hello class here we are into the second half of chapter number two we're getting into cognitive and linguistic development today uh actually cognitive science is quite an interesting discipline because it's very much a catchall highly multidisciplinary approach to looking at how the brain manifest essentially into cognitive uh capacity and then by extension how that affects things like the acquisition of language and social interaction as well so uh with this as you're going to see especially on the next slide there's lots of different subdisciplines and if you decide to get into cognitive science you can park yourself in many different sort of levels of uh magnification you know depending on what you want to focus in on all right so if we take a look at cognitive science it basically implies that we have a hierarchy of events that need to play take place in order to impart the capacity to do proper processing within our brain and it's a very as I mentioned interdisciplinary very broad scope uh of cognitive science the first thing we need to do is be able to have an experience which means our sensory systems are going to be taking information and it's going to be processing that information for multiple modalities whether it be auditory and visual and tactile all of these are going to be feeding into this perceptive mechanism that allows us to basically entangle all that information and interpret it appropriately and as we know in order to have good cognitive function you have to have the capacity to have higher executive function so think about what you've experienced decide what you're going to commit to long-term memory uh and so over here on the right hand side there's a nice little sort of Wheel of the scope of cognitive science and there's a few disciplines within this that are quite obvious uh the idea of memory and the idea of looking at perception and how we take in that sensory information and process it the idea of attention is a huge one we cannot have any cognitive capacity unless we're attending to a stimulus and then taking in that information in a very sort of uh focused and precise way uh the idea of Consciousness is kind of this fluidity of topics that involve many of these other principles you're going to need memory you're going to need perception you're going to need attention and you're also going to need higher level processing in order to uh to interpret your own Consciousness and so some people again they Park themselves in very specific subdisciplines of maybe Consciousness or memory but a lot of cognitive scientists take into consideration multiple subdisciplines from this one interesting component of this scope uh figure that I have is on the bottom right hand corner here we've got artificial intelligence and some people might in a very Puritan Way say well that's not human cognitive science that's artificial intelligence that's computers and calculations and the like but in reality if you take a look at any type of discipline that aims to estimate or understand human function there's almost always some kind of framework or analog that's used in order to uh investigate that we model things quite well in my world we take pieces of neur nervous system tissue and we will put them into a petri dish and create an artificial network of development or neurons uh that is representative of the full intact specimen all right so it's a modeling approach if you look at what's happened with artificial intelligence in recent times uh it is absolutely going to provide lots of information about how we model and structure the concept of how the brain uh basically functions within the cognitive science environment so I'm not going to overemphasize this anymore because it's not in the chapter but just keep in mind this is a relatively novel and important component to cognitive science So within cognitive science we know that we're going to be encoding information coming in from our sensory systems we also know that we have to make decisions as to how we're going to hold on to that information and for how long we're going to hold on that information so this basically starts the whole process of taking in information and having what we call a sensory register so for example right now I could give you a sentence and you could hear me saying the sentence and maybe not really paying much attention to it but then you want to think about that sentence you really want to scrutinize it and go back in your auditory memory stores that that's the sensory register for auditory information coming into your brain and review that sentence briefly and it'll help you refine your understanding and perception of what I'm trying to get across with that uh with that language so we call this the sensory register and as you know it only lasts for so long you know if I give you a sentence right now you might be able to go back on like order of tens of seconds or seconds but ultimately this is important because it holds the information long enough within those sensory registers that we can then decide if we want to commit it forward towards working memory there all kinds of information coming into your s sensory environment right now that you're entirely habituating you're TR you're triaging that information out of your brain you're not paying any attention to it some of it you're selectively grabbing a hold of and committing it to the next stage which is working memory so we denote this WN now for all of you who've taken intro psychology you have some basic idea of the idea of memory and memory mechanisms if youve taken behavioral Neuroscience you get a lot more elaborated in that I've included the basic schematic of the brain here we're not going to go through that it's beyond the course of this uh the scope of this course but just keep in mind that we do have specific regions of the brain that are going to be aligning essentially with the different sensory inputs coming into the brain and making those discretionary calls as to what we want to commit to working memory now the next decision your brain has to make is what you want to take from the working memory and commit into long-term memory long-term memory allows us to take very highly Salient information and by Salient I mean important and impactful information and make it into a very strong neural circuit a very strong memory that's essentially what salience is referring to in this case so when we're making that decision to go to long-term memory a lot of the sort of brain regions on the previous slide we'll start sending information to another subset of brain regions that are going to be encoding and storing that information in specific structures and in this example here I just have some of the you know commonly referred to brain structures that are involved in long-term memory things like the hippocampus which is a storage facility for long-term memory the temporal lobe which is part of that whole storage and long-term retrieval process another thing I want to make mention too as well and it's very relevant for young uh Learners is the amydala which is sitting here on the end of the hippocampus and the reason this is important and if you remember from mro psychology the amydala is really important for emotionality so aggression fear if you've had some kind of experience that's extremely intense and in some cases tragically it becomes a traumatic experience this amydala lights up and it will inform the hippocampus to basically supercharge the amount of consolidation of long-term memory this is why children who experience trauma tend to have vivid memories and recall of those events because that amydala basically took all of that information then encoded it very efficiently so with this we have a basic kind of working knowledge of the Neurology of memory mechanisms and it's important to think about this when you see students that might be experiencing things like trauma and uh you might be able to have a a little bit better capacity to intervene in their learning uh environment all right so we move from working to long-term memory and all of this is going to require that we're actually paying attention to the information coming in and I alluded to this in the the previous slide attention is going to be pulling out specific Snippets of information that's coming into your sensory and perceptive systems and deciding what part of that you're going to really focus your your encoding on so hence the term it attention if you have an impairment in in attention then obviously you're going to not be precisely encoding all of the information coming into your brain and obviously we know that the children for example that have ADHD have issues with being able to focus on particular Snippets of information coming into their system they can't attend to stimuli they end up becoming very distracted as well as a function of that and it's kind of tragic when you think about it because we have a lot of data coming into our brain and attentional mechanisms act essentially as a filter to allow us to dispense with certain categories of information and to focus on other categories of information and this is essentially how learning happens right there this is a concept of passive learning where you're not putting much attention into something yet you're still able to incorporate that information into your brain but attention is a very effective tool at facilitating the process of uh getting specific uh acquisition of skills so ultimately we need attention for getting information into the system on the upper right hand corner here I have the the classic kind of uh pharmacological approach with dealing with attention deficits uh the old school stuff uh riddlin is a classic one uh but since then there's been many versions of this like Aderall and moving forward uh that you know claim to reduce the amount of side effects and increase the efficacy of the drug this is a very contentious topic uh and uh I think this is actually a fantastic topic for any discussion on the discussion board because you're going to find that there's diametrically opposed opinions on this some people might be of the opinion that well if you can relieve that inattention and that distractability using you know low dosage uh pharmacological intervention then that's going to fac facilitate the long-term benefit of the child whereas other people are like well we don't need to be giving drugs and altering brain structure in order to get that child to perform within the confines of the classroom right so keep in mind very contentious but very important and interesting topic to talk about so ultimately we have to be able to take this information coming in through the sensory systems and then take it from working memory bring it into long-term memory with this we know that there's certain tactics that we can use things like rehearsal right doing things over and over again is going to help the to increase the frequency by which those neurons are going to fire and therefore encode that information in a more Salient fashion to again use that term organization you know if you can organize things this allows you to uh be able to retrieve that information from long-term memory stores and elaboration so we're always going to be elaborating on the definition and context of language as we're learning it and so these will all facilitate that movement of information into the long-term memory stores now ultimately this is not something that happens immediately right it doesn't just get turn on during development we know that it develops over a long lifespan in fact right now and I I will be giving you several examples of things that we're learning in the context of the classroom and young people that are absolutely relevant to your learning right now right you're still very aggressively encoding information and trying to process and change your brain structure and so a lot of these same principles apply and will extend into the full duration of your life this whole process of being able to control the information processing is what we call the central executive or executive functioning in the brain one of those things again that really separates humans from all other animals is that we have a very powerful Central executive all right so within cognitive science we need to know how to deploy these ideas into roughly a couple of main categories we can talk about cognitive tools so these are the mechanisms by which we actually encode and understand things but also cognitive strategies and that will become more personalized as the person grows older and understands how they actually learn and we'll talk about that in a few slides now in order to facilitate all this there's probably nothing better than the deployment of group activities group activities means that each one of these individuals is talking with their peers and getting essentially an understanding of how those peers are processing and what level of depth of understanding they have on that top topic we are incredibly social beings as a as a species we're always referencing our peers to figure out where their understanding is relative to ours so group activities are just basically an inherent environment that allows you to provide that now reciprocal teaching is the idea that during that group activity you're going to have natural teaching and instruction that's going on between the peers especially if the topic is whatever the lesson is they're going to be playing within the the realm of that topic and the dialogue back and forth is going to be reciprocally reverberating if you will within uh the interaction between the students now this is important this works for you as well this is one of those examples of you know the strength of a study group for example um there are going to be some of you who are going to be really strong in a particular topic and some of you who are struggling a little bit in certain topics sitting down as peers and having to explain back and forth is of massive benefit to both parties right the stronger person is further reinforcing their encoding and understanding it in more detail they're also having to dig into different approaches through language to try to explain it in different ways to somebody who doesn't quite uh pick up on it and so there going to be a reciprocal benefit to that uh you're also going to be able to provide reminders of what to do uh as we're going to be talking about when we get into attention there's going to be an increase in the ability to attend to stimuli as you get older and so especially when they're very young they're going to need reminders of what to do and reminders as to what the topic of the moment is present challenging tasks right and this goes back to last lecture you'd be surprised what the students can learn if you challenge them uh in a heavier way and so if you provide sufficent sufficient scaffolding so if you're providing a framework within the the the uh context of that lesson it'll help them p uh basically persevere within that highly challenging task and hopefully they can get to the point where they're providing their own scaffolding strategies and you're at this point and then some in your progression where you know how you learn and you know how to organize and scaffold your learning accordingly well hopefully you can facilitate that by providing challenging tasks and allowing them to develop those strategies themselves continuing our list to assess children's abilities under a variety of work conditions clearly we have a mosaic and a variety of different learning styles and personalities and as such why should we only have a singular way of evaluating uh a children's Pro progression second Point here provide opportunities to engage in authentic or real world activities yes we have the formalized learning environment of the classroom you're sitting in your desk in your learning mechanism but to take that out into the real world and actually deploy that and interact with the real world actually consolidates and puts things into context so things like asking them to go and do interviews or record what's happening at a sporting event these well provide a real world deployment of that information finally encourage and scaffold play so play is a form of learning it's an opportunity for a very Dynamic and closer to real world form of learn learning learning and you and your ability to scaffold those events can actually happen very efficiently in that context so different types of play you might observe exploratory play with objects right this is fundamental to the very early stages of elementary school where you're just learning about objects and you're learning about where they fit in and what you can do with them you're doing this often times with your peers so there's Group Play involved there's imaginary play with symbolic objects the best example I could think of is using a banana as a phone and then finally roll taking all of these are opportunities to scaffold the learning environment uh through the mechanism of play now I really like this figure because it definitely summarizes in a very succinct way the elements of the cognitive processes we've been talking about so if we take a look on the far left hand side it starts with environmental input obviously this is anything that can elicit a sensory stimulus from our environment and as we know and as we discussed we have a sensory register for each one of those modalities that we're receiving this information information might be old faction might be the visual system might be auditory could be any one of these we know that there's a brief holding on of that raw data that information that's coming in and that transient holding on to it is going to be very quickly evaluated and there's going to be a decision that is made as to whether or not they want to move further in the consolidation process so do we want to advance it for example to the working memory level so here they're saying 2 to 3 seconds or less on average and this is uh there's variable opinions on how long long that duration is now we have the working over towards working memory which basically allows us to have a short duration so this is going to be a transient memory storage facility this is going to be on the D kind of magnitude of about a minute in duration and the ability to consolidate from the sensory register into the working memory is going to require that we have a certain degree of attention that's placed on that event all right so as I mentioned you attention is essentially a filter it filters out irrelevant habituated information and does not allow it to go through and stuff that is significant ends up advancing towards the working memory so this is going to be again uh you know on the order of 30 to 90 seconds now if it's really important if we've actually processed it and rehearsed it and thought about it then we can actually go through a process of consolidating that into long-term memory so in-depth processing we're going to repeat the information we're going to organize it elaborate it and this is going to literally rewire the brand there will be new synaptic connections being made between neurons and that will increase the saliency of that experience and of that piece of information it will become Consolidated into long-term memory now even things like the decision to attend to a stimulus right that is something that is often times a decision you know if you think that you're interested in a topic you're going to be spending more time attending to that topic and so attention can actually be imposed by the central executive Central executive is basically our higher executive centers making decisions to influence every one of these steps throughout the memory consolidation pathway so if I decide I really want to focus on something then that is the central executive basically supercharging the attention mechanisms to be able to facilitate the movement over to working memory and this happens at every single point along this Continuum all right so if we focus our attention on attention if you will uh we can talk a little bit of about some of the characteristics of the environment that are going to impact whether or not we have a high degree of attention to a stimulus or not so we call these stimulus characteristics the first two kind of diametrically opposed ones are novelty versus famili familiarity things that are entirely novel generally draw our attention a little bit more powerfully than something that's very familiar in fact Things become so familiar that we start to habituate out their presence and they almost become invisible to us whereas new things in our environment draw our attention this is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that's allowed us to identify potential new threats or potential new prey opportunities within our environment and we can also focus our attention on people versus inanimate objects and especially when you're looking at the developing brain this is basically looking at the idea that you know that there's tools and things in your environment that you can manipulate but you also know that there are other individuals navigating around so the attention is actually highly involved in the concept of Social Development now with that we can also say that attention actually develops in Social contexts this means that we are a uh species of beings that very much is interdependent socially speaking we live as tribes through Evolution and so with this we need to be able to look at what somebody else is attending to and basically hold that in enough regard that we pay more attention to it so there's two uh terms here joint attention and social referencing joint attention means if I look over and I see my peer and they're really attending to something then I'm likely to go and look at that thing and see what they're looking at to try to understand it as well and this by extension go uh kind of manifests into social referencing which is basically I'm going to behave and learn and change my schema of how the world Works based on what's going on around me in my peer group so this extends again into the developmental question how does attention actually change over the course of your life life uh span well we know that distractability which is essentially an impairment in the ability to attend to a a stimulus it decreases with age and then this is no more true if you look at a 2-year-old just running around like a little maniac you know there's so many things that are just pulling them in so many directions their attention mechanisms are very unfiltered at that point and so they tend to be highly distractable and as the brain develops and becomes more Consolidated you start to see that decrease with age uh obviously there's disorder that we've talked about that will mitigate that but at the same time we know that generally speaking there's a trend towards decreased distractability with age sustained attention which is related to that is also increasing with age and then attention becomes increasingly more purposeful where we start saying I have a goal or a task that I want to achieve and so I'm going to deploy my attention mechanisms through the executive in a way that's focused towards that task now when you're using cognitive processing techniques in the classroom the first point I think here might be the most powerful of all these provide a variety of sensory experiences and this really speaks to that idea of novelty we know that novelty increases attention attention is going to be less likely to filter down that novel information it's going to be considered within that uh series of memory banks uh that through the consolidation process help children pay attention to things that are important so you're going to help scaffold and direct their attention to things that are going to facilitate their learning relate new information to existing knowledge base we know that we're constantly building upon our knowledge in some cases we have to rearrange the base itself to create a new perspective and then we can elaborate on that as well that's all part of the same concept of an ever increasing elaboration off of a base of knowledge remember that children can only think about a small amount of information at any one time and this is again a lifelong process up until the point where your brain neurology Peaks um and starts us decline into the Aging brain context we basically have an Ever increase in capacity for keeping track of things and using different cognitive Tools in order to solve uh challenges consider both verbal and non-verbal behaviors we know that the verbal and language development should match with the non-verbal behaviors of an individual but if you're not observing the non-verbal behaviors in the context of what they're saying then you don't really know if there's an alignment between verbal and non-verbal development finally provide opportun for ongoing practice conversation about experiences and a more formal assessment so this is basically saying we want to have repetitive nature with all of this learning process we want to be able to have dialogue between peers uh regarding this and also have multiple ways in which we can formally assess their performance within the lesson now the textbook talks about some what I would call Universal learning strategies this is not restricted to the students you're going to be teaching in elementary or junior high or High School ultimately these are ways in which the brain can more powerfully consolidate and create knowledge that's encoded within those neurons so the first one is going to be rehearsal the more frequently you see something the more chance that those neurons are going to fire and it becomes a strengthened circuit and so rehearsal or repeating over and over through repetition is going to increase the strength of that uh memory so repetition increases salience and again salience being how powerful or How likely it is for you to to be able to retrieve that information and use it accordingly organization obviously you the entire purpose of the brain is to be able to take an information and organize it in such a way that you can create a construct and with that construct you're basically looking at relationships between variables and people and information and objects you throw them into categories and as we age out you start to see that we can be very very fluid in understanding about how we categorize uh many different dimensions now finally the last Point here elaboration using prior knowledge to embellish new information you know if you've had a really good quality lesson to learn a topic at the very beginning of your learning experience then you can use that information to facilitate and to complement the new information coming in so that's a perfect context in some cases you've had erroneous learning where the learning is actually been delivered in a a fairly poor fashion in which case you actually have an impairment in that elaborative process so now we get into the concept of really what we call metacognitive awareness or self-awareness and self awareness in the context of cognitive science is basically paraphrased as being aware of how you think now this seems like a really easy concept it seems like it should be implicit in the whole process of learning but I will speak anecdotally it took me probably till second year university before I really figured out how I think and learn it's because I hadn't really focused on how I think and learn and the many years preceding that point and so this is actually a concept that can be extended towards all levels of learning so if we take a look at the developmental changes of metacognitive awareness basically we know that very young children so elementary school children they're better able to reflect on their own thought processes compared to when they're very very young uh you got increasingly aware of the nature of their thinking and learning as they progress from grade to grade and Milestone to Milestone increased knowledge about and use of effective strategy so obviously they figure out what works for them and uh hopefully the teacher is also aware of what works for them and you can facilitate this process so that you can accelerate the learning uh curve and again this is incredibly important for you if you haven't figured out how you learn if you're not metacognitively aware personally then you're really doing yourself a disservice and you really should be focusing on figuring out well I'm a visual learner I tend to encode things this way I tend to focus on figures rather than text once you come up with that Strat stry that works for you you'll find that your learning capacity and your memory capacity will just parabolically increase so keep that in mind as we get into adolescence obviously they're more aware but not necessarily metacognitively uh aware about how they actually think and learn so ultimately we call them metacognitively naive but this is a Continuum all right as I've been describing going from the earliest stages to even right now you're going to see a progression of metacognitive awareness now we know that metacognitive development is important and awareness is important so how do we actually facilitate this in the classroom the first point here engage children in discussions about thinking and the mind right so discussing the abstractions of what they're learning and actually kind of reverberating that back into reflecting on themselves is in essence training met metacognitive awareness all right and especially when they're doing this in discussions with other individuals they're seeing other people's level of met cognitive awareness as well they can say well you know a little Billy over there doesn't really you know understand this concept as uh as strong as I think he should you get an idea of the relative metacognitive awareness in the room the second Point here expect and encourage increasingly to Independent Learning over time obviously you know we've been talking about the idea of attention and the idea of learning how you learn and if you're doing that in a directed fashion independently then clearly you're going to develop on your own a very confidence inspiring level of metacognitive awareness so basically strategic and self-regulated learning figure out how you learn formalize it do repetition and eventually that will consolidate into an effective strategy provide opportunities for children to evaluate their learning so obviously uh this you can even go down a long rabbit hole and say you know get the students to actually evaluate themselves and give themselves a grade looking at how their metacognitive strategy is actually working relative to how other other people expect them to work right so basically health and develop mechanisms for doing so effectively I think up to this point in the lecture I've been trying to convince you that things like processing and memory retrieval and higher executive functionings they're all coalescing into a larger sort of computational ability this is what cognitive science is all about now one seal Central concept to this is that we have language queuing systems that are mediating all of this our ability to categorize something means we have to have an identifier to that piece of data and relative to other pieces of data will have different terms in different language to describe those this is the way we think your internal monologue this is the way we organize things and so language queuing systems are basically entirely Inseparable from cognitive functioning now we're going to talk about four main things here we're going to talk about semantic meaning phenology syntax and pragmatic aspects of language queuing systems and all of these are going to be integrative in into the concept of cognitive development so let's start off with semantic we're going to talk about how we Define semantics ultimately this is imposing the idea that we have a specific meaning associated with the term I.E the language that we're using in order to categorize something so in its simplest form then semantics are implying that we do have a meaning component of this language but it's not as simple as that as that because we also know the mechanism in which we can actually use those words we know that some words can be used in many different contexts and many different references so semantics is more about the singular meaning of a a term but rather how that term can be deployed across the use of all language all right so knowing now that semantics and language are basically integral into the cognitive developmental process we can talk about a couple of different Milestones of language development and I've included actually another piece of data here from MCM mural uh in 2007 just to illuminate this a little bit better so first let's talk about receptive language basically this is the ability to understand word meanings so if you're traveling for example and you're in a different country with a different language that you're not familiar with after two or three weeks you start to pick up on certain uh definitions of words and even have some rudimentary communication skills this is essentially what receptive languages now about 8 months of age up to about that age you start to see this really heavy emphasis on receptive language where they're taking in information and creating a construct of what those words mean eventually you get into expressive language which is instead of just understanding what's told to you you actually have the ability to retrieve and utilize words and this happens up you know at the earlier stages it starts around one year of age now if you take a look at the graph this doesn't necessarily correspond perfectly with the data in your textbook but it's very similar and I think you know there's some uh sub discussion to be had as to when the timing is exactly but ultimately this is a quantification of the progression of your vocabulary over time your textbook says about 50 words by 16 to 18 months so this is would be the expected vocabulary of you know up to about a year and a half of age and then you see this vocabulary explosion now this agrees with this to a certain extent you have a vocabulary explosion but they're showing you here is that you know you have a bit of a plateau here that goes to about 12 months of age and then you see this parabolic increase in the number of new words produced within the vocabulary so I think it's absolutely consistent with the textbook it's just the you know the minor point is when exactly that explosion of vocabulary actually happens now as it relates to language development and semantics we know that there's a progression that you're going to observe across development and so here they're described as general Trends first one here lexical words precede the grammatical words lexical basically refers the idea that as you're learning different terms in your vocabulary the ones that have a very singular intent or meaning are going to be considered simpler and lexical in nature so things like nouns verbs adjectives adverbs so on and so forth gr when we were talking about grammar grammar is a more formalized system of how we deploy our vocabulary in a very structured fashion and semantics is absolutely uh integral to grammar but grammar is actually rules and more advanced you deployment if you will of that vocabulary and so it becomes pretty obvious that we should see that later during development compared to the use of lexical words we start simple independent singular meaning then we start to create more elaborate use and deployment of those by basically using grammatical uh words and rules to the next Point here labels for concrete objects will occur before labels for abstract ideas this is following the same concept where we have a developing brain that starts off in very simple terms where we're learning individual words as they relate to objects we're basically lexical in nature and then eventually we start to see the emergence of more abstract higher processing thought so the executive starts to kick in our four brains are far more developed and with that you start to see abstract ideas emerge later on in development now for looking at this process you can see some very conventional errors that are made uh during development when you're looking at the classroom the first term here is undere extension the second term of O is overextension there just diametrically opposed terms underere extension basically refers to not using the word in enough cases so you've got a very restricted set of contexts in which the child is using the word now as they learn more they start to realize that they can deploy that word in other contexts in other uh sentences in which case you start to see an overextension uh phenomenon emerging where they're using the word for too many different cases so they're basically over deploying the specific word uh in multiple situ situations let's take a look at a couple of examples of how semantics develop over time when you're looking at the early younger ages basically it's going to be a very simplified uh lexical uh categorization of words so mostly labeling things so for example I.E they have a dog and this dog's name is lucky so the child is able to identify that this dog is lucky right this is lucky lucky is associated with that individual with that object or living being now as development proceeds Things become more sophisticated more experience is going to feed back and develop a more sophisticated schemata and they'll be able to start looking at classifications and also melding together different classes into the same statement so for example lucky is a dog right that's a a much more elaborate commentary compared to this is lucky and by extension a Great Dane is also a dog they can make that extension to say there's actually a subcat or associated with lucky as a dog and so you can just see a general Trend in development of the semantics as it relates to this uh this concept of labeling now the next Point here importance of verbal play to children making links between their experiences and language basically verbal play allows them to develop and connect the external and the internal language centers so ultimately if you're going to be hoping that they have a rapid development of literacy you're going to have to have verbal play occurring in addition add to reading and to the last Point here this Learning Happens best when adults scaffold children's language I know this is a recurring theme it's almost like a default that they put in at the end of every comment where scaffolding the ability to guide and direct the child's task in order to facilitate language uh development it it's clearly it's going to help and if you look at illiteracy Trends a lot of the pockets of society where you see aill literacy you see in a basically aity or a deficiency of adult scaffolding Children's Learning capacities now another very important discussion Point as it relates to language development is that we live in Canada and in Canada we have two official languages we've got English and French we have some people that speak English some people that speak French some people are bilingual but we also have a beautiful Mosaic of other cultures that are uh very much present and we may even have new families arriving in Canada where the earliest phases of language development and a completely disperate Lang language from English has already been established and we're expecting that child to basically assimilate their neurology into being able to speak English in the context of our society and so this is a huge pressure and a very big uh challenge not only for the learner but all also for the educator I've created there just summarized this uh this great little list of examples of why the English language is very difficult to learn I'm sure that you can find the same list for every other language out there in the context of of having somebody come into their country and learn that language so keep in mind we have a lot of idiosyncrasies and kind of nuances to our language and sometimes those get lost on the students that are learning uh as ESL all right so we went through semantics and the second category we're going to talk about is syntax it's at the very bottom of this vend diagram basically referring to the idea that in addition to vocabulary we also have the structure of sentences we know that there's a certain order of rulle rules in which those terms can be placed into a sentence and if it's out of order or out of convention then it starts to violate uh the rules of our grammar and also change the meaning dramatically so ultimately this structure is going to give us information about what we're trying to convey when we use that particular combination in that particular order so for example the pitcher through the ball okay that sounds like a very reasonable uh sentence you can definitely imagine the pitcher throwing the ball the ball through the pitcher well fundamentally speaking based on our logical understanding of what a ball is and what a pitcher is and the sport of baseball and that this is a movement so it's a verb action well we know that the ball through the pitcher is probably a highly unlikely event and so we've kind of violated the linguistic structure that is going to be accurate in this context this is what we're referring to when we're talking about syntax so if any of you have taken any of Peter Chow's statistics courses you you'll be learning syntax you'll be learning how to actually code language basically using uh code processing in order to do statistical work syntax refers to a very specific and important order and distribution of terms in order to get that to work and the same thing happens when we're trying to learn sentence structure and how to apply that in linguistic terms now syntax is something that actually develops over time uh we learned this not only actively in learning the formal rules of grammar and how to assemble a sentence but also we do it passively just through conversation and being in the room with other people talking you're going to be basically picking up cues on syntax and this is integral also to the maturation of language and syntax so to the first point here children basically begin to recognize that there are Trends within sentences and Trends within grammars that have an order to it and that convey a particular message and they'll start to emulate that this will help them basically communicate their intentions their purpose their needs far more effectively right when you order things into a conventional syntax then people are more likely to understand what you have to say so this idea of ordering things so the order of terms and the Order of ideas is essentially what we say is syntax and the development of syntax now the syntactic system is usually in place when children be begin school unquestionably you know children been at home for four or five years at that point their parents are speaking all the time their siblings might be speaking they may have visitors to the house maybe going out into public they're listening to people in the grocery store all of this is going to be basically queuing up and creating syntactic rules within their language centers and if you look at the progression of things they're going to start off using very rudimentary syntax that's maybe not completely adequate for the mature uh so for example I go to the store you know they understand the concept of I me and go means to basically travel from one place to the next and specifically to the store obviously the tense in this phrase is off and the Order of things are not appropriate it will eventually refine itself out and so this is achieved by not only formal education but also the role of mentoring at home from parents and and other people who are caregivers so basically you want to clarify and reinforce the child and it's yes you're correcting the child's language but you're doing so in a way that you're reinforcing the proper syntax and the way they deploy that language so for example yes you went to the store right you're replying to the child when they said I go to the store and you're saying yes you went to the store and so passively and actively you're actually reinforcing and refining that syntax all right so before we move on to phenology we're just going to talk a little bit about how we Foster the development of syntax uh within the classroom environment so there's normal Crescendo here for this first point uh we you know if you take a look at the earliest phases of verbal development we have have which largely telegraphic speech so these are going to be short simple sharp sentences to the point and what we do is we use those as fundamental pillars to develop and expand upon that so take that telegraphic speech phrase and get them to start adding little components to become more sophisticated more meaningful the other thing here the second point is to teach irregular verbs and comparative adjectives and this is kind of an interesting bottleneck for a lot of people learning language if you look at irregular verbs let's just say we'll take a look at the term B so be this can mean many things in congruence or even fundamentally different things and you have to know when it can be used and in what context it's appropriate so for example am is and are are all a form of be I am he is we are right still related to be and also was and were right those are both complimentary irregular verbs to one another comparative adjectives basically used to compare differences between the two objects they modify so most of them have on the end of them because they're saying that one thing is a different magnitude compared to another larger right one thing is larger than the other smaller faster higher these are all comparative adjectives and so what you're doing is you're adding a level of fidelity of the language being able to say I can actually use terms to describe the magnitude of comparison differences between two objects now at the bottom here we've got described various sentences and structures and give children considerable practice in their their use right that's just a basic tactic for any type of classroom and then finally provide ample opportunities for children to express their ideas in a relatively formal way and give feedback about appropriate syntax and of course this goes all the way back to you want to get them to be doing presentations or even a one-on-one conversation where you can evaluate things they know that there is a formal uh process and that they need to present their best syntax in which case you can actually have multiple opportunities do evaluate their maturation right this brings us to phology now phology comes from the prefix phono which basically means sounds and as Society has evolved we've also included visuals and you I'm going to give you an example of how visuals actually play into phology even though it's not part of the original term so ultimately it's going to be the patterns of the sounds that we use all right so we know that people you know started grunting and squeaking and making different terms to try to emphasize or draw attention to stuff that's going on in the environment and it's those sounds in composition that created language and so we call this phology so being able to use a number of sounds in combination including some visuals in order to convey your Communication in order to convey meeting so we've got phenomes we've got linguistic gestures right so gestures are really important we call them linguistic in nature because you're using them in the context of actual uh language so gestures hand symbols and rhyme and then ultimately ultimately it involves any sound that can be used to communicate including those found in sign languages okay so this is really where we wrap together not only the sounds and hence the term phono but we also bring into it visuals it's the meta message that's being conveyed in the process of communication we are using our name or sounds in order to create composition but we're also using body language gestures and even some cases formal sign languages in order to convey that now at the very bottom here I've got a little important note phology is basically differentiated from phonetics but the two are not unrelated right phonetics uh implies that there's going to be a sound to a particular word and you can use phonetics in order to develop the progression of language and phology is differentiated from this because we're ultimately in creating the rules and contexts in which language can be deployed right using not only verbal but also the listic G gestures now in the previous slide I kind of illuminated the circumstance where through Evolution we went from making small little sounds to becoming very sophisticated composition of language so this progression of phology really implies that we do have an innate capacity to create language and then when we start employing formal education environment we can actually refine and accelerate that process so if you take a look at this it also uh holds true in the developmental Continuum so at the very young age so in infants they're basically going to be focused on the native language sounds that are happening around them right they're going to hear them peeping and kind of grunting to try to replicate the sounds that are going on in their environment this is the earliest nucleus of pH phenology young children rely heavily on context so they're hearing these squeaks and perss and we're hearing all the different language happening they're also aware of all the other sensorium of things going on around and they start to pair things together right they know that when they hear a certain articulated sound usually means that they're going to have some food come up behind that eventually that word will be paired with food and they'll understand the context of food young children have overly simplistic view of good listening all right so what is good listening ever try to get a child to sit there and listen to what you have to say they don't really understand what good quality listening is they could sit there and listen but not necessarily have an intent or an attention expand that is facilitating Learning elementary school children do not always know what to do when they don't understand and I don't think this is just restricted to elementary school personally I think that sometimes you progress out of that category where you understand that you have an impairment of your understanding but you don't know how to progress forward to refine your understanding I'm sure you've experienced this even at the University level where you just can't quite figure out how you're going to get yourself to learn a particular task and finally children and adolesence become increasingly able to understand multiple meanings and this goes that all the way back to the sophistication of advanced language and the many different rules and exceptions to rules that we see in something as you know complex as the English language so basically we can know that one term can have multiple meanings and depending on the syntax we may have a different deployment of that uh of that word so this brings us to pragmatics and the term pragmatics basically means practical or factual use of a term and by extension we know that when you have an interaction whether it be a speaker talking to an audience or two people having a conversation there's going to be ways in which those people use terms in practical ways to imply what they actually mean all right so they're creating meaning and how they actually deliver that information so the context of language use so let's just say you're having a conversation with somebody and they're saying I think you're a really nice person but they're yelling it in a very aggressive way you know you have a dissonance between their affect and what they're actually speaking in terms of the terms and language they using and so you want to be able to align those two things together to be basically harmonious so that you have an implied meaning that's actually appropriate so the context of language use for example taking turns in a conversation that's something that's not part of the language uh formally so to speak but it's part of the pragmatics of communication if you know when to take those social cues to know the topic at which you can take over and have a CounterPoint in a conversation that's all part of the pragmatics approach and ultimately this means that we have implied meanings uh based on that interaction of communication all right so now that we know that pragmatics is essentially the context of the use of language let's take a look at some of the different contexts in which a child might be in and the types of uh differences in the language rules they might be encountering so for example many rules are going to be culture specific uh some cultures are going to have different standards as to when a child can say something or intervene or whether not they have uh anything to contribute at all right so we know we have a spectrum of this and so we know that there's going to be a culture specific and actually a context specific impact of pragmatics on language so for example when is it appropriate to be quiet when is it appropriate to ask a question or to interrupt for example in your classroom you will might have a very open environment where you're inviting opport unities for students to ask for clarification when they can actually ask a question in another context it might be very inappropriate for a child to be speaking up right so maybe the adults are having a serious conversation and there's just no uh place for the child in that particular conversation so this is going to be interesting contrast right so you're going to have what's happening in your classroom you're going to have what's happening at home and out in public and it's going to involve the variety of different cultures in each one of those environments also how children interact with adults might be imposed by what they're experiencing at home right so the pragmatic Rules of Engagement if you will are going to be variable depending on what child you're interacting with uh children learn and practice appropriate speech registers so basically these are going to be the ability to use certain phrases in order to convey their meaning so in the classroom the language rules might be fundamentally different than if they were out I don't know at the fish shack with uh you know with with some friendss of the family right so you're typically going to find that the language rules will be variable throughout the day throughout the week and this is again this plays into the idea of pragmatics uh playground rules versus home and family Rules right so we always talk about you know playground Justice there's a different set of Standards on the playground compared to what you're going to find in the classroom or at home or at a family formal event for that matter so one question is is pragmatics something that is form considered in our education system to a small extent it's certainly not a predominant tactic or um Paradigm if you will within our education systems there's almost this implicit understanding that as a child arrives in the classroom they're going to have some understanding of pragmatics that's going to allow them to perform and interact within their environment now with this uh you can also formalize it to a certain extent within your um classroom but there's a really important caveat get in consideration to this you need to be sensitive to the students cultural backgrounds because in some cases the pragmatic system at home is entirely appropriate it's just a contrast with maybe the way that you're trying to organize and run your classroom but you can't be condemning in that sense because again this is their culture so uh you have to try to find some happy medium between the two where you have an effective uh Paradigm within the classroom that complements the uh at home cultural experience as well all right so that wraps up chapter number two I'd say that this chapter is uh I really like what they did with the cognitive development uh content within it and I also like what they've done in terms of relating it to Canadian education systems so next week we're going to be getting into chapter number three personal social and moral development now that seems like a very untechnical uh series of topics but as you're going to see there's some interesting formal explanations about how we look at personal social and moral development have a fantastic week and weekend everyone thank you