How Quickly can an Adopted Toddler Learn English
Toddlers adopted from foreign countries come to their new families at almost precisely the ages at which most kids are learning to talk. Their new parents may wonder how soon these children will be able to communicate with them in English.
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Language Development Milestones
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According to the Child Development Institute, most children begin cooing and grunting when they're as young as two-months old. By the time they are four- to six-months old, they are babbling, making most vowel sounds and about half the consonant sounds. Between 10- and 12-months of age, they start saying their first words, responding to commands and imitating sounds.
When a child is between 18 months and two-years old, she will have a vocabulary of more than 200 words. Between the ages of two and three years, a child begins using short sentences. By the time the child turns five, she will be able to talk clearly, use adult speech sounds, tell a story, and has a vocabulary exceeding 2,000 words and a basic mastery of grammar.
Language Development in Internationally Adopted Toddlers
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When a toddler adopted from a foreign country comes to the United States, she has to learn to communicate in English to survive in her new environment. Boris Gindis, Ph.D., a licensed child psychologist working in New York state, has studied language acquisition skills in children adopted from China for many years. He reports that most foreign children adopted between one and three years of age learn to speak English rapidly and well.
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Communicative Language Skills Versus Cognitive Language Skills
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Dr. Gindis warns, however, that sometimes foreign-born children who learn to speak English perfectly will have language-related problems once they start school. "There are two domains of language usage, referred to as 'communicative language' and 'cognitive language,'" he explains.
Communicative language skills are those a child needs to survive in social situations. Cognitive language, on the other hand, "refers to language as a tool of reasoning, a means of literacy, and a medium for academic learning. . . . Mastery of cognitive language requires specific conceptual and semantic knowledge of the language itself."
Dr. Gindis explains that children acquire communicative language skills first, but cognitive language skills "are embedded into the psychological makeup of native speakers through frequent repetition when they are infants and toddlers and their parents talk to them or near them or read to them. In other words, children are predisposed to cognitive language mastery through their earlier experiences with the language."
Unfortunately, most children adopted from foreign countries don't have this kind of early experience with English, and furthermore they also suffer the loss of their first language and a consequent break in their acquisition of language skills.
Be Prepared
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Dr. Gindis suggests that parents and teachers closely monitor the progress an internationally adopted child makes in school, and be prepared to intervene if necessary to help the child acquire the cognitive language skills she needs to succeed.
Should Adoptive Parents Try to Preserve Their Child's First Language?
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Interestingly, Dr. Gindis does not recommend that parents of internationally adopted kids try to help the child retain her first language. "Experience shows that in the majority of cases such attempts to preserve the first language are doomed to fail," he observes. He recommends instead that parents of internationally adopted children concentrate on the pragmatic issues of the child's health, attachment to her new family, and adjustment to new circumstances.
"The bottom line is that bilingualism is not an option for the majority of internationally adopted children," he writes. "It is more productive to concentrate on developing and facilitating mastery of their newly found mother tongue--the English language." With the help of caring and attentive parents, an internationally adopted child stands a very good chance of doing just that in fairly short order.
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