Child Language Acquisition - children's TV and books

Summerinesses,

this is the perfect time to do a little 'wider reading' in the form of digging out some books for young children and watching some Cbeebies. This will give you an idea about the kinds of input considered suitable for children who are developing their language skills. If you have them, you could always get out old exercise books and look at some of yours (or a sibling's) early writing (age 3-8ish)

Here are some ideas about what to look at and what to think about:

Books
What books do you remember from your early childhood? What did you read yourself and what was read to you? If you can't get your hands on hard copies, you can often get Youtube videos of people reading classic books (here are some suggestions):

Where the Wild Things Are - Sendak
Hairy Maclary books - Dodd
Dr Seuss books
Julia Donaldson books
reading scheme books e.g. Biff and Chip, The Village with Three Corners
Red Nose readers - Ahlberg (I also love Each, Peach, Pear Plum)

• What are the things that will interest/excite children? 
• What are the features of this kind of writing (if you were going to write your own using one as a style model, what conventions and techniques would you steal?)? 
• What makes this writing easy/hard/interesting to read? 
• What could parents enjoy as well as children? What could they explore together?

Use the search option on my blog to look for earlier posts on children's reading and on phonics. There are some interesting issues about updating old classics like Enid Blyton and Richard Scarry books to make language more modern and remove references that are not 'politically correct'. What models of different genders and races are being presented?

TV
What did you watch when you were little? Are the programmes still available?

I'm recommending you use Cbeebies programmes but my 4-year-old is obsessed with Paw Patrol on. NickJr. Check out an episode of that if you want to see why I have to work hard on fighting a lot of the representations it is creating in his developing world-view. And it is on a channel with adverts - don't get me started on the representations in those! Check out a few minutes of those if you get a chance (could be an idea for an investigation).

So, some Cbeebies recommendations (watch on demand or Virgin channel 702 or you might find them on the web - some might not be currently available):

bedtime stories
Alphablocks
Nina and the Neurons
Bing Bunny
Abney and Teal
Rastamouse
In the Night Garden
Topsy and Tim
Messy Goes to Okido
the changeover times with the Cbeebies presenters

and some Peppa Pig episodes (available online), because, why not?

Here are some things to think about:

• what are the characters like? what are the gender/race/age/disability representations?
• what is the language like? the proportion of talk to visuals?
• are there messages? didactic (teaching) aspects? how difficult are they to pick out? would it need an adult to watch with the child and discuss?
• is there humour? what sort?
• how long is the programme? how is interest maintained? Would it interest adults too? Why?
• which tones of voice are used? How is adult lanugage adapted for a young audience?
• is there any significant use of sentence moods other than declaratives? What other striking techniques are there?
• what would you definitely include if you were going to pitch your own children's TV show?

Please comment with anything you read and watched when you were young and anything that you noticed if you checked some of these out.