and paragraphs
– Conceptual understanding
What is inside-out reading?
Decoding letters into sounds, mapping sounds to words, and
discriminating words on a page
What factors fall under outside-in reading?
- Contextual units (narrative)
- Semantic units (concept)
- Language units (words)
What factors fall under inside-out reading
- Language units (words)
- Sound units (phonemes)
- Print units (graphemes)
How can we teach reading?
Through a phonics approach
What is a phonics approach?
Focuses on inside-out “decoding” skills
– distinguishes good and poor readers
What is Phonemic awareness?
the ability to identify the sounds that make up words
What are the three phonemic awareness skills distinguish good and poor readers?
- 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/.
When do number concepts appear in children?
Number concepts appear between 2 and 3 years of age
- “more than” “bigger” etc.
When do children learn the meaning of “one” “two” “three”
By 3.5 years
What is the cardinal principle?
Each number in a sequence represents a specific number of elements in a set
What is Spatial Cognition?
The ability to understand and represent shapes, locations, and spatial relations among objects (e.g., “on top of” “triangle” “behind”)