Marte Meo in practice: A method stimulating childrens language development

1. Marte Meo Method

The path is long through teaching, short and successful through example

(Seneca)

Marte Meo comes from Latin and means 'by one's own strength.' Marte Meo is a development-supporting program developed in the Netherlands by Maria Aarts. The Marte Meo method uses video recordings as a tool to support and develop relationships between children and adults. The Marte Meo method is used around the world in approximately 35 countries. It is utilized by educators, teachers, speech therapists, psychologists, family therapists, health nurses, nursing home staff and many other professional groups.

The purpose of this small book is to provide examples of the application of the main elements of the Marte Meo method applied in language stimulation for children. The material is intended for educators and others interested in language stimulation. The book presents the basic, simple Marte Meo elements for inspiration and implementation in daily pedagogical work, without necessarily requiring one to be a trained Marte Meo therapist or have attended courses on the method. Maria Aarts has taught me to build on what one already know and therefore, I use the method as a linguistic consultant in my many years of work with language stimulation for monolingual and multilingual children as a speech therapist and linguist.

I use Marte Meo elements, among other things, as part of the subsequent pedagogical action plan when, after a language assessment, I supervise and provide advice on relevant language stimulation for each individual child. Learning the Marte Meo method involves intensive training by analyzing, clip by clip, what happens in the film you have recorded of a child in an interaction context. This process is called interaction analysis.

The actual acquisition of the Marte Meo method occurs during the analysis of video recordings, where very small clips are used to specifically analyze what happens in the video recording. By going through the film in tiny segments, the focus is on the interaction between child-adult or child-child.

We refer to this formula in the program as ACTION - REACTION – and look which MARTE MEO ELEMENTs are developed, and which MARTE MEO ELEMENTS can be supported in the child’s development.

2. The functional view of Language

When children , through their behavior, indicates a need for help, particularly in developing communicative and functional language, one can examine the child's interactions using video recordings from everyday life. Interaction analysis describes the communicative competencies and skills the child has developed and identifies the specific support the child needs for further development, both linguistically and in a broader sense.

2.Functional Language Perspective

A functional language perspective means that a child needs to learn language with the aim of communicating with different conversation partners. Children need to communicate with various close individuals, and bilingual children also need to communicate with people who speak different languages.

In the latest research on second language acquisition, they talk about