Describe and Discuss Childrens Oral Language Development

Assignment Overview

Supporting language development is one of the most critical roles for educators in both early childhood and primary settings. In order for teachers to provide effective support, it is important that they have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the components of language, the stages of language development and the underlying theoretical perspectives that explain the processes of language acquisition.

This assignment will enable you to demonstrate your knowledge in all of these areas. It will also provide an opportunity for you to develop your written communication skills and ability to structure information in the form of an expository essay. Your essay should include a minimum of 5 references made to scholarly sources, the Early Years Learning Framework or the Australian Curriculum, and other relevant sources.

Assignment Details:

In this essay, you are required to address the following:

Describe and discuss children's oral language development using relevant theoretical perspectives and references to support your statements and discussion.

A tip:When planning for the components of your essay, you can consider including the following:

• the components of language development (i.e. phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development)
• a theory that explains children's oral language development from the nature perspective
• a theory that explains children's oral language from the nurture perspective.

Your essay should include the following sections:

Section 1: Introduction

• Introduce the topic.
• Identify the key terms you that will address in the essay.
• Include a thesis statement that outlines the way you will respond to the question you are required to describe and discuss for this essay.

Section 2: Body of the essay

• Thebody of the essaywill consist of a series of paragraphs through which you will describe the process of language development and discuss the influence of nature and nurture.
• Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that introduces the main idea or theme of that paragraph. Typically, you would then support this topic sentence with research-based evidence.
• Carefully consider how many issues you are going to cover, and how these issues are related to each other and answer the essay question.
• Make sure you write in the third person only, and that you develop a detailed explanation across the body of the essay with well-reasoned points.
• Try and keep to one topic per paragraph and keep in mind the word count.

Section 3: Conclusion

• Summarise the information provided in the essay.
• Make one final statement about the roles of nature and nurture in language development.

Take note:

While you will have personal views on this topic, this assignment requires you to define and explain from an informed perspective. This means that your work should be supported by evidence that you have found from scholarly sources, a relevant curriculum, and other relevant sources. Such evidence should help you to construct and validate your descriptions and discussion points.

As stated earlier, your essay should include at least 5 references and it must be properly referenced with in-text citations and a reference list using the APA style.