Teaching Toddlers
How to Talk
The toddler age is such a wonderful stage, but it can also be a very challenging stage. It is a stage so full of learning, curiosity, and growth, and one of the most amazing milestones that most children experience during their toddler years is learning how to talk. Learning how to talk often results in a significant shift in how toddlers interact with the people around them. It can also be quite a relief to parents and caregivers struggling to communicate with their toddler. As your toddler learns how to talk they can more clearly express their needs, desires, thoughts, and feelings. This can often reduce frustration, conflict, and even tantrums.
Teaching a toddler to talk is not always as straightforward as it may initially seem. Although, there is an extent to which a toddler will pick up on speech naturally over time. However, that really depends on if the toddler is having the appropriate experiences to support speech development. As parents and caregivers, we are often eager to get our babies and toddlers talking as soon as possible. Once our toddlers learn how to talk, it helps us to understand them better, build a new level of relationship, and discover more of their unique personality. So, how exactly do you teach a toddler how to talk?
Hi, my name is Natasha and I am an Early Childhood Educator. I have been working with children from birth to age five for almost ten years. I am eager to share what I have learned and experienced over the years with you in hope of easing the challenges of raising and teaching children. In this article, I will share some of the easiest and simplest ways to help your toddler learn to talk. The best part is, the sooner you start practicing, the faster they will pick up on the language. So, even if you have an infant at home, you can start working on developing some basic skills to help them along.
Teaching Toddlers How to Talk
Talk with your toddler:
The first step is simple, but in today’s busy world it is too easy to overlook. We have so many responsibilities and so many demands on us everyday that we can get really caught up and forget to talk with our children. Especially when they are not yet able to talk back or carry on a conversation.
Also, much of child care demands that we meet the basic needs of children, so we may be inclined to talk only about necessities, and then get distracted or caught up in all the other responsibilities we have like work, cleaning, cooking, or other children. We may talk to our toddlers to give instructions like “come here”, “sit down”, or “walk please”, or we may talk to them when we need to understand their needs or desires, for example “what would like to eat” or “ do you want milk or water”.
It’s important for us to remember to take a little bit of time to have a conversation with our toddlers, even if they cannot talk yet. It’s also important that we have conversations around them. As children listen to our conversations they will not only pick up on words, but they will also pick up on sentence structure, grammar, past, present, and future tense, and more. The more we engage them in conversation, the easier it is for them to learn how conversation works and how their thoughts, feelings, and ideas can be shared in conversations.
Listen to your toddler:
When I say listen to your toddler I don’t mean do what they want. What I mean is to just listen, hear them as they are learning to talk. Listening is very closely tied to speaking. The same way that we can be so busy and distracted that we aren’t able to talk to our kids, we can also be so busy and distracted that we aren’t able to really listen to them either. You might be wondering what you listen to when your infant or toddler doesn't talk yet. Before a child has learned how to say words and sentences, we listen to their babble. Babble is how an infant or young toddler talks.
Sometimes when we talk with infants and toddlers we may have a tendency to dominate the conversation, after all, the toddler hasn’t learned how to talk yet and often may not have much to say. Even if they do say something, make some sounds, or babble, it is very likely no one will understand what they are trying to say.
The important aspect of the listening part is not necessarily to understand what the baby says, but to leave space in the conversation for them. It is almost like a pretend play or role play of conversation, and it is a great way to help children develop an understanding of conversation and where and how they fit into conversation. You can model things like turn taking in conversation, facial expression and body language, curiosity and asking questions.
You don't have to overthink it. Be playful, be natural, and your skills with conversation will show which will model for you baby as they learn. Talking and listening don’t have to take too much thought or effort on your part. You can let this come naturally, just be sure you are either making some time for it or, better yet, weaving this into your daily rhythms. The repeat, expand, respond technique will be a little bit more involved on your part, but it will prove to be a very effective tool in teaching your toddler how to talk.
Repeat, expand, respond:
What I call the repeat, expand, respond technique is a method commonly used in infant, toddler and even preschool classrooms to support speech development and help babies and children learn to talk. You can start using this technique as early in your child’s life as you want, even when they are just starting to babble. Babble is one of the earliest forms of communication and it is an important precursor to talking. Appropriately encouraging and supporting babble does help to encourage and support speaking.
How can we encourage babble? We can encourage babble by doing three simple things: repeat, expand, and respond.
Repeat:
First, it helps to repeat the sounds or utterances your child makes, even if they are not yet saying words. This helps to validate their efforts to talk and encourages them to keep practicing. For example, playing with an infant can often look like a baby and parent saying hi back and forth.
If your child is saying words, they may not be saying those words very clearly or in the proper tense. Simply repeating what they said clearly or in the proper tense can help to gently correct their mistake without highlighting the mistake, putting fault in the child, or discouraging speech.
Expand:
As children learn to talk, their speech starts simple. They often begin with just a few words and sounds. As their skills develop they begin to group those words together into simple sentences of two - three words and over time those sentences become more complex until they are able to have full conversations. When your baby or toddler is just starting out with a few words, you can help them to move towards increasingly complex sentences by expanding on their utterances.
For example, your toddler may say “more” and you might say “more please”. As your child develops stronger speaking skills, you would increase your expansion. For example, if you have a preschooler who says “more please” you might say “ can I have more please”, slowly encouraging them to increase the complexity of their speech and guide them towards speaking in full sentences.
Expansion is how we help to provide children more language options to use. They can communicate by just saying “more” and may get the desired outcome, but to enable them to communicate more clearly we want to give them the language to expand on their thoughts and express them more clearly.
Respond:
Repeating and expanding on a child’s utterances will definitely help them learn to talk, but the reason we want our children to learn how to talk is so that they can communicate. If we ignore the content of their speech or fail to respond it can be very discouraging and defeats the purpose of using speech to communicate. That is what after repeating the utterance and expanding on the language, we also have to remember to respond and follow through on the conversation. Let’s take the previous example.
Toddler “more”
Parent “more, please”
Toddler “more please”
Parent “would you like more toast or more milk”
Toddler “more milk”
Parent “you want more milk. I can get you more milk”
In this short interaction the parent has given the toddler lots of new language to use and with practice the toddler will soon start speaking in the same simple sentences the parent is teaching them now.
Like I mentioned before, this technique I am calling repeat, expand, respond is one which is used in top early childcare and education programs with toddlers and preschoolers all over the country, and it really helps to propel their language and literacy development. Children with stronger listening and speaking skills tend to develop stronger reading and writing skills as well, and this is a great way to support that in a natural, gentle and engaging way. Together we can set our little learners up for a lifetime of success, one small step at a time.