Environments that promote communication

Children learn what language is by learning what language can do. The func­tion of language depends upon it's effects on the environment. An envi­ronment that contains few reinforcers and few objects of interest or meets children's needs without requiring lan­guage is not a functional environment for learning or teaching language.

Recent research suggests that envi­ronmental arrangement is an important strategy for teachers who want to pro­mote communication in classrooms. To encourage use of lan­guage, classrooms should be arranged so that there are materials and activities of interest to the children. In addition, teachers must mediate the environment by presenting materials in response to children's requests and other uses of language. Creating such opportunities and conse­quences for language use through envi­ronmental arrangement can play a critical role in a child's language acqui­sition.

Both social and physical aspects of the environment set the occasion for communication. The physical en­vironment includes the selection and arrangement of materials, the arrange­ment of the setting to encourage chil­dren's engagement, and scheduling of activities to enhance children's partici­pation and appropriate behavior. The social environment includes the pres­ence of responsive adults and children and the verbal and nonverbal social in­teractions that occur among the people in the environment. In addition, contin­gencies for language use, the availability of a communication partner, the degree to which adults pre-empt children's communicative attempts, and the affec­tive style of the listener have an impact on children's language acquisition and production.

As shown in Figure 1, the social and physical aspects of the environment are linked to communication when an adult mediates the physical environment in response to children's use of language. The adult links the child's language to the environment by ensuring that the child's communication attempts are functional and reinforced. As a media­tor, the adult can use an incidental teaching process to model and prompt elaborated language in order to expand the child's current skills.

Environmental arrangement can encourage children to initiate language as a means of gaining access to materials and getting help. By providing the ma­terials requested by a child, the adult serves the important function of specifi­cally reinforcing that child's use of lan­guage. In addition, the environmental arrangement supports the adult in at­tending to the child's interest and com­munication attempts, thereby increasing the likelihood that the adult will respond to the child's interest and provide mate­rials contingently.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-11