There are five general stages each person goes through when learning a new language. The amount of time spent in each stage depends upon several factors, like the age and abilities of the student, whether the student is taking an intensive English program (or other language program), and their commitment to learning the new language.
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Stage 1: Pre-Production
During this stage, the student is normally silent while listening to new words and gaining an understanding of the language.
Stage 2: Early Production
At this stage, students start to practice pronouncing new words, and typically learn at least 1,000 new words and their meanings. They also start using their new words to speak in short phrases.
Stage 3: Speech Emergence
Vocabulary continues to expand, and students will know a minimum of 3,000 words by the end of this stage. They start to speak in longer phrases and sentences, and to ask questions. In addition, at this stage they will start reading and writing assignments.
Stage 4: Intermediate Fluency
Students start to think and form responses in the new language. By the end of this stage, most people have learned well over 6,000 different words and their meanings. They are also speaking more fluently and continuing to improve upon their reading and writing abilities.
Stage 5: Advance Fluency
People who reach this stage continue to improve upon and expand their vocabulary and abilities in their second language.
For more information about interpersonal communications and ESL programs, contact Computer Systems Institute at 1-847-967-5030 today.
The stages of language development are one of the essential parts of linguistics. Language plays a vital role in communicating with each other, from one country to another. Every language has its characteristics and objectives. Now the question is how a language is developed in children?
A child acquires a language or mother tongue through different stages. After finishing all the stages, the child can achieve their mother tongue. Let us see the stages of language development. We mainly analyze the four stages of child language acquisition. The four stages of language development in children are demonstrated in the table below:
4 Stages of Language Development
The 4 significant stages of language development are given below:
Pre-linguistic Stage
The pre-linguistic stage is the core of child language acquisition. This stage begins from a child’s birth to his to her seven months. During childbirth, the baby’s vocal tract is here and there more like that of a chimp than that of a grown-up human. Specifically, the tip of the velum reaches or covers with the tip of the epiglottis. As the newborn child develops, the tract, bit by bit, reshapes itself in the grown-up example.
At the first or two months of life, a newborn child articulates distress with crying. Some non-reflexive, non-trouble sounds are delivered with a brought down velum and a shut or almost shut mouth, giving the impression of a syllabic nasal or a nasalized vowel.
At 2 to 4 months, the newborn child starts expressing alleviation sounds. The soonest alleviation sounds possibly snorts or moans, with the later forms being vowel-like ‘coos’. A child can laugh around three or four months later from birth.
At the age of 4 to 7 months, newborn children usually participate in ‘vocal play.’ They can produce different types of sounds such as friction noises, nasal murmurs, etc.
Babbling Stage
The babbling stage starts at the age of six months of a baby. At this stage, a child can produce sounds by using their speech organs. Not only that, those children begin to make extended sounds by oral articulations into syllable-like arrangements, opening and shutting their jaws, lips, and tongue.
At this stage, children often produce fricatives, affricates, and fluids rarely. In any event, at the outset, vowels will, in general, below and open. Sometimes they produce [bababa] or [nanana] etc.
In the Babbling stage, children produced random sounds with their speech organs. Vocal play and Babbling are both produced when they interact with their parents or relatives. In this stage, a child randomly grows a variety of sounds, and sometimes these sounds partly match their mother tongue.
Two-word Stage
The two-word stage begins when a child becomes one year or one and a half-year-old. In this stage, children pronounce from one word to two words. At the same time, children start developing their sound production capability.
In the two-word stage children naturally, follow some grammatical rules in their sentences subconsciously. We can find some inflections at the end of the two-word stage of a child, and they can be able to describe an event by grammatical functions. This is how a child finishes their two-word stage by producing many sounds and combining them into sentences.
Telegraphic Stage
At the age of 24 months to 30 months seems to be a child’s telegraphic stage. In this period, children start producing expressions with more than two elements, and the expressions of children are longer than two words and have meaningful characteristics.
For example, the little capacity words, too, the a, can, is, and so on, are missing; just the words that convey the primary message, that is, the substance words are utilized. The expressions like feline stand up the table, what that, no stay here, etc., do not have the capacity words. These expressions are called the telegraphic stage.
The telegraphic stage incorporates just morphemes and words that convey essential semantic substance.
Conclusion
To sum up, we may say this is how a child develops their language. These four stages of child language development enable children to improve their mother tongue.
Sources
- Dulay, H.C., & Burt, M. K. (1972). Goofing: An indication of children’s second language strategies. Language learning 22, 235-252.
- Dulay, H.C., & Burt, M. K. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. Language Learning 24, 37-53.
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There are two main areas of language:
- Receptive language (understanding): Comprehension of language.
- Expressive language (using language): The use of language through speech, sign or alternative forms of communication to communicate wants, needs, thoughts and ideas.
Note: Each stage of development assumes that the preceding stages have been successfully achieved.
* See the Appendix beneath for explanation of terms.
How to use this chart:
Review the skills demonstrated by the child up to their current age. If you notice skills that have not been met below their current age contact Kid Sense Child Development on 1800 KIDSENSE (1800 543 736).
| Age | Listening | Vocabulary | Sentences | Verbal grammar | Concepts | Questions | Possible implications if milestones not achieved |
| 6-12 months |
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| 1-2 years |
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| 2-3 years |
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| 3-4 years |
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3 to early 4 years:
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| 4-5 years |
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Mid-late 4 years:
Late 4-5 years:
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| 5-6 years |
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| 6-7 years |
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Appendix
Grammar Explanations
Regular Plurals – adds a ‘s’ to the end of words to represent more than one (e.g. 1 dog, 2 dogs)
Articles – learns to use the words ‘a’ and ‘the’ (e.g. “I would like a piece of fruit please” or “I would like the blue lolly please”)
Progressive –ing – adds –ing to the end of verbs (e.g. The boy is jumping)
Uses Pronouns ‘you, I, me, mine’ – e.g. “What are you doing?”; “I am happy”; Adult: “Who wants a lolly? Child: Me!; “That’s mine”
Regular Past Tense – learns to put –ed on the end of verbs to represent that something has happened earlier. This tends to be used for all verbs even if it requires an irregular past tense (e.g. “I runned” instead of “I ran”)
Possessive ‘s – learns to put an ‘s on the end of nouns (i.e. naming words) to indicate possession (e.g. “Daddy’s car”)
Auxiliary ‘is’ – learns to include the “helping verb” ‘is’ in a sentence (e.g. The girl is skipping)
Pronouns ‘he/she’ – learns that when talking about males we use the pronoun ‘he’ and when talking about females we use the pronoun ‘she’ (e.g. “He is running” or “She is drinking”)
Connector ‘and’ – learns to join two small sentences together using the word ‘and’ (e.g. “I want a banana and an apple” rather than “I want a banana. I want an apple”)
3rd Person Singular – learns to add an ‘s’ to the verb (action word) when it is followed by a 3rd person pronoun (he/she/it) – e.g. “He wants the ball”; “It eats grass”; “She reads books”
Contracted Negative – learns to combine the auxiliary verbs (e.g. is, does, have, should) with the negative ‘not’ – (e.g. isn’t, doesn’t, haven’t, shouldn’t)
Contracted Copula – learns to combine a pronoun with a copula (i.e. a verb that connects the subject of the sentence to the word after the verb) – e.g. He’s happy
Past Participle –It’s broken
Pronouns ‘his, hers, theirs’ – e.g. “It is his/hers/theirs”
Comparative –er and Superlative -est:e.g. big, bigger, biggest
Use of ‘is’ vs ‘are’ – learns to use ‘is’ and ‘are’ based on the number (i.e. ‘is’ for singular and ‘are’ for plural – e.g. “The monkey is eating a banana” vs “The monkeys are eating the bananas”)
Past Tense “to be” – e.g. “I was running” and “They were running”
Connector ‘because’ – learns to join two sentences together using the word ‘because’ – e.g. The boy was crying because he fell over and hurt his knee”
Adverb –ly – e.g. quickly, slowly, quietly
Irregular Plurals – irregular plurals are used fairly consistently by the age of 5 years (e.g. mice, children, men)
Irregular past tense – irregular past tense is used consistently (e.g. fell, broke, ate)
This chart was designed to serve as a functional screening of developmental skills per age group. It does not constitute an assessment nor reflect strictly standardised research.
The information in this chart was compiled over many years from a variety of sources. This information was then further shaped by years of clinical practice as well as therapeutic consultation with child care, pre-school and school teachers in South Australia about the developmental skills necessary for children to meet the demands of these educational environments. In more recent years, it has been further modified by the need for children and their teachers to meet the functional Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) requirements that are not always congruent with standardised research.