Middle School: How To Help Your Child Learn Verbal Linguistic Skills

How can I help my middle school-age child learn "verbal-linguistic skills"?

Beside modeling good expressive language for our middle school children, to improve their verbal-linguistic skills, we can also ask many questions of our children. Questions such as: Have you ever heard that expression before? When we're watching television, we can ask our children to explain to us what's going on. Did they follow the dialog? We can help them with their verbal-linguistic skills by helping to explain to them, re-phrasing things to our children that they may not understand and generally being verbally interactive with our children.