Module 2 Oral language: transcripts and audio descriptions
1. Oral language development
Video: Oral language development
While reading instruction typically begins when children enter formal schooling, reading success is founded in strong oral language competency. A great deal of research has demonstrated strong links between early oral language skills and subsequent literacy achievements.
Children learn language by hearing language around them. Whether they speak early or late, are learning one language or more, are learning to talk along typical lines or are experiencing difficulties, the language acquisition of all children occurs gradually through interaction with people and the environment.
Early language development occurs in every setting to which the child is exposed. The more experiences the child is exposed to, the more language they will learn to describe their thoughts, feelings and ideas.
Just as being exposed to language-rich environments is important for the development of oral language, literacy-rich environments provide children with opportunities to learn about, interact with and experiment with print. A literate environment begins with the presence of easily accessible reading and writing materials and is shaped by the child's experiences with print materials, family attitudes about literacy, and adult modelling of reading and writing skills.
Language and literacy development can be promoted through interactive shared reading experiences, in which the adult and child actively participate in the construction of a conversation surrounding a story book. The collaborative potential of interactive shared reading is increased when the adult is highly sensitive to the child's level of engagement, interest and language competence.
Strategies for engaging children in interactive shared reading include:
- Observing: look out for verbal initiations, facial expressions, body posture and eye gaze. These can indicate how well the child is engaged and understanding new concepts.
- Waiting: remember, children need more time to formulate responses to questions and comments.
- Listening: pay close attention to what the child is saying so you can respond appropriately.
- And finally, being face to face. When you are face to face, you can read the child's cues to find out what interests them about the book. The child will know you are interested in sharing the book with them if you are looking at them with interest.
Video: Identity and oral language
It's through language that we share and express our ideas, our feelings, our culture and its values. Language is the fundamental aspect of our identity.
Here on screen we have David and Yuki. They're raising two bilingual girls in Melbourne in Australia, and Yuki says: "By sharing my culture and language, I feel acknowledged and welcomed in Australia. I feel proud of where I come from and being Japanese."
It's really important to recognise and celebrate the students' home languages.
When we think about how closely language is linked to our identity, to who we are, we understand that valuing home languages improves the learning outcomes for our students. They can engage. They can learn how to behave within each environment in relation to others and to different situations. They feel respected. Encourage your students to share aspects of their culture, their language and they'll feel valued for who they are. They can express their emotions. They react to others. Now we would like to say positively, but often they are still learning to react positively to others. It's important, though, for them to learn how to express how they feel and how to share their needs and their wants. They're able to persist. Now, this is really important in learning environments, that your students try new things, they know how to ask for help and they can approach new situations.
English is one of the many languages spoken in Australia, and different languages may be spoken by families, classmates, and the community. We understand that students belong first to their family, their cultural group or community, and then school. Teachers can encourage students to build a sense of belonging and interdependence with their classmates through oral language interactions that demonstrate a shared purpose.
2. Understanding oral language
Audio: Oral language components
Oral language is complex. This model, developed by Bloom and Lahey, explains the different forms of oral language skills that emerge as we learn to speak.
The model breaks language into three areas: content, form and use. These three areas work together in complex and overlapping ways to enable us to develop receptive skills for listening and reading, and expressive skills for speaking and writing.
Audio: Form
The form component involves an understanding of the rules of language and how language works. It includes the areas of phonology, morphology and syntax.
Phonology is the study of the sounds and patterns of sounds within language. An example of phonology is being able to hear and identify syllables in words such as e/le/phant. An understanding of phonology is a key foundation for learning to read and spell.
Morphology is the study of the parts of words and the meaning of those parts. An example of morphology is when we add an -ed suffix to the end of a word to change the meaning and show past tense. So, “I jump” is happening right now, but “I jumped” happened at some time in the past.
Syntax refers to the patterns of language and the way words are ordered to make meaningful sentences. An example of syntax is knowing what a correctly structured sentence sounds like. So, we know that the sentence "I will go to the shops tomorrow" is correctly structured to make meaning, but the sentence "I shops the go tomorrow will" is incorrect.
Audio: Use
The use component is also known as pragmatics. It is related to the social use of language and how words are used in different contexts. It involves an understanding of the rules of language and how these rules change depending on purpose and audience.
The content component is all about the meaning of what is being said. It covers the development of vocabulary and our ability to sequence events and understand inferences.
Audio: Oral language development
Oral language development involves skills from form, use and content. These skills blend together as children develop the ability to speak and understand oral language.
Review Activity:
Choose which of the three components of oral language (content, form or use) each of the following statements relate to.
Statement 1: Relates to the meaning of language.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 2: Is also known as pragmatics.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 3: Relates to the social use of words.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 4: Includes the development of vocabulary.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 5: Involves knowing the rules of language.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 6: Includes the areas of the sounds of language, and the meaning of word parts.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 7: Includes the area of syntax or grammar, which is all about patterns of language, word order and meaningful sentences.
Is it content, form or use?
Statement 8: Relates to the way language changes according to its purpose and the audience.
Is it content, form or use?
Answers
The correct answer for Statement 1: Relates to the meaning of language – content.
The correct answer for Statement 2: Is also known as pragmatics – use.
The correct answer for Statement 3: Relates to the social use of words – use.
The correct answer for Statement 4: Includes the development of vocabulary – content.
The correct answer for Statement 5: Involves knowing the rules of language – form.
The correct answer for Statement 6: Includes the areas of the sounds of language, and the meaning of word parts – form.
The correct answer for Statement 7: Includes the area of syntax or grammar, which is all about patterns of language, word order and meaningful sentences – form.
The correct answer for Statement 8: Relates to the way language changes according to its purpose and the audience – use.
3. Oral language and reading
Audio: Professor Pamela Snow's Language House
Professor Pamela Snow uses the analogy of building a house to explain the link between oral language and the development of reading and writing skills.
She explains her language house model in the following way.
When we build a house, we do not commence with walls or the roof. We commence with foundations; but before foundations can be laid, we must consider the ground into which they will be embedded. Reclaimed land could mean the foundations will sink, and solid rock will mean the foundations do not penetrate beneath the surface. With the right ground selected (in this case, the social and emotional contexts for early language acquisition), the conditions are created for solid foundations to be laid.
Here, the foundations represent the first 5 years of receptive and expressive oral language development and the mental processes represented by language – for example, concepts, opinions and memories. This is a metaphorical ‘slab of granite’ that will support the walls on both sides.
In one wall, we have the development of pro-social interpersonal skills, and the factors that need to be in place to support these. In the other wall, we have the development of reading and writing skills. Both walls are represented with a brick pattern, because they are built up over many years, well into late adolescence and early adulthood.
With the walls firmly built and sufficiently strong, we can ensure strong support for the roof, in the form of social-emotional and behavioural wellbeing, including social cognition and inferencing skills.
The roof then represents the individual’s ability to transition from school to further training and education, to gain marketable employment skills and be part of the social and economic mainstream. This needs to be considered in the context of diminishing employment opportunities for unskilled workers in first-world industrialised nations.
Video: Oral language and reading difficulties
A great deal of research has demonstrated strong links between early oral language skills and subsequent literacy achievements. These connections have been referred to as the speech-to-print continuum of development, acknowledging the foundational skills of oral language to written language. In turn, access to written print facilitates ongoing growth in oral language competency.
Reading comprehension involves two primary processes, decoding printed text and understanding the language accessed through the process of decoding. In the early years of reading development, children's ability to comprehend text is largely constrained by their ability to decode text. Once decoding becomes automatic, which for most typically developing children occurs at around 8 years, reading comprehension becomes more dependent on skills in language comprehension. Deficits in one or both of these areas will result in different profiles of reading disorder and different intervention strategies.
4. Oral language in the classroom
Video: Positive, purposeful interactions
Positive, purposeful interactions build the foundations for learning in the classroom. When we're talking about positive, purposeful interactions, we're talking about responsive, warm and supportive verbal interactions between you and your students to build the foundations for learning. It makes sense that students are more likely to thrive and achieve learning outcomes when they feel a sense of belonging, when they feel valued and understood as individuals.
Research indicates that the ways teachers interact with children is crucial in determining how they will develop over time. Students benefit most when teachers engage in stimulating interactions that support learning and are emotionally supportive. These positive, purposeful interactions help students acquire new knowledge and skills. They provide input to students, elicit verbal responses and reactions from them, and foster engagement in and enjoyment of learning.
This is hard, and it can take time to get to know your individual students, to understand what they are bringing to your classroom and what interests them. You might even like to try using a checklist for a week or so. Just tick off next to each student's name each time you've had a positive, purposeful interaction with them. For example, an interaction that elicits oral language from the student and makes you feel you're building a connection with them is a positive interaction. You'll know when this is happening because you'll feel it yourself, the feeling of building a connection. It's not about using directive language and it's not about imparting information or instructing or asking yes/no questions.
When you do make a checklist, you might find that you are constantly engaging with some students and some students are constantly seeking connections with you. Or you might look at that checklist and say, look, Sally's got lots of ticks and Ben rarely gets that one-on-one interaction with me.
Making time to interact with each of your individual students can improve their learning outcomes.
Video: Questioning and conversation
When we're talking about questioning, we mean asking open-ended questions to support students' thinking and comprehension skills, so all of those things that you do anyway. For example, tell me about what you're doing. What do you understand? Why do you think this happened? Tell me about what you can do next.
Talking with students supports language skill development. You're building relationships with them to find out what they like, to help motivate them to talk and learn.
It's important to demonstrate joy in your interactions. Create comfortable and supportive learning environments. Don't use a loud voice that you'd use for the whole-group interactions when you're with a small group. Alter your voice to suit the learning environment. It can be really off-putting for students to be engaging in conversation with you if they feel like it's being projected to your whole classroom. So lower the volume and lower your tone.
Use collaborative learning talk in small groups to ensure that everyone's involved. This gives students a chance to engage and share their opinions more freely because they're not exposed to the whole classroom environment that can lead to silence or reluctance to participate. Have those reciprocal back-and-forth conversations with students about the things that interest them, in order to keep them engaged and provide learning opportunities.
Introduce new vocabulary during conversations and encourage students to ask for the meaning of new words. For example, I'm feeling anxious. What do you think that means? Yes, it means I'm feeling worried about going to the meeting because I haven't met these people before. Continue to introduce vocabulary on the theme, such as, do you ever feel nervous meeting new people? Use a variety of words such as anxious, tense, worried, nervous. We can start to think about the nuances of words that have similar meanings.
Use conversational language throughout the day. Here's another example. You seem excited about going to the art room. What do you hope to do there? Tell me all about it when you come back.
Students who build language skills are better able to express themselves and connect with others. So model this for your students, expand on what they say to stimulate their thinking.
Provide a platform for continuing conversation. You may start to introduce Tier 3 or subject-specific vocabulary. You told me you used the clay. How do you feel about making sculptures? Or, tell me about how the clay felt, and then use descriptive words to expand their vocabulary, crumbly, rubbery, slimy, gritty, all of those delicious descriptive words.
Positive, purposeful interactions help students feel supported and understood. This can lead to them feeling more confident and comfortable in speaking to others.
As you become more aware of individual student needs and interests, scaffolded learning can be planned in a strong, intentional way to improve student learning outcomes. Students can be empowered by contributing to discussions and by being recognised as competent learners.
Video: Puppets to promote oral language
Puppets are a valuable way of promoting oral language skills and confidence. When puppets are incorporated into play-based learning, students retain knowledge more effectively. They communicate naturally with puppets, and they gain confidence in expressing themselves. You can increase students’ communication and social skills by providing structured opportunities to interact with the puppets. They can practise both vocabulary skills and narrative language or oral storytelling using the puppets to interact with other students or with you.
A puppet can be a good tool to capture the attention of young learners, especially if you as the adult give the puppet an engaging personality. Oh you're shy. Come on. You can come out and talk to the children. Are you a bit worried?
Puppets with moving mouths are especially good for use in language lessons but there is no need to go overboard with the movement. If emphasising a particular vocabulary word, such as “consequences", or a phrase in oral storytelling, “but he was still hungry”, you can exaggerate the movement a bit more so that it opens and closes again with each syllable.
Encourage them to use a variety of words. You're shy. Are you worried? Are you frightened?
Students can express affection towards a puppet by stroking it, or patting its head. This contact can be extremely important in breaking down barriers, relaxing the students, and enabling physical expression. It can be a starting point for oral expression as they might feel more comfortable expressing themselves through a puppet.
And, of course, it all becomes fun when a puppet's brought into the picture.