The importance of place for early childhood language; is there more to early language development than words?

A provocation paper

Dr Abigail Hackett and Professor Maggie MacLure, Manchester Metropolitan University

Introduction

Young children’s language development has long been the focus of policy anxiety and intervention, regarded as evidence of the “proper” development of the child and a predictor of future educational and economic success. But are we looking in the right place for the early signs of language development? In nurseries and other early years settings, the focus tends to be on the acquisition of vocabulary, on the ability to name things, and on being able to take part in simple interactions with adults. Children as young as two years old are now routinely assessed according to this rather narrow (we will argue) view of language; and highly consequential judgements about language “delay”, parenting practices, and “school readiness” are made on the basis of these assessments. Are these preoccupations squeezing the life out of language, and skewing our understandings of what it does and how it develops? Drawing on a range of disciplines, we suggest that language does not only have a functional purpose in that it enables humans to exchange meanings with one another (though it also does that). Language engages the senses and affects bodies, it is entangled with places and lives, in specific locations. For these reasons, we argue that there is something more-than-human about language.

The first part of this paper discusses the growing focus on young children’s language, together with the tendency to emphasise the role of adults in talking to children and the extensive critique of this from numerous perspectives. Next, we describe a growing interest in the role of place and objects in young children’s language practices, and consider what this shift might mean for education and families in the context of the kinds of worlds young children today will live in as adults. Young children’s futures may well involve or require different kinds of language practices compared to present day adults. The future is likely to be characterised by globalisation, environmental instability and increasingly unpredictable consequences of human / animal / place relations (for example, zoonotic disease such as COVID-19). In response, we suggest that understanding and acting on the complex connections between humans and the world, and better understanding the inter-dependence between human and planetary wellbeing / survival [i], will be of increasing importance for children of the future. Therefore, the ways in which young children’s language naturally tangles with and responds to place is something to be embraced and emphasised in teaching and policy.

Young children’s language and early childhood policy

Language development has a long history of being connected to the idea that the human species is exceptional or superior to any other. In young children, language is valued as evidence of their ability to rationalise, problem solve, make abstract connections, empathise with others or hold their own views. Thus, waves of policy initiatives over several decades have aimed to tackle perceived inadequacies in young children’s talk in these respects, with a particular eye on the school starting age (around four to five years in the UK). In recent years, this anxiety and drive to encourage children to talk more and to talk in particular ways, is increasing and also becoming focused on younger and younger children. Two year old children have been a particular focus of recent policy in England, with free education and care made available to all two year olds from lower income backgrounds, with the aim of “levelling the playing field and improving a child’s life chances” [ii] . Although the aspirations of the “two-year-old offer” go beyond language and literacy, the initiative has concentrated public and professional attention on early language and disadvantage.

Avineri et al’s (2015) anthropological work shows the cultural specificity of some of the most common language socialisation practices promoted in early childhood policy in the UK. Consider, for example, practices such as directly engaging pre-verbal children in conversation, pointing and naming, asking questions to encourage the child to respond with words, and the assumption that more words are better. These language habits are highly valued in white Western middle-class communities (Blum, 2016). For instance, the conventions and etiquette for asking and answering questions or for telling stories and anecdotes are culturally diverse. They mobilise distinct kinds of interpersonal skills, community knowledge and gestural dynamics that may be overlooked or misread from the perspective of the status quo. In fact, even the notion that language is exclusively human and is what makes the human species special, a commonly stated assumption in the UK, is not shared by all societies (Abram, 1996). As well as demonstrating that clearly there are various different ways (culturally, globally) in which children enter and take up language, rather than only one right path, the cultural specificity of certain approaches to encouraging children’s language has another effect. When the child socialisation practices of one particular group of people, in this case, affluent, middle class families are inaccurately promoted as natural, essential or best, this has the effect of marginalising other rich and valuable practices. Cultures differ, for example, in their assumptions about when it is appropriate, necessary or respectful to speak: the obligation to fill space with language at the behest of others or as self-expression, is not universal. In an educational system that values explicitness, subdued bodies, the ability to “abstract” language from context and a kind of school-sanctioned talkativeness, practices that depend on indirectness, allusion, restraint, rhythm or word play are likely to seem insufficient. Dangerously, this erasure can mean that we overlook structural inequalities, social injustices and institutional racisms / classisms that negatively impact the lives of young children and families.

Beyond the role of adults; language, place and the “more-than-human milieu”

Perhaps the dominant image of early talk is that of a child and adult “face to face”, interacting without distraction or noise. But young children’s language does not always depend on the support of an interested adult, and it unfolds amidst the smells, sounds, scattered toys, sticky fingers, anxieties, hopes and frustrations of everyday life of families in communities. During our own research, which has looked at one to three year old children in community spaces such as playgroups and the park, adults were frequently on the sidelines, whilst the children ran, played, explored spaces and interacted intensively with objects and places. Increasingly, research is recognising the role of moving bodies, places and objects in young children’s language, including how effective immersive, sensory places where the pressure to talk is removed, can be at encouraging “reluctant talkers” [iii].

We prefer to use “language” here, rather than “talk”, because we are interested in all the vocalisations, gestures and facial expressions children make. In educational settings, there tends to be a focus on recognisable words, but anyone who has spent a lot of time with young children will have noticed the wide “grey” area between words and “not-words”. We propose that as young children move, explore, get caught up in the feel of the wind, or the action of jumping up and down in a particular spot, or the curve of a chalk line drawn across the pavement, language joins in, as words or not-words or nearly words, or exploratory playful noises. This, rather than an adult looking directly into a child’s eyes and asking them a direct question, is a more frequent starting point for young children’s talk. In a paper we have published about this research [iiii], we have called this a “more-than-human milieu”; by this we mean that all of those things (the wind, the place, the chalk, the curve and so on) come into play and language is inseparable from the rest.

We also think it is worth asking questions such as; are we sure that children always intend words to be recognisable, or are they sometimes deliberately playing around with the “not-words” and the “nearly words”? In addition, is it correct to assume that children always want language to be functional; do they sometimes enjoy it as playful and nonsensical and contradictory and funny? Thirdly, do children always require a human audience for their language? Frequently in our research, vocalisations happen in relation to an action, an object, a place or a landscape, without an obvious human intended audience. These three questions are grounded in what research and lived experience shows us tends to naturally unfold between children, places and language in everyday situations. In addition, these three questions are related to the question of “inter-dependence”, that is the connections between humans and the world. Or, to put it another way, the impossibility of extracting language from its “more-than-human milieu”. Inter-dependence is an important term in the context of living well in the future and may be at the heart of the question of what kinds of early childhood pedagogy will best support children to thrive in the future they will inherit.

The future of young children’s language

How do children live well in an environmentally precarious future? And what does the sort of language that emerges in play and movement and place, described above, have to do with the answer to this question? Young children’s futures may well involve or require different kinds of skills and practices compared to present-day adults. In the context of an increasingly globalised, yet also deeply divided world, accompanied by environmental instability and economic crisis, researchers and educators can only speculate about the kinds of worlds young children will live in when they are adults. We write during the COVID-19 global crisis; as a zoonotic disease (likely the result of human encroachment on animal habitats), COVID-19 itself reframes questions about the relationship between humans and the world. Thus, the likelihood of further zoonotic diseases, the effects on intimacy and proximity brought about by social distancing and digital cultures, and countless other interventions into daily life that we are unable to predict, form the backdrop to the questions we are asking about the kinds of language practices that might serve children well in a future that we adults have not experienced and can only partially imagine.

In a report commissioned as part of UNESCO’s inquiry into the future of education, the Common Worlds Research Collective [v] have argued that planetary and human wellbeing are indivisible, and that education has “a pivotal role to play” in terms of conveying this interdependency between humans and the world. We agree, and propose therefore that the most useful language practices in the future are likely to be those that embrace this inter-dependency, rather than those that emphasise humans as exceptional, special or separate from the fate of the planet.

To meet the challenges of the future, language pedagogy must:

• Embrace the diversity of ways in which young children can enter into and take up language.
• Understand the role of place and wider context when assessing what children can / cannot do with language.
• Acknowledge that young children’s language frequently happens in relation to movement and vocalisations, songs, words and chants that emerge in play, or running, or dancing and shouting into the wind.
• Value words and “not-words” and “nearly words”, because language can be playful and nonsensical as well as functional and easily understood by adults.

Young children are being subjected to ever more intensive language assessment, instruction and intervention. In England, policies such as baseline assessment on entry to nursery, the provision of funded places for two year olds, the early learning goals in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), and the end-of-stage measure of Good Level of Development (GLD) all emphasise the importance of language. All of these initiatives are designed with an eye on children’s futures, but their success is limited, because they fail to engage with the ways in which language resonates in children’s bodies and is grounded in the places they inhabit. Education policy and practice needs to broaden its vision to accommodate and foreground dimensions of language that develop in “sympathy” with the physical world and the sensations it engenders. The risk otherwise is that policies aimed at supporting the development of the individual child will advance an impoverished view of language as extracted from place, context and cultural significance. These are the very facets of language that are likely to be of increasing importance for living well in a globally entangled and environmentally precarious planet. Schools and classrooms could be “opened out” to provide more congenial spaces for embodied practices — both literally, in terms of moving learning outdoors and into new spaces, and metaphorically, in terms of releasing language from the confines of vocabulary and banal speech routines. In so doing, we might begin to answer the question of how situated and place-based understandings of children’s language practices can inform pedagogy for future planetary wellbeing.

The British Academy has undertaken a programme of work that seeks to re-frame debates around childhood in both the public and policy spaces and break down academic, policy and professional silos in order to explore new conceptualisations of children in policymaking. Find out more about the Childhood Policy Programme.

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[i] Common Worlds Research Collective (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report.

[ii] Department for Education (26th August 2014). Press release: Number of 2-year-olds eligible for free childcare to double. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/number-of-2-year-olds-eligible-for-free-childcare-to-double Latest date of access 10.06.19

[iii] A. Martín-Bylund, “The matter of silence in early childhood bilingual education”, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50, 4, 2018, p.349–35.

[iiii] A. Hackett, M. MacLure, S. McMahon, “Reconceptualising early language development: matter, sensation and the more-than-human”, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2020.

[v] Common Worlds Research Collective, “Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival”, Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report, 2020.