North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

Domain: NC Foundations for Early Learning: Language Development and Communication (LDC)

Subdomain: Learning to Communicate

Goal: Children use most grammatical constructions of their home language well.

Skill Progression: Use most grammatical constructions of home language well

Age: 36-42 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 36-42 Months.

Produces the following morphemes: Articles (a, the) Third person regular verbs (“he goes”, “she eats”) Contractible copula use of is (“here’s the ball”) Uncontractible auxiliary (“He is” in response to question, “Who is…?”)

Situations for Observation of Skill

Listen to the child in conversation with peers or adults during play. Record or write down the conversation for later analysis.

Elicitation Strategy

No elicitation needed.

Behavior Observed

During conversations the child uses: Articles (e.g., a, an, and the) Regular 3rd person verbs (e.g., eats, likes) Contractible copula (e.g., is eating, is sleeping) Uncontractible auxiliary (e.g., “I am here.”) For example during house play the child says, “I called the pizza man. He is bringing the pizza. The baby likes pizza, but she is sleeping.”

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

During book reading the early childhood educators and parents can encourage use of the emerging new morphemes by asking questions about what is in the storybook. “What is he doing?” “What does he like to eat?”

 North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2015

©2015 by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.