Answer to Question 1
Answer: The five-year-old enters school not fully understanding the syntactic system, with limited abilities to understand and use passive voice, to imbed and conjoin, and to elaborate on noun and verb phrases. The ten-year-old has a much richer understanding of the syntactic system, and is able to use a variety of passive sentence structures, to understand and produce sentences with a variety of embedding and conjoining, and to elaborate noun and verb phrases. The five-year-old's vocabulary is still limited. The five-year-old often uses syntactic relationship to define words. The ten-year-old has a much deeper understanding of concepts, and is able to define words using the class of words. It is important to recognize all the growth that occurs during these school years. Our responsibility as teachers is to help students grow in their oral language as much as possible, so they will become efficient and effective communicators.
Answer to Question 2
Answer: The growth between one year and five years old is tremendous. The 5-year-old has developed a receptive vocabulary of 13,500 words, a speaking vocabulary of 2,200 words, has learned all his or her phonemes except for a few, has an average sentence length of 6 words, can form a variety of sentences, and can use plural past tense markers. A one-year-old understands fewer than ten words, uses up to three words other than mama and dada, uses up to eighteen phonemes, has one-word sentences, and has no endings on words.