Oral Language

Effective communication is a very important aspect of people’s life. The first association that a person may have in this context is oral language. The essence of this concept is absolutely understandable for adults. Thus, they forget that the foundations of oral communication are laid in early childhood, when people just learn how to speak. This paper summarizes the article “Young Children’s Oral Language Development” by Celia Genishi about oral language and how it is learned and developed by children, and strives to prove that the atmosphere created by a child’s family and language-teaching techniques that it uses can significantly help him or her to quickly develop oral communication skills.

As it was mentioned in the introduction, adults do not realize that their communicative skills start to develop very early. The analyzed article by Genishi (n.d.) tells about the formation of oral language in children. The author states that people are born to speak and they have an innate ability to formulate rules and perceive the system of the language as they consider most appropriate at an early age. She (n.d.) claims that “language occurs through an interaction among genes (which hold innate tendencies to communicate and be sociable), environment, and the child's own thinking abilities” (para. 6).

Aside from the mentioned facts, the author discusses oral language components, namely, phonological, semantic and syntactic, and tells about the sequence of learning and application of these components by children. She gives some special attention to the pragmatic rules of the oral language, which are to be gradually learned by children as well. The last aspect of Genishi’s article (n.d.) contains some practical recommendations as to what parents and teachers can do to accelerate and improve the development of the oral language skills of children. These recommendations include: (1) encouraging interaction in all possible ways; (2) treating children as usual conversationalists; (3) remembering that they are the “chief resources of language development” (Genishi, n.d., para. 22). Thus, the material is well-organized and covers all issues of the oral speech formation.

The considered article conveys some new facts about how children develop oral communication skills and become sociable. I have learned at what age children start pronouncing words and sentences, and the fact that this age may significantly differ depending on the abilities of a child. Now I know that when children start to use written language, they should be inspired to continue obtaining oral communication skills, because this combination is useful for their overall development. I have also found out that constantly correcting the way a child pronounces words is not productive. I would like to learn more about the right time to pay attention to children’s mistakes and how a parent should act in this situation.

The information in the article is useful for the course and can be easily incorporated into the classroom. I understand that being a teacher does not only mean teaching children some basic disciplines. This work requires a specialist to have some basic knowledge of children’s psychology and biology, especially when socialization starts and children obtain communication skills. Therefore, if a teacher knows how the oral language is formed and what to do to promote its development, he or she will facilitate mastering of all other disciplines for children.

To conclude, it is important to note that effective oral communication is a key to success of any person. If his or her parents acknowledge this fact from the very beginning when a child is born, they will work hard to create some favorable environment for the child’s development. It is essential to emphasize that an inborn ability of a person to speak may be enhanced by certain conditions, like promotion of social interaction, different communicative exercises, and perception of a child as a normal communicator. All these recommendations assist in forming the concept of pragmatic language rules and adapting a child to any social environment.