All My Children

There is no set of rules of how to talk to a child that can even approach what you unconsciously know.

Brown is responding above to the question ‘How can a child’s learning of language be facilitated?’ In thinking of the ways in which teachers can help children communicate we have, like Brown, taken as our starting point the skills and strategies of the natural and spontaneous parent. A great deal of what we have to say is either an enhancement or clarification of what adults normally do. We do not believe that language can be dispensed to children, or taught as a subject set apart from the rest of the child’s learning experience. When teachers ask what they need to do differently should a child have communication problems, the simple answer is to communicate. In Brown’s terms, that means ‘to understand and to be understood’. When conditions for communication are right, the child’s active impetus for language learning will be harnessed. Make communication purposeful and meaningful and the child will be motivated to discover language through using it. In other words, the adult stimulates and facilitates language interaction, but it is the child’s task to piece together the rules of the game.

The underlying philosophy of this approach is that children’s communication difficulties are best understood by observing how children use language in the different environments in which they live, play, and learn. Instead of seeing language difficulties as residing wholly within the child, attention is focussed on the patterns of interaction between child and others. In planning language intervention we shall be emphasising factors in the adult’s style of behaviour, the physical organisation of the school, co-ordination of support agencies and resources, and aspects of the curriculum. These are the major variables which teachers can control. As we saw, a diversity of factors influence the child’s potential for learning, such as intact senses, physical and intellectual skills, and a nurturing family environment. Most, if not all, of these variables are outside the teachers‘ control. It follows that by optimising conditions for learning and developing strategies for language interaction to take place, the effort invested i_s much more likely to be repaid. Where the learning context is given a low order of priority in face of more obvious learning obstacles, such as a severe hearing loss, or the limited ability customarily associated with Down’s syndrome, then we may be guilty of exacerbating a child’s difficulties by providing less-than-nurturing opportunities in which the child can progress.

The term ‘naturalistic‘ has sometimes been applied to the approach we recommend. In order to apply such an approach we have to be absolutely clear about the natural circumstances in which spontaneous language interaction takes place. One central process we shall be discussing concerns the strategies for conversation adopted by adults. Adjustments to adult speech in contexts of meaningful activity provide clear evidence from which children can learn. The view that language cannot be taught directly, or in isolation, but reflects the sharing of experience, should not imply that we can be hazy in our thinking about the objectives of our teaching. The starting point must always be a careful consideration of where the child is in terms of the skills already mastered, and what we hope the child will achieve. The next step is to use the teaching objectives which have been set, in order to plan appropriate learning opportunities. Whether, in fact, the teaching experience is a fostering and helpful one for the child concerned, can only be gauged by monitoring whether the objectives are achieved over time.

The major differences between the approach advocated here and other kinds of intervention are ones of focus and of control. The present focus lies on the communication context: the social situations in which language arises, what it means to the participants, the intentions realised through using it, and the patterns of interaction between children and adults which enhance language development. Language behaviour is spontaneous in the sense that contributions are made freely, without external control. Other approaches, such as behaviour therapy, have been based on techniques derived from learning theory, usually applied in a clinical setting, in which language is deliberately controlled by a therapist. Responses such as looking behaviour, sounds or words may be elicited from the child and then reinforced in some way, perhaps by rewarding the child with food or praise. The focus of attention is on the form, or content, of what the child says, rather than the social interaction between the people involved.

Direct teaching techniques, where the child is a passive participant in language exercises set by a teacher or therapist, are usually justified on the grounds that a child has already failed to learn in more ‘natural‘ contexts. Several points need to be made here, without wishing to be didactic, so that teachers can make informed choices about the way they work. Firstly, few nursery or school environments may actually provide the richness of language interaction employed by children at home, although they may claim to be ‘natural‘. Schools, therefore, can be helped towards more nurturing styles of interaction. Secondly, individualised training of specific language skills has its pitfalls. A great deal of time is usually required to improve performance across what is usually a very narrow range of language forms. The most fundamental criticism, however, is that language learnt during training may not be used spontaneously by the child in other settings, and the function of language in the child’s social world may be ignored. As we said earlier in relation to language ‘kits’ and programmes, highly structured interventions alter the nature of the linguistic and social environment in ways which may be unhelpful to language learning.

Those who have been developing ‘behavioural’ methods of teaching have, in fact, moved on from individual training to a far more ecological approach which takes into account relationships between the child and the environment necessary for language development. ‘Behavioural’ and ‘natural‘ styles are not necessarily incompatible. In a recent paper by Rogers-Warren, Warren, and Baer ‘ideal’ environments for language learning are described, which incorporate elements of normal interactive settings, together with behavioural principles, such as feedback and reinforcement. For those who feel strongly that children need deliberate exposure to specific items of language, there is no reason why language lessons should not be designed to strengthen the learning from less formal settings. A short period could be set aside for this kind of practice session as an adjunct to the child’s day-to-day language experience. For the teacher working within a mainstream school setting, some thought needs to be given to what is practicable and appropriate, as well as theoretically plausible. The strategies for intervention which follow are based, to a greater or lesser degree, on the belief that language is learned through complex interactive processes involving children and adults, as they live, play and learn together.

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