The Telegraphic stage occurs around the age of 2 1/2 years.

In this stage, children begin stringing more than two words together, perhaps three or four or five at a time. However, the style of speaking children use in this stage resembles the way of writing that used to be used in telegrams. That’s why this stage is called telegraphic. In the past, every word in a telegram cost money, so people used to write the shortest possible messages to save money. For example, to send the message "We arrived in Paris on Monday," someone might write "Arrived Paris Monday." Function words (pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions) and even grammatical morphemes (-ed) are typically absent.

Articulation of sounds continues to develop in order described in earlier stages. 20 consonants are articulated, and all vowels are articulated by approximatey 3 years of age. All vocabulary development processes continue, and more words are added. Utterances exhibit phrase structure, that is, they tend to follow the grammatical rules of the language.

The Beyond Telegraphic stage begins around the age of 3 years and continues into fully developed language skills.

Vocabulary development continues, including its strategies of overextension. In fact, a similar pattern of overgeneralization is used for morpheme development: -ed, meaning past, shows up in such utterances as goed, or putted. Derivational affixes and compounding show up early in this stage: age 3 or 4. Inversion in questions comes in later.

To conclude, children go through approximately six different stages in learning their native language.

The next question is, "When are they finished?" That is, "When can we say that a child has learned language?"

This makes sense if you think about it. One reason we traditionally send kids off to school at age six is because they now have enough language to manage on their own. There are, of course, other developmental milestones that have also been reached (such as toilet training), allowing a child of six to manage away from regular caretakers, but an important benchmark is the language level that they have reached.

And what do we teach kids about language at school?

Think of the three Rs:

• Reading
• 'Riting
• ‘Rithmetic

A second answer is never.

Consider the following point of the argument for this answer:

Even adults keep adding to their vocabularies. One of the hallmarks of the college years is a tremendous increase in vocabulary. Of course, if a person doesn’t attend college, the increase is not as significant. So the vocabulary increase may not be tied to age so much as to the college experience.

Nevertheless, the human brain continues to develop until about age 25, and if Vygotsky is correct in describing a codevelopment of thought and language, why wouldn't we expect continued development of language until age 25? Of course, Vygotsky describes the situation as more of the intertwining of language and thought, which is a rather different from ongoing development.

Still, we should also consider that language is a system comprising phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In the discussions of the stages given so far, focus has been given to these categories except pragmatics. Dr. John Madden (personal communication) has suggested that further language acquisition stages deal more with pragmatics than with some of the other linguistic areas.

And so the debate continues. However, for the moment, the age of six can be taken as a key age in the attainment of language skills. A child of six can fairly readily be said to be able to speak, something that is not as clear for young children, whose language use is often described with mitigating terms such as "She's just starting to talk." or "He knows some words." Rarely would one look at a six-year-old and ask the parent, "Can he talk yet?" It's not even a question that comes to one's mind, since most children of this age can not only talk but can also talk just fine.

The fact that there is a relationship between age and language development suggests that the age of the learner is an important factor in language teaching.

• The question arises whether learning a second language is the same as or different than learning a first.
• The question also arises whether learning two languages at the same time follows the same developmental patterns in the same time frame.

These issues and questions form the basis of methods of teaching language and differentiate L2 teaching from L1 teaching.