Milestones in Children’s Language and Literacy Development

(Adapted from Krogh & Slentz, 2001)

Birth to 18 Months

• Vocalizes, smiles, cries to express interest, pain, or distress, or to initiate social contact
• Babbles using sounds from many languages, then eliminates those not heard in the environment
• Connects babbles into longer and longer strings or “sentences”
• Looks at picture books with increasing interest and in increasingly conventional ways
• Points to objects in books
• Makes marks on paper, then looks at them to see what has been created

 

18 Months to Three Years

• Replaces vocalizing by enjoyment of nonsense word play and rhyming
• Increases speaking vocabulary to about 200 words
• May begin to distinguish between drawing and writing, even making letter-like forms
• Combines words, eventually into compound sentences
• Understands that pictures in books are symbols for real objects
• Labels objects in books
• Comments on characters in books

Three and Four Years

• Expands vocabulary from about 2,000 words to as many as 6,000
• Lengthens sentences from three or four words to five or six
• Has difficulty with the pronunciation of some words
• Asks who, what, where, when, how, and why questions but at first has difficulty responding to them, especially why, how, or when
• Can tell or retell a simple story but may forget its point, get events out of order, or just focus on its favorite parts
• Enjoys rhyming games
• Knows that alphabet letters have their own names and can identify some of them
• Recognizes familiar environmental print, such as stop signs and names of fast food restaurants
• Learns that it is the print, not the pictures, that is read in stories
• Can connect information in a story to events in real life
• Writes/scribbles messages on paper
• May begin attending to beginning or rhyming sounds

 

Five Years (Kindergarten)

• Makes use of new vocabulary and more complex grammatical constructions in speech
• Increases vocabulary from about 5,000 to 8,000 words
• Takes turns in conversation and interrupts less frequently
• Can recite simple poems, remember many songs, and repeat lines of dialogue from movies or TV shows
• Listens intently to stories told or read by teacher or caregiver
• Can tell and retell stories keeping sequence of events straight
• “Reads” familiar stories, not necessarily verbatim
• Recognizes some words by sight
• Understands that the sequence of letters in a word represents the sequence of sounds
• Begins to write letters and some familiar words
• Uses phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge to invent spellings
• Builds a list of conventionally spelled words
• Can write most letters, own first and last names, first names of friends

 

Six and Seven Years (First and Second Grade)

• Learns words at a rate of up to 20 per day, if the environment provides language-related support
• Becomes aware that words can have multiple meanings
• Gains and uses greater control of language to think and to influence others’ thinking
• Develops humor that values jokes, puns, tongue twisters, and riddles
• Demonstrates fluency in speech and grammatical construction, but struggles with some complexities such as the passive voice
• Uses phonetic knowledge to invent spellings while knowledge of conventional spelling grows
• Can revise and edit own writing with assistance
• Learns to attend to spelling, mechanics, and presentation for final written products
• Makes transition from emergent to real reading
• Reads aloud with accuracy and comprehension if text is designed appropriately for age and time of school year
• Can use strategies such as rereading, predicting, questioning, contextualizing when comprehension doesn’t work
• Predicts what will happen next in stories
• Reads and understands both fiction and nonfiction if it is designed appropriately for grade and age

 

Eight Years (Third Grade)

• Increases vocabulary to approximately 20,000 words
• Begins to understand most complex constructions, including the passive voice
• Can read for enjoyment
• Reads aloud with fluency if text is designed appropriately for age
• Reads chapter books independently
• Can summarize the main points in a reading
• Can use roots, prefixes, and suffixes to infer word meanings
• Can independently review own work for spelling, mechanics, and presentation
• Can write in a variety of formats such as stories, reports, and literature responses