Contents

1. What is language
2. Language - the early stages
3. What will help my child learn to talk?
4. Towards a perfect sentence
5. Good ideas for language learning

4. Towards a perfect sentence

Speaking in proper sentences is one of children’s achievements which please parents most. It is also an important target for parents of deaf children.

A ‘proper’ sentence, may not be perfect in the way adults use words hut is the right way for a child of that age to talk. However, it is the path towards the perfect, adult sentence.

The use of sentences develops step by step, along well established paths, though all children develop at different speeds. Often, but not always, hearing impaired children take longer than hearing children, but they pass through the same stages in learning their language as hearing children.

This is a guess at the way a child might say that his ball’s gone into next door’s garden and he can’t get it back. It starts with a young child (say 1 5 month old) who can simply manage the word ‘ball’ and a pointed finger (and perhaps a wail!), and progresses up to the much older child (perhaps nine or ten years old) who can use adult language.

Although the stages follow one another, a child’s progress through them is not necessarily smooth. He might seem to whiz through one stage quickly and easily and yet seem to get stuck in another, staying at the same stage for several months. The stages cannot easily he linked to age either, especially where a hearing impairment is present.

The stages cannot be leapfrogged. Each stage is a part of the building process of the complete sentence and there are no shortcuts. Teachers of the deaf have for many years tried to help children to move quickly through the learning, and have always ended confusing children. This teaching of sentences has been one of the things which made learning language so difficult for deaf children in the past.

It is the small words (prepositions) like in, on, to, of, for, off, into, onto, which are often the last to start being used correctly by hearing and hearing-impaired children alike. A profoundly deaf child could still be missing them out in late teens. Trying to teach a child how to use them will cause confusion, and will make the child less confident about his language. A child who is made to feel that he can’t talk properly may be discouraged.

If you are concerned at a lack of progress in your child’s use of sentences, it would be wise to ask your teacher of the deaf for a review of progress.

next: 5. Good ideas for language learning