As children mature, language development continues
".. by the age of five the child has mastered the major building blocks of the system. From the age of five the rest of childhood is spent refining and integrating the system so that language can be used for an increasingly complex range of tasks (reading, writing, debating, arguing, hypothesising, being factual or artistic, or for fantasising etc.)"
(Lees and Unwin 1997)
Language is used for a range of functions in school and in everyday life:
- commenting and directing
- initiation of conversation
- talking about feelings and social context
- questioning
- describing
- relating previous experiences
- reasoning and explaining
- predicting future events
(summarised by Locke and Beech, 1991)