How do you teach your children to talk well?

Mother and father: “Are children less verbally skilled through the use of technology? A lot of communication nowadays takes place via apps. Where you used to call someone or rang someone in the past, it now goes through Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, WhatsApp. With abbreviations and emotions. Distories this written communication form we bribe the skill of goodbye? If they come for a conversation.

Constantly practicing

Eliane Segers: “Children learn their oral skills in the first instance through the continuous conversation with their parents. The development of language is in daily interaction. That is why parents would have to keep an eye on their own screen behavior. If they are busy on their own device, they will not talk to their children.

« They are all those buggies with device holders for parents and child. They help the entire communication. Especially when parents with their children are en route, so much can be mentioned from the world around them.

« Talk especially to your children. Don’t just let them look at YouTube or Tiktok anyway, but watch something together, and discuss it. If there is a tablet, then put digital picture books on it, and read those books first. Then the children can then hear them on the tablet infinitely.

« The following applies to verbal skills: practice makes perfect. That exercise continues far into their young adulthood. As children get older, they gain new experiences for which you can offer words. Also evaluate the current affairs at the table. That’s how they learn to think critically.

« The discrepancy between a smooth e-mail and the poor oral continuation that you perceive can be due to the use of AI. Many young people use, for example, chatgpt for written communication. That makes it extra difficult to continue the subsequent oral conversation at the same level. »

Encourage language skills

Justine Pardoen“Your observation will be correct. Young people will be on their smartphone on average 6.5 hours a day. At that time they communicate in shortened form, with emoticons. They hardly do bubbles anymore. As a result, they make less flying hours in practice with facial expressions, pace, the right tone, what kind of oral communication then you have to have more time for a response, and you have to face a lot more to have a response, and you have to face more. Being able to think and formulate.

« Young children also spend more and more time behind a screen. We hear speech therapists complaining about the bad language and speaking skills of primary school children. That their vocabulary is too skinny, and they can make few sentences. They blame that a too lean language exchange at home. You see children everywhere behind a screen: in buggy, there is no meaningful exchange, in restaurants.

« Learning children between three and six years old as a rocket. They can record a lot of new words a day. This is the time to stimulate that oral language skills. So talk to your children. Ask questions about what they have done, read about the text. Let them be facetimen with grandpa and grandma if you are cooking, instead of listening to a film. Skill.

Eliane Segers is a professor of Learning & Technology at Radboud University Nijmegen. Justine Pardoen is linguist and founder of Bureau Jeugd & Media.