Education

Education

Introduction

Cognitive and language development holds important place in children development. Both impact highly on reading proficiency by developing reading skills in children with the passage of time. According to Piaget cognitive development stages, children start reading only when they understand how to use language and identify that spoken words are represented by written text (www.kentrandle.com). Language, cognition, and reading proficiency are linked together, as cognition ability develops in children, which enables language ability in them and finally both help leads them towards reading proficiency (www.kentrandle.com).

Discussion

Characteristics of language and cognitive development and their impact on reading proficiency for grades 1-6

During grades one to six, children make significant cognitive advancements, and most of them learn to read and write (Middle childhood, 2008). Cognitive development of children during these grades is defined by Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, according to it children progresses with starting of self-awareness acting intentionally through learning by using language and start thinking logically, and finally they become capable of thinking in abstract and hypothetical way (www.kentrandle.com).

Piaget's cognitive development stages indicates that children start reading only when they understand how to use language and identify that spoken words are represented by written text (www.kentrandle.com). It shows that language and cognition plays an important role in developing reading proficiency. When child's semantic building advances, his/her vocabulary expands with that. With learning new words, children also start understanding and retaining adult definitions of known words. During these grades children start using appropriate logical thinking and develop relationship between words, understand synonyms and antonyms, and also understand how words are affected by suffixes and prefixes. Thus, building of logical thinking and language usage ability helps children in reading, which shows that language and cognition development during this stage impacts highly on reading proficiency of children (Middle childhood, 2008).

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