Vocabulary refers to the words a child is able to understand (receptive vocabulary) or express (expressive vocabulary). If a child has a limited vocabulary they may have difficulties in understanding what is being said to them or difficulties in expressing themselves.
Young children will learn vocabulary directly relevant to their life experience and environment. To begin with this will be social greetings e.g. ‘bye-bye’ and mostly nouns i.e. labels for items or significant people in their life. Gradually they will learn labels for actions [verbs] or events and begin to understand and use describing words [adjectives] linked to the way they are feeling e.g ‘tired’ ‘hungry’ ‘thirsty’. In addition young children will learn vocabulary has a grammatical role to play in a sentence i.e. how to use prepositions or pronouns.
Children continue to develop their vocabulary skills throughout primary school in order to use curriculum key words, give clear descriptions and gain a greater understanding of the relationships between words. By the end of primary school, most children have developed effective strategies to learn, store and recall new words. Secondary school and college students continue to develop more advanced skills to meet the vocabulary demands of the curriculum. This enables them to use subject specific vocabulary to communicate effectively within their subject classes, written work and peers.
Word finding is the ability to retrieve words from your mental ‘dictionary’. Adults and children experience word finding difficulties when they know a word, it’s on the ‘tip of my tongue.
Word retrieval strategies rely on the child/students ability to store both semantic features [meanings] and phonological features [speech sounds] of words. Children and young people will always benefit from playing vocabulary type games both at home and in school.
Children of this age communicate needs and feelings by crying, babbling, gurgling, and squealing. By practicing and developing speech sounds through babbling (e.g., baba,mama) babies go on to understand and say their first words at about 1 year.
Children of this age continue to enjoy babbling and are developing their vocabulary. By 2 years of age children generally have a spoken vocabulary of more than 50 words. Most of these words will be nouns with a small vocabulary of verbs e.g. sleeping, walking. The pronunciation of these words may not yet be clear. Children of this age will be able to understand a wider range of nouns and verbs than they can say. Children will also be starting to use personal pronouns e.g. I, my and mine.
Between 2-3 years, a child’s spoken vocabulary grows considerably and can be up to 1000 words.
Children will understand and use more verbs, and will start understanding prepositions, e.g., in/on and pronouns, e.g., he/she, you/your and we.
Children of this age start using joining words such as ‘and’ and ‘because’. Children will also be asking lots of questions e.g. Why? What? Where? They will start to use adjectives of colour and size, further prepositions e.g. ‘under’ and ‘next to’ and more pronouns e.g., his/hers, they/theirs, him/her, ours.
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Last updated: 17 April, 2018
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