Green Lane Come to Visit!

by Leila Parker-Heath

On Wednesday 15th January, a group of the most adorable 3 year olds came to visit our English Language class.

Before you get confused as to why they did so, I’ll explain. One of our topics of learning is child language acquisition (CLA), which is essentially how children learn to speak, read and understand language in the first few years of their lives.

Miss Copley had the brilliant idea (which was met with unanimous dismay from the boys, but personally I loved it) that we would understand the theories about CLA and the stages that children go through when learning language if we could see it and observe it for ourselves, which undoubtedly did help our learning - actually seeing how young children listen and understand questions and tasks they are given (and then respond, regardless of correctness) enhanced our learning, and was much more fun than sitting in a classroom and looking at a whiteboard.

So we invited some 3 year olds from Green Lane to come and visit! 3 is a particularly good age for observing language; by school age (4/5) most kids can string a full sentence together (although this does depend on how typically a child’s language develops), but at 3 they’re usually still learning how to do this, making it more interesting to try to understand their thought process and how they actually speak.

There were several activities that we created or adapted. For example, Joanne had some cars with pictures and what the picture was at the bottom, like horse, jelly, igloo etc. We asked the kids if they knew what the things were; sometimes they did and responded correctly, but some were too shy (which was expected). With the cards that had animal pictures on them, we asked whether they knew what noises they make, and often, they knew and made the noises with adorable enthusiasm. Although we didn’t get particularly thorough, conclusive results about children’s language acquisition (never work with children, as they say!) overall it was an incredibly helpful way of grasping a better understanding of how children learn in terms of language.

Miss was particularly impressed with Dean and Qasim; they had an unwavering positive attitude and patience, which is necessary, to the activity unlike some of their peers who still had their reservations about it, and felt as though they had a better understanding of the topic by the end of it.

Finally, the leaders from Green Lane were so impressed that they’re coming again next year, which is something for the year 12s to look forward to!