Subject, Predicate, and Language development

I've made a small discovery today, which is that in learning any language the most crucial elements for understanding fall in a hierarchy. In order for someone to have a basic understanding of anything someone reads or says they must have a knowledge of the subject and predicate. The noun and the verb in particular is the most basic elements of a complete sentence or thought. So, if a person does not know what the subject or the verb (the action or state of being) given to that subject, then no understanding of the remainder of that thought will be comprehensible.

Comprehensible input will more than likely occur if these basic elements of speech are developed before other elements such as description, prepositional phrases, or other extra elements of speech.

This seems so obvious, because when I teach writing I teach those elements first. Subject and Predicate...Noun and Verb. And, I teach the use of action verbs because they are the most concrete, which makes complete sense. In building language it seems most helpful to build the concrete portions of language before moving into abstractions because these will make no sense without the foundation of a concrete knowledge of whatever language you are learning. This is probably why children are able to build social language so easily, because it is tied to the concrete elements of play, while the academic language takes a while. This most obviously seems to be linked to the abstractions that are built into the academic culture and language.

School and learning itself does have a culture all its own. So, if a student or child does not already have academic language and cultural experiences in his or her own native language then learning the academic pieces of a foreign language will be that much harder for that student. In essence putting that student in a position that will put him or her further behind in comparison to a student who goes to school in a place where they can speak the language that is most familiar to them.

To conclude, subjects and predicates (nouns and action verbs) lay a foundation for all other parts of speech, providing stepping stones for the more complex and detailed elements of language. Build those first, and you will have something to build on. Abstract elements should come later. This is the reason why kids have an easy time with social language and also why academic language tends to come later.