Babies are born with a huge capacity for "talk!" They hear and repeat every sound, and soon learn to use these sounds to communicate with adults. The talk between parents and infants is critical because it forms the foundation for all future literacy development. Every time an infant looks into her mother's eyes and can tell there is another human being present, every time he cries and is picked up and fed, every time she makes a sound and her father answers back, she is beginning to understand that her needs can be communicated and that her thoughts are worth sharing with others.

Family relationships are vital to healthy growth and development because young children depend upon adults to meet basic physical and emotional needs. Developing comfort and skill with language builds on the relationships formed when these basic needs are being met. Children have many things they want to say. They have opinions about what they want to eat, which clothes they want to wear, how they want to play or what story they want to hear read aloud. Toddlers are eager to impact the world around them by having adults or other children respond to their demands. And as any parent of a two-year-old knows, toddlers love to use the word "No" to assert their independence from those big people around them.

Oral language grows when children actively imagine. Play is the primary way children develop their own ideas and explore using language. They have a seemingly endless attention span for active games such as Ring Around the Rosy or for playing with their favorite toys, whether cars, trains or balls or baby-dolls. Playing with other children requires the increasingly sophisticated use of oral language. Each child comes with a different set of ideas about how the play is going to go. Game rules need to be negotiated. They must agree on who is going to play which characters. Conflicts arise and need to be sorted out. Children form their own identities through these kinds of interactions.

First steps toward reading and writing or "literary" language come when a child has the opportunity to play with oral language. Parents of infants naturally play with sounds when they make funny noises or babble with their baby. Children delight in making up, listening to, or repeating familiar chants, stories, poems, songs, nursery rhymes, finger plays, raps, all sorts of verbal play. They enjoy listening to picture books and hearing poetry read aloud. Being "put to bed" with a favorite story or song or book is a "must" for many young children before they can fall asleep at night.

Parents are sometimes frustrated by the incredible persistence of their children asking to hear a favorite story read aloud one more time. Repeated stories are so important to children because they create a framework for understanding both the world and the world of books. The special relationship of a parent and child reading together opens the door for the child to point out favorite details in the pictures, to make connections to their lives, and to share the thoughts or questions they have. Having these conversations, reading just for fun, and enjoying words all play crucial roles in a pre-school child's developing literacy.

The importance of parents and children interacting through language doesn't diminish once a child gets to school. One essential ingredient for developing oral language skills is listening. A child who is speaking needs to be listened to.

Those of us involved in Cornerstone are all familiar with Ellin's demonstrations with children and have observed her high expectations for children "to be brilliant." One of the keys to the way she works is the idea of "wait time". We can picture in our minds Ellin keeping her eyes on the children and then noticing the glimmer of an idea in a less-than-usual-suspect child. She then entices an incredible, no-one-thought-it-was-possible connection or inference or question out of the child who is most often a child the teacher is so surprised to hear making a constructive contribution. Ellin does this by saying she knows he had a thought, she saw it in his eyes. Then, when he is reluctant to speak, she pulls him up close to her in front of the class and asks him to find the page where his idea came to him. She tells the rest of the class that he is so smart to think hard, and she waits. She is listening with the expectation of brilliance. And it comes, dependably, and in the form of oral language. Being able to say ideas out loud is usually a precursor to being able to write. This waiting and listening for those unexpected ideas, and then celebrating and honoring their uniqueness, depth and originality, is what we adults want to be able to do consistently for our children at home as well as at school.

Listening and creating emotional safety are key supports for children speaking their minds and hearts. In the words of one wise person: "Children talk unless they're suppressed." Asking questions and paying attention, catching the moment of excitement, probing a brief comment and being appreciative of any efforts are all ways to encourage children to talk about what's important to them. A child may want to talk about friends or favorite TV shows. There may be an experience at school that needs to be talked about before being able to concentrate on homework or play or dinner.

Parents and children also interact about things that are important to the family, such as negotiating family routines, planning and carrying out family activities, understanding and taking each other's needs into account. In addition, families are part of larger communities of networks of friends, extended family, neighborhoods, religious and civic organizations. Children develop competency and confidence in many skills including oral language when adults in the family and community figure out how to make room for their children to have and express ideas, thoughts, opinions, questions, and concerns about the world they live in.