Language learning starts at home

All children, except for those with an exceptional degree of handicap, a gross defect of intelligence or a severe impairment of hearing, come to school having learned a great deal of language. This is true regardless of their social class. We can find evidence for  this in Gordon Wells’ (1987) fifteen-year longitudinal study of 128 children across the social spectrum in Bristol. Wells studied the tasks that children can achieve through

talk, such as:

• asking questions;
• making plans;
• recalling past events;
• commenting on the world around them.

He also looked at the range of meanings they could make while carrying out those tasks, and the linguistic shape of their utterances. The findings of the research from their first to their fifth birthdays, seemed to be learning in the same sort of way. By the end of this first phase of the research, for each child all the major linguistic systems were more or less in place. The children knew, for example:

• how to formulate questions in a variety of ways;
• how to form past tenses;
• how to phrase requests in a way that was likely to get a positive response.

Each child had a vocabulary of several thousand words. All this is miraculous enough in itself if one considers that they were only just about five years old and had had few, if any, specific ‘language lessons’. What is truly awesome is that some children at this age have already begun to operate in more than one language. Gordon Wells, who has a nice way with metaphors, describes this early feat of learning as ‘a sheer climb up the face of a cliff ’. It seems regrettable therefore that education research has repeatedly drawn attention to the language failings of some children. We do need to remind ourselves constantly of how much they have in fact achieved.