The Early Learning Goals for the new foundation stage are strong on key skills and lists of objectives. But practitioners, and families, may find it more helpful to concentrate on young children's enthusiasms, drives and innate language competence. This particularly applies to the area of communication and language, where the powerful linking of our innate capacity for language with a strong drive in infancy to bond with carers and join a human community is the making of us all.
The QCA working party advising on the new curriculum framework wants this area of learning to be renamed 'communication, language and literacy' to take account of the importance of verbal and non-verbal communication in our development.
General principles
Adults who spend their professional and private lives with young children are already inclined to nurture and extend their language and communication, for the very good reason that this is an enjoyable way of getting in touch with another mind and personality. But several important general principles about language emerge from the practice and the theory of care for babies and children:
l Children are sensitive and enthusiastic communicators from birth.
2 Children have an innate ability for tuning in to non-verbal communications and spoken language and using them for their own purposes.
3 Children are passionately and persistently curious about whatever crosses their paths, from bits of dust and fallen leaves, to new people, new sounds, pictures, print, magazines and books.
4 Children have a driving need to make sense of life and experiences. This is a crucial survival skill, and communication and early language are key features of it.
Living proof
However, we need to keep very close to the real children who are living evidence of these principles. So here is 22-month-old Dylan sorting out a common feature of modern life:
A doorstep salesman had been told very firmly by Dylan's grandfather that he did not wish to buy his fresh fish and the door was slammed, emphasising the annoyance felt. During this incident Dylan watched from between his grandfather's legs, but once the door was shut he stamped back down the hall shouting with great anger, 'No buy fish'. In itself this was a remarkably creative new three-word utterance by Dylan, but he had also picked up the emotional tone of the annoyance felt by his grandfather. Even more interesting is the fact that Dylan has a long-standing passion for large fish, especially sharks, and 'fish' and 'shark' were among his first words and feature in many of his favourite books.
Dylan's ability to recognise his limited but very meaningful collection of his first words, in tandem with his astounding sensitivity to the emotional tone of adult conversations, reminds us of the significance of communication for all later language development, learning and literacy.
A brief look at these key aspects of the language curriculum in the Foundation Stage may help us put some flesh on the bones of the early learning goals.
Communication and language
Language development does not start with children's first words, or with the Foundation Stage of early education. Words rest on a foundation of social communications laid down in the earliest hours, weeks and months of life. Newborn infants are attentive, playful and friendly and they pay special attention to eye contact with carers and the movements of their lips, tongue and mouth. They can even imitate these movements, including some of the expressions and hand gestures of their carers. These are non-verbal forms of 'getting in touch' with another person which remain important for all later developments in language and for other non-verbal signing systems, as well as supporting social skills, empathy, co-operation and play.
A child's first words, when they come, emerge from months of listening to others talk and enjoying wordless conversations, significant noises, facial expressions, gestures and the whole complex business of living with other people and negotiating needs, feelings and meanings.
The lessons for all of us are obvious. We have to value and create extra opportunities for non-verbal communications after spoken language is established. This is important for all children, but crucially so for those whose first language is not English, because when they enter group care and education settings they have to depend on picking up as many non-verbal communicative clues they can.
The foundation of literacy
If communication is the foundation for language, then literacy must also depend on the same basis of developing shared meanings and communicating, before words and writing come into play. Literacy is a special extension of the world of words and has to build on effective talking and listening and a growing love of the sounds and rhythms of oral language.
It is essential to focus the early years language curriculum on talk, discussion and activity, with a high priority given to play with the sounds and musical qualities of languages. This will involve developing the oral traditions of poetry, rhyme, nonsense, storytelling, songs and music, rather than struggling with formal, inappropriate and often incorrect lessons about phonics.
For most of us, literacy is all about books and writing, but for the youngest children it starts with making marks and drawing messages, listening to stories and looking at books, over and over again! We must give children the time and the opportunities to hear favourite stories many, many times and to spend lengthy periods investigating the pictures and books and talking about the characters and events depicted in them.
Reading is about investigating print and recreating the message it carries for our own purposes. Unless this 'basic' is established in the early years, we cannot hope to make children into lifelong readers.
If we want our setting or home to support young writers, we have to fill it with lots of examples of everyday print (tickets, wrappers, recipes, notices, labels and so on) and an ample supply of paper, pens, crayons, charcoal and paint, so that children become active print investigators and creators who can make their own marks in the world. Writing is about creating permanent messages, but an excessive and early emphasis on forming letters and holding pencils 'correctly' will not teach this essential lesson. l
Marian Whitehead's most recent book is Supporting Language and Literacy Development in the Early Years (Open University Press, 12.99)
