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Infants and toddlers encounter numerous spoken story experiences early in their lives: conversations, oral stories, and language games such as songs and rhymes. Many adults are even surprised to learn that children this young need these kinds of natural language experiences at all. They may think, why would responding to an infant's gurgles or talking to a toddler about changing his diaper be important? After all, children this young do not talk much, if at all, and they can't understand everything adults say. Why shouldn't attention to language wait until later, when children can have "real" conversations?
In fact, there are direct links between young children being immersed in a range of different language experiences and their language development. Adults don't always recognize "language experiences" as such or understand their importance for very young children, but infants and toddlers are learning all the time from the stories, jokes, songs, and other spoken language they encounter in their particular culture, their family tradition, and the media (Dyson 1994).
We help very young children take a step along the path toward loving stories and becoming competent language users and storytellers when we provide experiences that foster enjoyment and engagement with sounds, symbols, and words, which are the precursors of the more complex structures we call stories. The more natural conversations and other spoken language experiences that infants and toddlers have in their very early years, the more likely they will become confident speakers, storytellers, and readers and writers when they are older (Schickedanz 1999; Rochat 2004).
Beginning with sounds
How do we help very young children enjoy and engage with language and stories when they can't yet understand all of what we say? We start at the beginning - that is, with young infants and the sounds they make, imitate, and respond to.
Through daily exposure to human and environmental sounds, infants gradually become aware of how sounds are made and how they vary. This awareness is a necessary precursor to hearing and making the different sounds of the alphabet. Adults naturally and informally support infants' engagement with sounds and spoken language when they
* draw children's attention to human and environmental sounds;
* model listening to these different sounds;
* point out the different qualities of...