In the early years, a child’s brain is growing and developing important new connections. Describing what you are doing as part of your day-to-day routine is a great was to enrich your speech with your little-one by providing more opportunities to talk together.
You can use narration with children of any age!
When your little one is learning about the sounds of their languages, your voice provides a great chance for them to learn. Describing what you are doing – whether it’s changing a nappy, or folding some laundry – boosts the amount of speech your little-one hears. Most parents use a fun sing-song voice with their infants, known as ‘parentese’. Babies like to listen to this speaking style, which boosts their learning
While your little-one is still learning to talk, it can be tricky to find things to talk about. You might not think a daily activity like brushing hair, or washing dishes is very interesting. And yet, every conversation with your child is a chance for them to learn about the sounds of language and how they go together.
With their growing word knowledge, your toddler is making rapid links between words and the world. By narrating your actions in a fun voice, you can draw their attention to words they might not otherwise know, and help to boost the complexity of the speech they hear – providing more opportunities for learning.
As your little-one develops more complex understanding of language, using fun voices while you describe everyday activities is a great way to keep adding complexity to your talk time together. With older kids you can try narrating in different styles like ‘movie trailer voice’ or ‘Elmo voice’.
Goals. Increase your opportunities for talk-time by describing what you are doing, while you are doing it – whether that’s changing a nappy, folding laundry, or packing toys away. Since every conversation is a chance for your little one to learn, narration can help you to enrich the speech your little one hears by talking more, and talking about a wide range of daily activities.
How does it work? Babies and toddlers need to hear a lot of spoken language before they can figure out the sounds, the words and the structures in the languages they hear at home. Many scientists now agree that toddlers who hear more speech, and a wider variety of words are faster to recognize the meanings of words, and have larger vocabularies. For younger babies making eye contact while chatting is a great way to help them keep track of the conversation, and pay attention to your voice. For older children, you can try using silly voices, or narrating like the voice from a movie trailer.
Key point. Not all speech with your little one needs to be functional speech – like asking, teaching, and explaining. Although this kind of talk can be important, you can enrich the speech your baby hears by finding opportunities to add in different kinds of speech throughout your day – turning every-day tasks into fun opportunities for talking together.
Multilingual insights. You can use narration in any language! Some families use one language when they talk about certain things, and different languages when they talk about others. Other families use just one language all the time, or a mix of all their languages. By narrating regular activities in your daily routine, there are more chances to enrich the talk your little one hears, in whatever language works for your family.
Read more about narration:
http://www.hanen.org/Helpful-Info/Articles/Build-Your-Baby-s-Understanding–Match-What-You-Sa.aspx
Read the Science:
Suarez-Rivera, C., Smith, L. B., & Yu, C. (2019). Multimodal parent behaviors within joint attention support sustained attention in infants. Developmental psychology, 55(1), 96. FREE ACCESS LINK: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6296904/