1. Treasure your talking time with children as moments that enhance grammar skills.
2. Pronounce words clearly, slowly and correctly when you speak.
3. It is important to model correct grammar for children. If they say, “It blue”. You can model, “Yes, it is blue.”
4. Prolong and/or stress the key word you are trying to teach the child. For example, "He is jumping" (pronoun) or "He is jumping" (verb).
5. Repetition - Repeat key words and phrases to allow for multiple opportunities to learn targeted grammar patterns.
6. Routine - Use similar phrases during routines every day.
7. Imitation - imitating a statement containing a grammatical error with the use of intonation can help a child hear and make a judgement about what they said. For example, Child: "Him opened the door" Adult: "Him opened the door?"
8. Expansion- Expanding an utterance means repeating an utterance that contains an error and expanding it, using the correct grammatical form. For example, Child: "It soup." Adult: "It is soup."
9. Extension - Recast a child's statement, correcting grammatical errors and providing additional information. Extensions are useful in moving children from using simplistic forms to using complex statements. For example, Child: "Him runned" Adult: "he ran because he was scared."
10. Reading with children is a wonderful way to promote their grammar development. Here are a few suggestions on how to reinforce using correct grammar patterns during story time:
Explain the different concepts illustrated within the pictures of the book. For example, If the story discusses all of the animals, point out the final /s/ on the word animals, which indicates there are many animals. Count the animals to explain the concept of plurals.
Use pronouns to refer to the characters within the story. Point to a character and say, for example "Look at this boy - he fell in the puddle. Look at that girl - she jumped over the puddle." If your child does not understand that he refers to a boy and she refers to a girl, be sure to explain that to them.
Find stories that have a repetitive grammar pattern and read them as often as your child will permit, so that they will later "read it to themselves" (e.g., Five Little Monkeys; Brown Bear Brown Bear; Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear, etc.). Repetitive pattern books provide multiple opportunities for spoken grammar exposure and practice.
When reading stories that do not have a pattern, you can choose a pattern to describe the pictures. For example:
She is looking. She is bending over. She is picking a flower...
Where is the red ball? Where is the biggest girl? Where is the other kitten?..
The following documents list books that may be useful in promoting grammar development:
Short, repetitive grammar books have been developed by your school SLPs as another resource to help facilitate grammar development.
11. Reinforcement- Reward student's listening and talking efforts with your attention and responses.
12. Play games that reinforce correct grammar use. The grammar games listed on this site are fun ways to promote children's grammar development.