Kara Blevins

EDU 214
Deanna Reinard
9/28/19
Language Observation

For this assignment, I observed a two year old boy. We went to a large park near a

school, so the environment was fairly busy and stimulating. The first situation that occurred was

the boy running up to a slide and screaming in delight. This happened many times throughout

our time at the park. He used a lot of random sounds to express his excitement at certain pieces

of playground equipment. Next, we went to swing for a few minutes. When arriving at the

swings without being prompted he said, “Up, up, up!” I replied with “Do you need help getting

up onto the swing?” The boy answered with “Yeah, up up!” Once he was swinging he was

repeatedly saying “Wee!” After swinging we decided to have a seat on the bench. He leaned

back and said “Ow my back.” He then told me he was going to get his juice. I said “Okay, what

type of juice do you have, is it apple?” He replied to my question with “No is orange, cheers!”

He decided to cheers his juice with my coffee.

At this point, I realized he liked to announce everything he was doing without being

prompted. Some examples of this are “I gonna go in grass” and “I be careful” or “Imma grab my

juice.” Soon after we slid down a few slides the school buses were going past. Every time a bus

would go past he would say “Whoaaa, school bus!” and “School bus coming,” I asked him if he

liked school buses and he simply replied with “Yeah.” A helicopter was flying above us and I

noticed he was watching it intensely so I asked “Do you know what that’s called?” His reply was

“Whoa I don’t know.” I said “It’s called a helicopter!” The boy then began repeating

“Hellacopper, hellacoper!” He didn’t quite have the exact sounds of the word but was able to

identify the object after. Without being prompted he also started naming a few colors on my

shirt. Most of my shirt was pink so when his mom told him to tell me bye he said “Buh-bye
Kara Blevins
EDU 214
Deanna Reinard
9/28/19
pink.” Overall, he was talkative, but not conversating with me. I tried to get him to ask me

questions as well as prompting him with questions to continue our conversations, but I didn’t

have such luck. He spoke in small 1-3 word sentences and made tons of noises and mumbled

things that I couldn’t quite understand.

In my opinion, this child falls perfectly in the transition stage between the second stage of

language development ( symbolic/protolinguistic) and the third stage (symbolic/linguistic). In

our book this stage can be described as “Telegraphic sentences of two or three words continue to

be most frequent, but syntactic complexity continues to develop, and the child occasionally uses

such functional words as pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and possessives. As their

language ability grows, children gain confidence. They actively play with language by repeating

new words, phrases, and making up nonsense words. They enjoy rhyme, patterns of language,

and repetition” (Morrow, 80). As shown in most of the quotes I included, the boy only spoke in

2-3 word sentences such as, “School bus coming.” He also was very repetitive saying “Buh-bye

school bus” to each school bus as they went by. From the checklist the child I observed

sometimes made phenome sounds, he struggled with some more than others. He always spoke in

short 1-3 word sentences and did well with following verbal directions. The boy sometimes

understood the language of others, but there were some words he was not familiar with.

Throughout the time I spent with this child he always spoke freely to others, whether it was me,

another child at the park, or a parent. Not all of his words were pronounced correctly which did

make it hard for others to understand him.

From this observation, the boy used all of Halliday’s functions except Heuristic. Until I

was writing this paper I didn’t realize the boy didn’t ask me any questions as we talked and
Kara Blevins
EDU 214
Deanna Reinard
9/28/19
played at the park. He mainly made statements or demands for example, “Your nails red” and

“I’m on the stairs.” This child’s current language level could potentially affect future reading

development because he hasn’t completely mastered all of Halliday’s seven functions perfectly.

Since these functions teach children “how to mean” it is really important when reading to have

these seven functions. I don’t believe this child has delayed vocabulary to where it will affect his

reading in the future and success in higher grades. He was open to learning new words for

example, when I told him what a helicopter was and he then repeated the word many times after

that. He was capable of picking up new words and associating them with the proper object.

Especially for the stage he is at (the transition between stage 2 and 3), his short sentences were

appropriate.

Overall, the boy was constantly expressing his excitement with noises, telling me what he

was doing or wanted me to do, “Sit here!” and was had a fairly good vocabulary. After observing

him and comparing it to the text, I still believe he is in the transition stage between stages two

and three in language development. Another detail to support this could be how the child often

used language as a way to share information. Some examples of this include “I got my hand

stuck in there” and “A big house.” He wasn’t just using language to just say random things, he

was trying to communicate information to me about his hand and a big house he was looking at.

His words had purpose, and he knew that. That is something new that happens when children are

transitioning between the two stages and occurs when they begin to walk. With that said, I don’t

think his current language level will affect him negatively in the future. The only major thing he

was missing was Halliday’s Heuristic function (as mentioned before), which will come with time

since he is still only two.

Kara Blevins
EDU 214
Deanna Reinard
9/28/19

Works Cited

Morrow, Lesley. Language and Vocabulary Development. Processes and Acquisition of

Reading, by Deanna Reinard and Sheila Allen, e-book, Pearson, pp. 69-110.