Eyfs best practice: Prime time ... Communication and Language

Watch a young baby interacting with people around them, and you can clearly see that we are born to be communicators. At birth, after months in the womb hearing the 'underwater' sounds of voices, a baby can already recognise parents' voices and their native language and prefers the human voice to all other sounds.

A young baby listens carefully, seeks out eye contact and gazes attentively when someone talks. Soon the baby and a responsive parent begin to copy each other, together developing an early 'conversation' of sounds and movements.

Communication means sending and receiving messages in any form - including non-verbal signals such as gestures and movements, facial expressions and tone of voice. Communication is the meeting point between people, where we know we have been 'heard'. Language is a special form of communicating using words, and rests on that early knowledge that we can relate to other people both as the sender and receiver of messages. Children build skills in communicating and using language from the countless interactions that they have with people who are their communication partners.