Chapter 4 is all about language and the child. Growing up, this has always been something I have thought about. How do we know how to speak? We are taught, but how does our brain know to do that itself? These are questions I have always asked myself. The fact that people just start talking when they are infants is crazy to me. Chapter 4 discussed theories that help us understand a bit more how children go about speaking. All of the theories have great ideas and great points, but I like the Behaviorist theory the most. The behaviorist theory focuses more on positive reinforcement. It is so important for children to have some sort of reinforcement in their lives. Children love having positive reinforcement. Actually, I think all people like to have some sort of positive reinforcement in their lives from some one. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel like we are doing something right. I can remember being younger and showing my mom how well I colored in the lines in a coloring book and she would put it on the refridgerator. That made me feel so good about myself and about what I was doing. And thats exactly how children need to feel when they are learning how to speak and develop their language. They have no idea what they are doing, but they hear the adults around them talking, so they imitate that. Which theory do you most agree with and why?

Although each child is different, and each child learns in different ways and at different paces, they have created a general stages in which children's language develops. I agree with the age ranges and stages that they have created. It is very hard to try to group children together and make them all fit into certain categories. It is also very hard to do that in a classroom. That is a task I am a little scared of when I have my own classroom. I think it is going to be very difficult to have to figure out how to tend to each child when I have a classroom full of them. If you have a classroom full of 20+ kindergarteners, I don't really think you have time to sit down with every student and figure out what you need to teach them. But knowing the different stages in which children generally are when it comes to language development makes me not as nervous about helping the children. What do you think the best way is to see where the children are in terms of language development?

It is very important to be descriptive with our language around young children. The children will pick up on that and start doing it themselves. The chapter gives many helpful things to say to children to help their language. I really liked the section on overgeneralizations. I had no idea that you should not correct the child when they say something like using me for I. Instead of learning from it, it makes them not want to use the language at all. It is important just to model good language and hopefully the child will pick up on it by the age of 5. I think this is hard for most of us because we want them to be correct but I think they have to get a feel for the language and figure it out on their own. Do you agree with not correcting the child when they say something wrong?