California Preschool Learning Foundations - ECEZero2Three ...

Griffin 2004; Dickinson and Snow
1987; Dickinson and Tabors 1991;
Snow 1983).
Children learn much of their vocabulary
and basic language concepts
indirectly through their interaction
with others, especially adults (Cunningham
and Stanovich 1998; Hayes
and Ahrens 1988; Miller and Gildea
1987; Nagy and Anderson 1984; Nagy,
Herman, and Anderson 1985; Nagy
and Herman1987; Sternberg 1987;
Swanborn and De Glopper 1999).
Children also acquire vocabulary
through direct, explicit instruction.
For example, Biemiller (1999) and
Stahl (1999) reviewed several studies
and found that children can acquire
and retain two or three words a day
through instruction involving contextualized
introduction and explanation
of new words. Other researchers have
also found that direct and explicit
approaches are effective in increasing
children’s vocabulary (see Elley
1989; Feitelson, Kita, and Goldstein
1986; Whitehurst and others 1988).
With adequate instruction most children
can acquire new vocabulary at
rates necessary to reach “grade level”
vocabulary by the middle years in
elementary school (Biemiller 2001).
For example, Hart and Risley (1995)
found that when teachers provided
40 or more hours of rich linguistic
interactions per week, children were
able to perform linguistic tasks at the
expected level. Similarly, Landry’s
study (in press) demonstrates that parents
who do not frequently engage in
quality conversations with their children
can be coached to support their
children’s language and literacy skills
more effectively.
California Department of Education • Preschool Learning Foundations, Volume 1
75
Grammar. During the first five years
of a child’s life, language acquisition
develops toward an adult-like grammar.
“Grammar” refers to the way
in which phrases and sentences are
structured to make meaning. Children
seem to have an innate propensity
toward learning the grammatical rules
that govern their language. The grammatical
rules include the organization
of basic sentences (e.g., subject + verb
+ object: Juan drew the picture) and
the joining of clauses and phrases to
elaborate the basic sentence structure
(e.g., subject + verb + object and
subject + verb + object: Juan drew the
picture and he is hanging it) (Chomsky
1957). Grammar also provides rules
about the way in which nouns can be
elaborated with determiners and adjectives
(e.g., the big brown dog), verbs
can be elaborated to share information
about time (e.g., will be running), and
phrases can be created for prepositions
(e.g., on the table), adverbs (e.g., very,
very slowly), and other parts of speech.
Between the second and fifth year of
life, children master virtually all the
rules required for an adult-like grammar
and can comprehend and produce
sentences with embedded clauses
(e.g., “That boy who came today is
my friend”), as well as sentences with
multiple subjects and predicates (e.g.,
“I am going and then he will get me”).
The rate at which children achieve
syntactic precision, however, varies
from child to child (Chapman 2000).
The proportion of complex sentences
contained in children’s language use
ranges from 5 percent to 30 percent
(Huttenlocher and others 2002). This
variability in the rate of growth has
been linked to children’s experiences
LANGUAGE AND LITERACY