ABSTRACT
Spoken language plays a central role in learning. Parents in talking to their children help them to find words to express, as much to themselves as others, their needs, feelings and experiences. Through language children can transform their active, questing response to the environment into a more precise form and learn to manipulate it more economically and effectively. The complex perceptual-motor skills of reading and writing are based in their first stages upon speech, and the wealth and variety of experience from which effective language develops. Language originates as a means of expressing feeling, establishing contact with others and bringing about desired responses from them; these remain as fundamental functions of language, even at a more mature level… . Language increasingly serves as a means of organising and controlling experience and the child’s own responses to it. The development of language is, therefore, central to the educational process.
