An utterance can be a word, a phrase, or an entire sentence.

Mean length utterance (MLU) can be used as a measure of a child’s expressive language development. One intervention that has been used to increase MLU is expansion. Expansion is when an adult responds to a child’s utterance by expanding their sentence to form a more complete or complex sentence.

When we talk about increasing sentence length in children, we often use the term “mean length of utterance”. This refers to the average length of the sentences that a child typically uses.

The ability to create “novel” utterances means that the user can say ANYTHING he or she wants to communicate. Speaking individuals can use the thousands and thousands of words at our disposal and carefully craft our messages just the way we want to communicate them.

Language is Productive and Creative: Language has creativity and productivity. The structural elements of human language can be combined to produce new utterances, which neither the speaker nor his hearers may ever have made or heard before any, listener, yet which both sides understand without difficulty.

Language is intrinsic to the expression of culture. As a means of communicating values, beliefs and customs, it has an important social function and fosters feelings of group identity and solidarity. It is the means by which culture and its traditions and shared values may be conveyed and preserved.

Students learning a second language move through five predictable stages: Preproduction, Early Production, Speech Emergence, Intermediate Fluency, and Advanced Fluency (Krashen & Terrell, 1983).

The secret to successful language learning lies in finding that same sense of motivation. You need to have a real stake in the outcome of your language education, just like you had in your driver’s ed classes—and just like you once had, without even realizing it, in learning your first language.

Learner attitudes have an impact on the level of language proficiency achieved by individual learners. Thus, learners with positive attitudes (motivated one) will experience success. Similarly, learners with negative attitudes (demotivated one) will not experience success rather failure (Ellis, 1994.