Talk like a three-year old

As both the readers of my blog will be aware, my smallest son has been getting into trouble at school. The teachers have reported very seriously that he has not been meeting his targets. Those are National Performance Targets, set by the Government. It's practically treason not to meet them.

"But he's only three!" I protested. "What can you possibly expect a three-year-old to be doing that he isn't doing?"

"He doesn't Interact Socially With Others. He doesn't Put His Hand Up to Ask to Go To The Toilet. In short, he doesn't talk."

Ah. This was difficult to refute. Birdy had by the age of three mastered the Old Homo Erectus dialect (point, grunt, point, SCREAM!) and decided that that was sufficient to meed his communication needs. Since he is a World Champion at opening closed cupboards, finding the biscuit tin, switching the TV on and switching Mum's computer off, he didn't really have any needs that he couldn't satisfy by himself. If the purpose of language is to satisfy our communication needs, then Birdy's language skills were impeccable.

I admit I was starting to get worried about him. Listening to all the other little children in his nursery class happily chattering away as they played Mummies and Daddies, I did wonder if Birdy might be missing a couple of cogs.

This term he has started playing with Big Brother's Doctor Who figures. (They are kept in a locked bedroom but that doesn't stop him.) He has been talking as part of his games, first repeating lines from the TV show, then riffing on them to create his own improvisations. I heartily approve. It's the LingQ Way.

First he amassed a collection of "all-purpose nouns". Anything with batteries in it is a deet-deet. Anything even remotely cylindrical and man-sized is a Dalek. Any tool is a screwdriver.

He also improvises new nouns. Shown a picture of a lawn mower he called it a "garden hoover". He explained to me how he wees out of his "willy button" (a part of his anatomy that I don't even know the proper name for). By putting two nouns together he can come up with a wonderfully descriptive, new name for something.

James at Birdy's age was good at making words up from scratch. He coined the verb "to spadge", as in "if you spadge together yellow and blue paint you get green". Emma would sing her remarks, and hum in the bits where she couldn't think up words.

It is interesting to think that, by the age of four, a child has amassed powerful coping strategies for talking about unfamilar objects or situations, whereas some advanced English students refuse to speak on "new" topics, for fear that their active vocabulary will fall short. I believe if they could learn to improvise, to "riff" on the language, they would be more confident speakers and also learn the "proper" vocabulary faster than they would by just avoiding tricky new topics.

Can we, as adult learners, learn to improvise like a three year old? Can teachers support learners in learning to improvise?

More on this topic later....