午夜剧场

Many people agree from experience that language skills have a significant impact on a child's academic performance. Numerous guidebooks have been published on how to improve children's language skills; while some are excellent works written by researchers, others are filled with claims that are scientifically unconvincing. For readers without specialized knowledge of language development, it is difficult to know which ones to trust. In such a situation, what the reader needs is to understand 'why' a particular method is effective. However, most books confidently advocate methods to 'double a child's vocabulary' without providing any supporting evidence.

I wrote this book with the desire to explain, through the mechanisms of language development, why methods practiced by many people (such as memorizing words using flashcards) do not yield good results in the long run, and to help readers without specialized knowledge of linguistics or developmental psychology understand and accept this. The meaning of a word is essentially something that adults cannot teach; children can only learn it by making their own inferences. Children are 'language detectives.' The best thing an adult can do is create a situation that makes inference easier. In this book, I propose ways to assist children's inference based on evidence from numerous studies in developmental psychology, including my own research.

Another point that distinguishes this book from others is its clear, scientific explanation of the relationship between language development and thinking skills. Children infer and memorize in order to use language. In that process, not only their ability to use language but also their ability to think grows. Thinking skills refer to the ability to solve or discover problems, supported by an information processing system in the brain that selects information and suppresses unnecessary data. Inferring the meanings of many words from early childhood through school age promotes the growth of this internal information processing system. This also leads to improved academic performance, as using this system effectively is essential for reading, listening, and understanding in all subjects. In other words, the more children infer word meanings and enrich their vocabulary, the more their thinking skills and academic performance will grow.

Mutsumi Imai

Chikuma Shobo

160 pages, 1,300 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.