Over the centuries, language has progressed along with human civilization. Some would argue this is what separate us from animals, more importantly however, through different forms of language we are able to express our intentions, share our thoughts and feelings and create better pedagogies for our students. Language can take on many forms, in its purest form language can be heard via oral communication (Fellows & Oakley, 2014), it can vary through, tone, pitch and different types of register (Emmitt, 2010, p. 67). Understanding that meaning essentially derives from context and not necessarily just from words is essential to children language development in the early years. The ability to extract and construct meaning by utilising …show more content…
Children will learn how to mean from these language functions which are structural but not grammatical until the transition into the linguistic system.
Fostering oral language development is a key aspect of the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, and Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) (DEEWR, 2009). Language can be seen through body language, sign language and written communication. Although, written form is a secondary delivery system and oral is the first, school literacy is the main form of language being thought in the educational system and this can be fundamentally different discourse from the home language a child speaks (Green, 2006).
Language is diverse, there are many variations of English in particular especially in multicultural societies such as Australia. Children develop with their own vernacular variety which doesn’t always translate to Australian Academic English thought in our schools (Gee & Hayes, 2011). This essay will discuss how the knowledge and understanding of diversity of language and the socio-cultural context impacts child development, and how educator awareness will broaden one’s personal teaching philosophies within the classroom setting whilst promoting language …show more content…
6) language is a set of rules, spoken grammatically or a cognitive phenomenon. However, Green (2006) argues that language more than just a set of cognitive skills, rather practices which are cultural, social and behavioural in nature which are more dependent on context. Language takes on many different roles, it is spoken or oral, visual and spatial, signed, written, contextual, can be seen in as forms of body language and social. It is dynamic, constantly shifting and changing thus making it almost never neutral (King, 2016). Although language has many forms, the primary delivery system is oral closely followed by its historically relatively new form (Goody, 1986, 1988) as cited in (Gee & Hayes, 2011, p. 9) which is in written and printed form, as a secondary delivery system.
In the history of language, all cultures at least initially were considered to be “oral cultures”. Over a long period of time, oral language was transformed through evolution. In its original form, oral language was used for face-to-face communication where two or more people construct meaning. It is an interactive process involving an encoder and a decoder to decipher the message, the encoder will often use additional information to decode (Fellows & Oakley, 2014, p.