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“It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics. The social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics.”

All of this understanding is at the bleeding edge of what we understand; new technology is being developed to better understand these phenomena.

“We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child’s brain development.”

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

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Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

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Infant brains are open to learning in a unique way. Babies have these brains that kind of work like “rocket scientists” for language acquisition.

There's a critical period for this genius: children are expert in acquiring language skills until around age 7. Ability falls off here, and by the time puberty starts, language acquisition skills drop sharply. The speaker Patricia Kuhl describes these children as "citizens of the world”.

“Babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there’s a systematic decline.”

“Babies all over the world are what I like to describe as citizens of the world.”

The way babies do this learning is by hearing all language noises and cataloguing them in their heads. They are subconsciously tracking noise frequency, and they create sorts of “statistical maps” of sound frequency.

“What they’re doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear… and it changes their brains.”

Experiments were run by having babies who had so far only heard one language being immersed in another - Mandarin - to see if their cataloguing of the different frequency of Mandarin noises could be tracked, and it can.

It’s essential for babies to be interacting with humans for this - video or technology is not effective. It’s social learning.

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Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning 

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Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning 

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Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning

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Oral language development facilitates print literacy. In this article, we focus on the ways in which teachers can ensure students' speaking and listening skills are developed. We provide a review of effective classroom routines, including some that can be enhanced with technology.

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Listening comprehension is a more sophisticated ability than reading comprehension, especially early on. Many children understand more complex ideas when they listen than when they read. (Reading Rockets)

The gap between listening comprehension and reading comprehension persists through elementary and even middle school. That has implications for how we teach content across grades. (Reading Rockets)

To move students toward reading complex texts, teachers should also bolster students’ abilities to listen and speak about complex topics. (Reading Rockets)

Academic talk, speaking & listening in content-area contexts, should be frequent. The article recommends using about 50% of instructional time in content area learning for collaborative conversations. (Reading Rockets)

Instructional routines that support speaking and listening include:
• Readers’ Theatre
• Presentations (with feedback)
• Listening stations
• Reciprocal teaching (predict, question, clarify, summarize)
• Digital tools: photo narratives, digital storytelling, etc. (Reading Rockets)

Classrooms need a culture change: students should talk every day about content, not just listen passively. Teachers may need to adjust the environment, routines, expectations, and accountability for student talk. (Reading Rockets)

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Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

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Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds, or phonemes. A child's skill in phonological and phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

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Children need to be aware of how sounds work before they can learn to read. Phonological and phonemic awareness are predictors of later reading success or difficulty. (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)

Examples of phonological awareness include segmenting a sentence into words, able to identify words that rhyme, counting the number of syllables in a name, and identifying the syllables in a word. (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)

The 4 levels of phonological awareness are word level, syllable level, onset and rime level, and phonemic awareness level. (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)

Ways children can develop phonemic awareness include:

Recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound

Isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word

Combining or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word

Breaking or segmenting a word into its separate sounds (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)

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“Children can listen to and talk about much more complex ideas than they can read (and probably write) about.” (Reading Rockets)

“Oral language development facilitates print literacy.” (Reading Rockets)

“If we want to ensure that students read increasingly complex informational texts, it seems logical that students should be talking during their content area learning …” (Reading Rockets)

“Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.” (Reading Rockets)

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“Phonological awareness is a critical early literacy skill that helps kids recognize and work with the sounds of spoken language.” (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)

“Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.” (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)

“Phonological and phonemic awareness refer to spoken language- the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words.” (Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness | Reading Rockets)