spink final paper

DaAs I move into my practicum one placement next semester, it is important for me to understand the roots of reading and writing for when I must teach them to students. Though I would prefer to teach a class between third and fifth grades, chances are great that as a first year teacher, I will end up accepting just about anything that is available from kindergarten to sixth grade. As such, a firm understanding in the universal stages of speech, reading, and writing is pivotal to my success as an educator. As such, I have already learned quite a bit, but I am ever learning more on how the initial stages of reading actually apply to verbal language acquisition as well.
As children learn to talk, it is important to realize that speech acquisition comes in stages. Though we would love to imagine that we do, it is seldom the case that parents rarely teach their children oral language skills (Honig, 582). Instead they start out by exploring what noises they are capable of making (Owacki, 50). An infant starts out by making noises and exploring their ever expanding ability to make noise. Then as they grow a little older, they learn that their vocalizations can have an impact, be it for attention, fun, fear, or communication. As the child’s skill and comprehension increase, they begin to communicate by not random noises, but as single words. These single words may have different gestures and tones that are used for many different meanings. As they learn new words, they begin to connect them in the two-word stage. These mini-sentences can have large meanings, or small. They may only use two words, but they can contain a full sentence in them. For example, “doggy bark” means that the dog is barking, or the dog was barking, or that they want the dog to bark. After this, the children start the telegraphic phase of speech in which they are not using functional words such as articles and other grammar inducing words. After this stage, comes the later multi-word stage. At this