California Preschool Learning Foundations - ECEZero2Three ...

LANGUAGE AND LITERACY
72
It is important to note that appropriate
(or accepted) language or behavior
is that which commonly occurs in the
child’s environment or community.
For example, in some communities or
environments, people make eye contact
when they speak, while in other
communities they do not. In the first
few years of life, children are not very
skilled conversationalists, only able to
(typically) maintain a conversational
focus for one or two turns. As children
become older and near the end of the
preschool years, they can maintain a
conversation for several turns and take
on more of the responsibility of maintaining
a conversational focus. Also, as
children become older, they develop an
increasingly sophisticated understanding
of the pragmatics of communication,
or the social rules that govern the
use of language and other communicative
behaviors.
The fourth component of the foundation
emphasizes the child’s ability to
use language for narrative purposes.
With narrative, the child’s task is,
essentially, to produce an “extended
monologue” as she relays an experience
she had, a story she has developed,
or something she wants to do
in the future. Narratives include both
real events (the personal narrative) as
well as fictional or imagined events
(the fictional narrative). There are clear
developmental changes in narrative
production as children mature during
the preschool years (Umiker-Sebeok
1979). Children at three years of age
may produce narratives organized as a
series of unrelated actions or characters
(e.g., “the bear, the cat, the gorilla,
the end”). At around 48 months of age,
children begin to organize narratives to
follow a causal or temporal sequence
of events (e.g., “The bear was angry
because her babies woke her up. And
then . . .”). The narratives of four- and
five-year-old children tend to be longer
and contain more information than
those of three-year-olds (Curenton and
Justice 2004). They contain more multiclausal
sentences, more words, and a
greater diversity of words. At the same
time, children’s narratives become
more coherent as children develop and
become less likely to omit key information
that the listener needs to follow
the events (Gutierrez-Clellen and Iglesias
1992; Peterson 1990).
Teachers can help children to
develop the different aspects of conversation
described previously. For
instance, teachers can provide opportunities
for all children to develop and
apply a range of communication intentions.
Teachers can develop skills in
maintaining a conversational focus
by repeating what children say and
extending children’s conversational
contributions—techniques that promote
children’s conversational abilities
(Girolametto and Weitzman 2002).
Additionally, teachers can both model
and promote the use of the appropriate
social conventions of language. Finally,
teachers can support children’s narrative
comprehension—which involves
the ability to negotiate vocabulary,
grammar, and background knowledge
on the subject, to process information,
to engage their phonological memory
(Baddeley 1986), and when producing
a narrative, to take into account
the listener’s needs. Teachers can
elicit children’s demonstration of phonological
memory by requesting that
children produce immediate recalls of
verbally presented material (Lonigan
2004).
Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 1 • California Department of Education