Strategies and Activities

Oral language develops as children feel the need to communicate their needs, feelings, and ideas and to engage others in social interactions. A primary way to support young children's language development is to structure activities and occasions when conversation is fostered in a natural and spontaneous manner. Teachers bring further support to these situations when they:

• act as good language models
• show genuine interest in what children have to say
• find ways to extend children's vocabularies and repertoire of sentence structures without placing undue pressure on children to conform to adult language standards.

The activities in this section focus on these types of supports.

We support children's language development when we talk with them in ways that show we care about them and are more interested in their ideas and experiences than the correctness of their language forms. We develop their language when we show we understand their intentions and elaborate on the sentence structures that they use without losing our informal conversational style.