Jj is for Jottings 55. Helping Your Child’s Language – Technique 1: Modelling.
Shikha and Shanti as kittens. They have to be careful when in the paddock with the alpacas because the alpacas will sometimes chase them. Although we refer to them as “the kids”, we didn’t have to bother with language modelling for them. Besides, they’re Burmese, and I wouldn’t know which language to model!
There are several ways in which parents naturally encourage the development of children’s language in conversation, and you may be using some or all of them without being aware of it. Being aware of these techniques will either reinforce for you that you are already using them unconsciously or help you to apply them to enhance your child’s language development. These techniques are: modelling, expansion, recasting and expatiation, which is a rather pompous word for maintaining the child’s topic but adding information. We will deal with each one in a separate post. The techniques can be used by anyone who spends time with children, including teachers.
MODELLING is providing the child with grammatically-correct phrases or sentences containing a particular target structure.
For example, if you notice your child omits the word “is” in sentences, you can make a point of looking through a picture book – anything with pictures of people or animals doing something (i.e. action pictures) – and say, “Look, the boy IS chasing the dog and the dog IS trying to hide from him.” When you are out and about with your child you can do the same thing, “See that lady over there – she IS pushing a pram.” You can label what is happening on television in the same way (as long as you don’t interrupt the program and annoy those watching.)
If your child is having speech therapy, this is one of the general things you will be asked to do, in addition to more specific exercises.
We’ll cover expansion next time.