Language in Early Childhood

Children with sound oral language skills are in an optimal position to start learning to read and write. Good oral language skills are required for children to be able to extract meaning from a written text.

In the Pre-school years, children begin to organize their own system of language meaning (their semantic system). A child's semantic system is used to build vocabulary, understand instructions and determine the meaning of written texts.

Responses to the MELS© questions give the examiner information on a child's language organization and conversational ability. The latter is likely to influence the success of their relationships with peers. As the test questions are graded, children's responses to these questions can provide a guide to the level of oral language intervention a child may require.

The questions used in the MELS© were developed by Marion Blank, an internationally recognized developmental psychologist from Columbia University, with extensive experience in developing language and literacy programs.

Blank Level 3 assesses a child's narrative or story telling ability. It is this skill a child needs to be able to perform tasks such as making a sandwich, changing a bike tyre or defending himself/herself when accused of doing something he/she may not have done. Children who are not able to tell a story find school a very frustrating, unjust place to be and may resort to physical means to solve their problems.

The graph below shows pre (term 1) and post (term 4) results on the MELS© for performance on the Blank questions after a collaborative intervention programme was implemented for an entire class between a speech pathologist and an Early Childhood Education teacher.