My Language and Literacy Development Journey has been a great experience so far. I have gained much insights on the developmental milestones for children from birth to 8 years old from past and present research.  Here is my introduction and Section 3 of my paper:

Language and Literacy Development Journey

Introduction

My Child in Context

Rance Allen Clark is American born 8 year old. He resides in a middle upper class neighborhood in the South Bay area of Southern California. He appears to be a happy child as he is the only male grandchild for mother’s and father’s family. He resides with his mother and father and he has a four year old sister. I know this child rather well as his mother is a dear friend of mine.

Rance’s family is god-fearing, well-educated, and good law abiding citizens. Rance’s dad works for in the customs department for international airport in the city they reside in and his mother is an educator for the local educational agency in a city close to where they reside. Rance has one sister whose name is Raven. Raven is the only female grandchild for both her mother’s and father’s family. With that said both Rance and Raven are used to getting everything they want from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles; including getting a pet fish who they both named Robert. Although Rance is older than Raven, he does not push or orders her around. He treats her respectfully and they appear to have a great brother and sister relationship.

Rance’s prenatal experience was not the best. At seven months of pregnancy his mother learned that she had gestational diabetes. She was scared to share this information with her husband, Rance’s dad, but she eventually told him as she had to give herself daily injections of insulin which she could not hide from him. At seven and a half months of pregnancy, she had to take a leave of absence from teaching in an effort to take better care of herself and her unborn baby boy, Rance. At eight months, Rance’s mother began having difficulty breathing as Rance’s head was pushing upward and he was turning around in the birth ready position. With this challenge, the doctor schedule a C-section which Rance was born a month earlier than his scheduled date. The birthing doctor informed Rance’s parents that his lungs would more than likely be undeveloped and that the hospital was prepared to airlift him to a children’s hospital an hour away. However, Rance’s lungs appeared okay and an airlift was not necessary. After one month of his birth, a thorough examination at the Children’s Hospital confirmed, Rance was perfect in every way.

Both Rance’s mother and father primarily care for him. However, he has an aunt who is love with him and provides a lot of extra basic needs for him; including paying his school tuition at the Lutheran School he attends. Rance has plenty of friends at school and appears to enjoy life. He loves to travel (by plane and ship, but hates long car drives) and go to restaurants for big family dinners.

The only language that is spoken in Rance’s home is English. However in the community where he lives, his neighbors speak English, Spanish, Thai, and Tagalog. At the school Rance attends, those languages are spoken as well. Rance is familiar with different cultures as his home community and school community is diverse and rich in culture.

Because English is the native language for Rance’s family, His parents believe that English is the language to be spoken at home; however they desire for him to be bilingual and biliterate (proficient in English and Spanish) as it will better equip him for the world around him. It will even make him marketable in our professional world; opening up many job opportunities for him in the future.

There are different language/literacy-rich experiences that are available to Rance and his family. Many of those experiences include continuous attendance in school, visiting the local library, traveling, shopping, and learning a foreign language. All of these experiences will help him on his language development journey.

Developmental Characteristics

Toddler (1 to 3 years Old)

Toddler age is from one years old to three years old. During the toddler stage, a child is progressing from initial stages which we call infancy into preschool years. Toddlers began to develop even more physically. Their motor development develops as well; however at a slow pace. What is amazing is that during this sage children develop emotionally, intellectually, and socially. The toddler stage is a period of great development. Their development includes fine motor, gross motor, hearing, physical, speech, social, and vision; these are called developmental milestones. During milestones, especially this one, children begin to learn, move, play, and speak.

          During this stage, Rance Allen Clark was taking his first step, doing a lot of smiling, and waving bye-bye. He began to do what most children do between the ages of one and two years old. Specifically at age two, Rance began moving around more and more. He became aware of his surroundings. He began to explore new objects, He also began to understand people and was able to distinguish between people who were special in his life and people who were strangers. He only wanted people whom he was familiar with such as his mother, father, grandparents, godparents, aunts, uncles, and people who he saw at church to either hold or speak to him. However picking him up and holding him was a challenge at times. Rance was becoming independent during this stage. He wanted to explore as he walked around and really did not want anyone to pick him up. As Rance became more independent, he became a little defiant; saying no to his parents when he probably should have been saying yes or ok. But for the most part he followed instructions and directions.

         

A child's environment is the most critical component to language development. An environment free of abuse and excess stress frees the brain to create the necessary language connections. In such an environment, adults need to provide a language-rich, nurturing world in which attentive caregivers encourage a child's language efforts, however primitive (Bohannon & Bonvillian, 1997). Rance’s language development was definitely increasing. During his toddler stage, he began to verbally imitate the words, phrases, and sentences of those around him. In the early stages of language development, the brain is programmed to attend to speech sounds and begin to mimic them (Child Development Institute, n.d.). He even began singing songs that heard at church, on television from commercials and cartoons. His favorite at the time being “Yo Gabba Gabba” (A fun show that encourage kids to sing and dance). He also began to say the names of those he was familiar with.

          At approximately 18 months, children appear to have achieved a mental system for representing the sounds of their language and producing them within the constraints of their articulatory abilities. At this point children’s production of speech sounds becomes consistent across different words ̶  in contrast to the earlier period when the sound form for each word was a separate mental entity (Stoel-Gammon, 2007). Although Rance was not in an early childhood center, preschool, or head start during his early years, he was definitely on a progressive path towards language and literacy. He met the targets as defined for toddlers (DeBruin-Pareck, Perkinson, & Ferderer, n.d.):

-         Make sounds that imitate the tones and rhythms that adults use when talking

-         Respond to gestures and facial expressions

-         Begin to associate words they hear frequently with what the words mean

-         Make cooing, babbling sounds in the crib which gives way to enjoying rhyming and nonsense word games with a parent or caregiver

-         Play along in games such as "peek-a-boo" and "pat-a-cake"

-         Handle objects such as board books and alphabet blocks in their play

-         Recognize certain books by their covers

-         Pretend to read books

-         Understand how books should be handled

-         Share books with an adult as a routine part of life

-         Name some objects in a book

-         Talk about characters in books

-         Look at pictures in books and realize they are symbols of real things

-         Listen to stories

-         Ask or demand that adults read or write with them

-         Begin to pay attention to specific print such as the first letters of their names

-         Scribble with a purpose (trying to write or draw something)

-         Produce some letter-like forms and scribbles that resemble, in some way, writing

Rance’s development aligned with the milestones that for typically developing children. Because he was surrounded by adults who were very nurturing and verbally communicated with him and read to him every chance they received, his language was developing as defined by the language development domains.
The environment itself is also a significant factor. Children learn the specific variety of language (dialect) that the important people around them speak (Genishi, 1998). In addition, he spoke they directed their speech to him intentionally. Rance’s family was very supportive as Rance was acquiring language. Directed speech might be particularly useful for learning vocabulary because, as noted earlier, word learning is likely to occur in situations of mutual engagement where the speaker’s referential intentions are made clear to the child (Tomasello, 1995). Some may say that parents are excited during the development of their first child and give much attention to their overall development, I believe that there is much truth to that as Rance’s parents provided every opportunity for him to hear words and say words.  His dad spoke more to him than his mother did at this stage. In fact, when researchers studied the interactions of fathers and children, they discovered that fathers spoke with their children for only minutes per day (Lewis & Weinraub, 1974).

References

Bohannon, J.N., III, & Bonvillian, J.D. (1997). Theoretical approaches to

language acquisition. In J.K. Gleason (Ed.), The Development of Language(4th ed.), Boston:Allyn & Bacon.

DeBruin-Parecki, A., Perkinson, K., & Ferderer, L. (n.d.). Literacy

milestones: Birth to age 3. Retrieved September 29, 2015, from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/literacy-milestones-birth-age-3

Genishi, C. (1998). Young Children's Oral Language Development. ERIC

Digest. ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education.

Lewis, M. & Weinraub, M. (1974). Sex of parent X sex of child:

Socioemotional development. In R. Richart, R. Friedman, & R. Vande Wiele (Eds.),Sex Differences in Behavior. New York: Wiley.

Stoel-Gammon C, Sosa AV. Phonological development. In: Hoff E, Shatz

M, eds. Blackwell Handbook of Language Development. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishing Ltd; 2007: 238-256.

Tomasello, M. (1995). Joint attention as social cognition. In C. Moore, P.

Dunham & J. Philip (eds), Joint attention : Its origins and role in development, 103–130. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates