Bringing the words out of the Montessori box: Towards a Montessori system for enhancing language development from birth to six years

Anecdotal evidence from early years practitioners in the UK reflects a perception of gradual, but per­sistent, decline in the extent of native English-speaking children’s vocabulary and oral communication skills when they start nursery aged 2–3 years. This paper will examine the scope and reasons for the perceived decline as background, before surveying and evaluating national programmes implement­ed in the UK to remedy it. Then, building on how the Montessori approach supports and enhances children’s language development during the early years, a proposal for a Montessori-based remedial system to develop and extend the range of individual children’s vocabulary, grammatical forms, and syntactic structures, in the order in which native speakers of English acquire them, will be outlined.