Today, I finished reading a textbook. Although I have had 19 years of formal education and have been out of school for three years, I had never read a textbook cover to cover. I started every semester with good intentions, but by the second week, I was behind in the reading. It seemed silly to start in the middle of the book, so I just never caught up.
However, through a great interlibrary loan program that I have access to through my job, I was able to check out a book by Marilyn Nippold that I mentioned in a previous post. The book is on language learning in the later years of childhood, including early adulthood, and I read it cover to cover in two weeks.
As it turns out, our language development continues through early and middle adulthood. Then it starts to decline a bit, but that is another post. Particularly, morphology (that is, the study of how affixes and root words combine to make different words), syntax (that is, the grammar of language), and figurative language continue to develop well beyond the years of required education in this country.
It's amazing! Just think: right now, your language is developing. You are learning new vocabulary (morphology and syntax, possibly), using complex syntactical forms that may include things such as adverbial phrases, subordinate conjugations, or ambiguous idioms, and by reading this and other blog posts, or writing your own blog posts, you are continuing to develop language skills even though you may not be in school any longer.
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