Infancy

Receiving age-appropriate English language inputs

Babies start to learn a language while they are in the womb. During the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, unborn babies already have the sensory and brain mechanisms to listen to speech and sounds. They are also tuning their ears to the languages they are going to acquire even before they are born, based on the speech available to them.

Therefore, parents-to-be can play different English songs and audios to their little ones. These will be the early English inputs and that can lay a solid foundation in newborns for learning the English language.

Babies can naturally and efficiently do language acquisition through repeated daily routines. Expectant parents who are not native English speakers or frequent users of English may want to refresh their English and practise talking in English more often. They can then be much more confident when communicating with their babies every day while taking care of them. Knowing what to say, how to explain and what to focus on in each step, parents can provide a significant amount of language input daily, making a big impact to their baby’s language development and progression in the future.