language learning

During this year’s NAIDOC week, 3 to 9 July, early childhood education and care services take the opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. In making the most of this opportunity, they reflect on the week, and devise ways to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture in the life of […]

The frequency of reading to children at a young age has been proven, by a study undertaken in 2013, by Guyonne Kalb and Jan C. van Ours, to be a directly causative factor on their learning outcomes, when they go on to school, irrespective of their family backgrounds and home environments. The research, the outcome […]

According to neuroscientists, the development of handwriting skills is a crucial part of a child’s development. Our brains are hard-wired to learn language, in both its written and spoken forms. However, as we depend more and more on communicating in text, via computers, mobile phones and iPads, some educators are questioning whether handwriting has a […]

In order to learn new words, researchers have found that children use an automatic object-association technique, which is remarkably similar to how robots learn. Young children are notorious for how quickly they can pick up words. In order to better understand the mechanics of such early learning, a new study tested the object association skills […]

Work at the Research School of Psychology of the Australian National University shows that toddlers’ symbolic play, which involves use of the imagination, promotes language development more effectively than functional play, such as solving puzzles, building with blocks or drawing. Over fifty infants’ early language development was tracked according to the style of play toddlers […]