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Don't use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good
and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those
who hear them.
Ephesians 4:29 (New Living Translation)
ON WORDS…cited
in Bits and Pieces
The right word spoken at the right time sometimes achieves miracles.
Good communication is as
stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) Writer and aviator
Milestones for normal language and speech development:
- During the first 6 mos.
Infants develop prespeech vocal skills through practice of crying,
cooing, babbling and echoing.
- At 9 mos. The child has
developed a sense of pitch and intonation which are stress patterns
- By 12 mos. Certain words
emerge that have meaning
- By 2 yrs. the child connects
words into phrases
- By 3 yrs. the speech is
pretty much intelligible to most adults, and the child uses several
phrases and sentences
- By 4 yrs. the child uses
about 90% of the grammatical concepts we use in our English language
- By 5 yrs. the child has
a receptive vocabulary of 6-10,000 words
- By 7 yrs. the child has
learned to produce most of the speech sounds of our language (44
consonants and vowels)
Dialectal differences and cultural
differences are very important things to consider when assessing
a child or adult. Several dialects of Standard English exist in
the US. They are identified with regional, racial, ethnic, or language
groups.
For example:
Black Standard American English and sometimes referred to as Ebonics=
I be home later (future tense)
Southern White Nonstandard English= How ya'all doin? (slang words)
Hispanic English= The girl are playing. (plural -s)
Appalachian English= It's yourn house. (slang words)
Asian American Engish= It him book. (pronoun usage)
I celebrate cultural differences
and I teach my students to do the same. I teach tolerance. I teach
the children that there is a time and place for differences in dialect.
I explain code-switching and how the business/academic has one set
of English standards while cultural groups have different rules
and usage.
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Spoken
