What can I learn about language and education throughout the life span? - Chapter 10

What is the system of language?

Language is the communication system in which a number of signals (sounds, letters or gestures in sign lanuage) can be combined according to rules, to produce an infinite number of messages. To master a language, a child has to learn basic sounds, how they are combined to form words, how words are combined to form meaningful statements, what words and sentences mean, and how to use language effectively in social interactions. 

Phonemes are the units of sound that can change the meaning of a word, like when you replace the b in bit with a p, it has different meaning. There are more phonemes than letters since letters can have different pronunciation. Languages have their own phonemes and their own combinations of phonemes (we can say brat in English, but not bmat). Morphemes are the units of meaning that exist in a word (view is one morpheme, but adding re - making it review - makes it two morphemes, since the meaning changes). To learn a language, you have to master its syntax (the systematic rules for forming sentences), its semantics (rules about meaning) and its pragmatics (rules for specifying how language is used appropriately in different contexts). And then, producing meaningful speech involves prosody (how the sounds are produced: includes pitch and intonation and duration). 

Language is mainly a product of the left hemisphere. A region named Broca's area is associated with speech production and a region called Wernicke's area associates with comprehension of language. They are connected through the arcuate fasciculus and damage to this can cause a form of aphasia (language disorder) in which the person might hear and understand linguistic input, but cannot vocally repeat it. The right hemisphere shows more activity when processing the melody or rhythm of speech. Learning words succesfully contains connectivity between the left and right supramarginal gyrus in the parietal lobe. Our capacity for acquiring language has a genetic basis. An important gene is FOXP2 which associates with the necessary motor skills for speech. If this gene is damaged, individuals cannot speak. It seems girls have higher concentrations of FOXP2 and they also have advanced language skills. 

Nativists believe the child is biologically programmed to learn language, and humans are born with knowledge of universal grammar (system of common rules to learn any language). Exposure to language then activates areas of the brain that form the language acquisition device (LAD) and so children learn a specific language. Support for nativists comes from the concept of poverty of the stimulus (POTS): children could not learn such a complex communication system with the limited linguistic input they receive. They have to have some biological "help". Furthermore they all go through the same sequences and make similar errors, and these universal aspects occur despite cultural differences in styles of speech by adults. And second-language learning is harder than the native language, so maybe there is a sensitive period in the brain for language. For language, it's "the earlier, the better". 

Environment obviously has a big role, since children learn the language they hear. Conversational parents help language development in their kids, for example showing them conversing involves taking turns, and expanding their spoken words (plane into airplane). Adults also use child-directed speech since adults use different speech than with other adults, and children focus on this speech. Environmental factors can more easily explain semantics and phonology than syntax, because research shows parents do not really pay attention to the syntactic accuracy of their child, but more to the semantics and thus the mechanism behind syntactic development is probably not reinforcement. Also children use language that does not seem like imitations of adults ("It swimmed"). So the environment helps but can not explain everything.

For deaf children, sign language development is similar to normal language development. They "babble" in sign language and their caregivers use child-directed signs. Brain activity is similar as well. 

So nature and nurture are both essential for language, and language development is interrelated to other developments that take place like perceptual, cognitive and social development. 

What does language mean to the infant?

Infants are sensitive to speech and the native language from birth, and they also know where pauses in speech fall and when words are stressed. By 7.5 months they demonstrate word segmentation ability when they detect a target word in a stream of speech, thus they understand a sentence is not one long word but a string of words. Repetition of words helps to get to this. Infants make sounds from birth and from 5 months they realize sounds can affect their caregiver's behavior. Prelinguistic sounds and the feedback it gets are a forerunner for meaningful dialogue. Around 6-8 weeks, cooing happens: repeating vowel-like sounds like "aaah" when content. They respond to the intonation of speech. Babbling like "dadada" starts around 4-6 months. From 6 months, differences between until then similar infants come up. Deaf infants then fall behind, and an accent can occur. Comprehension is ahead of production. Infants learn to understand words at first by relying on attentional cues like how important an object is to them. So when they focus on a ball, they think that mom's vocalizations are about this ball. By 12 months, they begin using social and linguistic cues. Like joint attention (two people looking at the same thing). Parents can point at objects and make clear that the word goes with this. Finally children use syntactic bootstrapping (using where a word is in a sentence to help find out the meaning).

At around 1, children speak their first words, which are holophrases (single word conveying a sentence's worth of meaning), usually combined with nonverbal symbols like pointing. Nouns are usually first, probably because they are used and understood more, and they can come with images in the mind easier. The speed of learning words differs a lot per child and goes one word at a time. Around 18 months, the vocabulary spurt happens. Fast mapping then allows children to use sentence context to get word meaning efficiently. They do make errors, like overextension (using a word to refer to a too broad range of things: like using dog for all animals) and underextension (using a word too narrowly, like using dog only for their own dog). Both are examples of Piaget's assimilation concept (interpreting new things using existing concepts), and probably don't have to do with not understanding the meaning, but more with having too little vocabulary to express. At around 2.5-3 years, these errors fade away. Again, SES, and especially child-directed parent talk, seems to be a big cause for individual language development differences. 

At 18-24 months, two-word sentences emerge. Early combinations of words are sometimes called telegraphic speech because they are like telegrams, where unneccessary words are eliminated, and they consist of functional grammar. Between ages 2-5 a dramatic increase in the sentences occurs. Progress sometimes reveals itself in mistakes. For instance in overregularization (overapplying new learned rules, like now saying "foots" instead of feet). The youngster also gets busy with transformational grammar (rules of syntax that allow a person to transform a sentence into a question, negative or other kind). 

Mastery motivation is the striving for competence and seems to be innate and universal. Some seem to have more than others though, probably because of the goal holding greater value to them, and parents frequently providing stimulation to arouse their babies also relates to mastery motivation. 

Many researchers think normal children do not deed direct instruction during their first 3 years, and that they should just be children - that early education can even damage self-initiative and intrinsic motivation. Educational videos do not work and children in academic-focused preschools turn out less creative and more anxious and negative in testing situations. Even though achievement sometimes increases, their motivation decreases. Preschool programs with a good mix of playing, social and academic activities can be beneficial, especially for disadvantaged children. Parent training is helpful. 

What do language and education mean to the child?

Language development keeps improving in school-aged children. Metalinguistic awareness comes up (knowledge of language as a system). This is better in bilingual children, just like working memory, juggling two tasks and cognitive reserve. 

Beliefs about yourself are very important in overcoming failure and succeeding. Individuals with a fixed mindset believe "what they have/can" is fixed or static, and therefore have less motivation and try less challenging tasks. When they fail, they feel defeated. Those with a growth mindset believe that abilities and talent are changeable and therefore have a lot of motivation. When they fail, they find the feedback useful and try again. Praising effort instead of results can help foster growth mindset. What causes a growth or fixed mindset?

• Characteristics of the child. The developmental level matters. Young children start off with a growth mindset, which encourages them to adopt mastery goals in achievement situations, wanting to learn new things so they can improve their abilities. They involve in self-regulated learning. As children age, they start to view ability as fixed. They then adopt performance goals: aiming to prove their ability instead of improving it. They involve in other-regulated learning, thus focusing on peers to determine their learning style. This change is partly caused by cognitive development (increased ability to analyze what caused success or failure and to infer traits from behavior) and by feedback in school, and can result in failure syndrome (giving up at the first obstacle). However, children with mastery goals do better, and enjoy the process. The two different groups even have different neurological activity in response to performance outcomes. They are not mutually exclusive: you can be motivated by both at the same time, but the focus matters. 
• Parent contributions. Parents should emphasize the process instead of the product. How parents think about failure also influences the mindset of their child.Three aspects of parentying style can influence children's motivation: (1) providing a good balance of structure for daily activities, (2) offering consistent and supportive responses, and (3) presenting opportunity for children to observe healthy responses to life's challenges from the adults around them.
• School contributions. Through how they are structured (e.g. focusing on external rewards like a sticker) schools create performance goals in children. A good grade is what is sought for in most schools and it seems like the goal, instead of learning, though schools claim they desire otherwise. Intrinsic motivation should be nurtured. Research has shown that rewarding children for the behavior they show and can control, thus the steps that contribute to the final product, results in greater achievement gains than rewarding children for the final product (the grade). A workshop on mindset can do a lot as well. 

Learning to read requires direct instruction. Children must first understand the alphabetic principle (written letters representing the sounds in spoken words) and this is a four-step process:

1. Prealphabetic phase: children can memorize visual cues to remember words. For instance, a picture on a page can trigger a child to recall the words her mother normally reads in this page.
2. Partial alphabetic phase: children learn the shapes and sounds of letters. They start connecting a letter, usually the first, to its corresponding sound. 
3. Full alphabetic phase: children know all the letters and can make complete connections. For this they rely on phonological awareness (sensitivity to the sound system of language, that enables them to segment spoken words into phonemes). 
4. Consolidated alphabetic phase: children now can group letters that commonly occur together into an unit. This speeds the processing of words. 

Multiple factors influence emergent literacy (the developmental precursors of reading skills), which includes knowledge, skills and attitudes that facilitate learning to read. Greater working memory and attention control will help. Reading a book together, like in a zone of proximal development, also helps, just like using rhyming structures. 

Skilled readers have a good understanding of the alphabetic principle and have good phonological awareness. Their eye movements show they are faster information processors. Dyslexia can cause reading problems. Children with dyslexia have a different neural activity pattern in response to speech sounds, which can be found after birth already. This suggests that a perceptual deficit may develop during the prenatal period. 

Why are some schools more effective than others?

• Student characteristics. Genetics affect IQ and thus school achievement. Schools cannot eliminate these genetic differences, but they can raise overall levels of achievement. Economically advantaged students generally do better as well. A passive gene-environment correlation also occurs, because next to the influence of genetic transmission, parents' genes influence their child by creating their environment: high-achieving parents usually select schools with good academic reputation. Student motivation is also very important for their achievement. But to see a school's effectiveness, it has to be determined how students change from before to after the instruction. 
• Teacher and school characteristics. Higher cognitive skills of teachers translates into better performance of their students. The effectiveness of teachers is very influential on their students. In effective classrooms, teachers (1) strongly emphasize academics and demand a lot from their students, (2) create a task-oriented but comfortable atmosphere, (3) manage discipline problems effectively, and (4) foster an atmosphere of social cohesion in the classroom. Teachers could also involve parents in their children's schooling.
• Interactions between student and environment. There should be goodness of fit (a match between the person's characteristics and the environment). Teaching methods should be adjusted to what fits the particular student: individualized education seems most effective. Students also have better outcomes when they feel they and their teacher share similar backgrounds, and they are understood and valued by their teacher. 

What does education mean to the adolescent?

As children grow up, it seems their expectations for success and their self-perceptions of ability decline, and their feeling towards school gets more negative. They are more worried about grades than intrinsic motivation. Achievement motivation is also more influenced by peers and this has negative effects, especially in certain cultures. There may also be a lack of goodness of fit, and as children switch schools, this may be extra challenging because of the vulnerable period of puberty and other changes. Giving students more control and choice, trying to match their interests more, stimulating mastery goals, and a supportive environment helps to maintain or stimulate good achievement. 

Asian individuals generally do better on academic achievement than other cultures, probably due to difference in work ethic. They generally have a growth mindset and feel greater pressure from their parents to succeed. Asians also seem to want to live up to the expectations of their stereotype, this is the stereotype promise. Asians also spend more time in education and more on-task time, even in free time. The message is: the secret of effective learning is to get teachers, students and parents working together, setting high achievement goals in the form of mastery goals, and investing effort everyday to attain those goals. 

IQ generally remains stable from childhood on, so some adolescents have more aptitude. And, as said, achievement motivation is important. Depending on their own choices, as well as family, peer and school influences, adolescents follow a high succes path or a low succes path, which affects their adult lives too. 

Research shows that employment while attending school often has a bad influence, but it depends on the nature of the work and the amount of working hours. Through a low-level job, mastery goals may decline. It works the other way as well: adolescents that struggle academically will seek to work more hours. 

What do language and education mean to the adult?

Overall, language abilities stay the same in adulthood, with an increase in pragmatic knowledge, vocabulary and semantic knowledge. Sometimes older adults cannot come up with a word, but this has to do with memory, just like how they can find it hard to follow long sentences. Sometimes they speak a bit more slowly, they plan their words more than earlier. 

Our achievement motivation also influences our lifestyles in adulthood. Adults tend to have more mastery goals and enjoy learning. Work motivation sometimes declines in older-getting adults. This could have to do with the "top of the ladder" effect; they got to where they wanted to go. It seems adults care more about intrinsic motivation (satisfying work) than external motivation (increased salary). The aging process does not nearly have as much influence on achievement motivation as changes in work and family contexts do: achievement motivation seems like a personality trait, and is a variable one among people. Setting and achieving goals stays important throughout life. 

Illiteracy is not easily improved in adults, which has to do with their attitudes about their illiteracy, and their motivation and attention for it and the goodness-of-fit with the material. Illiteracy is associated with poverty.

Adults that seek education are usually moved by intrinsic factors. They want to learn, but sometimes it's hard to find the time.