Play-Based Language & Literacy Learning

Playful teaching and learning are critical for developmentally appropriate ways to engage young children with language and literacy concepts in the prior-to-school years. In early childhood education settings, skilled educators locate entry points for meaningful language and literacy learning as children engage in various forms of planned and spontaneous play experiences across the day. Within these play experiences, a focus on oral language (speaking and listening) in the first five years leads the way for reading and writing following children’s transition to school.

Through play-based learning, children develop phonemic and phonological awareness, both of which are crucial for later reading and writing success. For phonemic awareness, children develop the ability to notice, think about and work with individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. For phonological awareness, children develop the ability to recognise and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words including identifying rhyming words, recognising alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying syllables in a word, and blending and segmenting onsetrimes. With a focus on oral language and sounds, phonemic and phonological awareness provide the necessary foundation for later formal learning around phonics which incorporates print and the ability to apply knowledge of letter sounds to decode unfamiliar printed words. In early childhood education settings, repeated opportunity to engage children in singing, shared reading with a variety of texts, retelling stories with props and puppets, creating and talking about artworks and play processes, sound hunts, playing with words and rhyming games contributes to their phonemic and phonological awareness. Children’s oral language is also developed when open-ended resources are offered in play. Open-ended resources do not automatically signal what they do or what they’re for, meaning children need to talk, collaborate and experiment with peers when using these resources in play.

Other ways educators encourage oral language development through playful teaching and learning include: to comprehend what is being said, to take in curriculum content, follow instructions and understand what others are communicating to them. Researchers including Pamela Snow (2014) emphasise that strong oral language skills are one predictor of a child’s success in learning to read at school. Alongside oral language and sounds, early explorations of print should be encouraged, with meaningful engagement with emergent writing skills and printed materials through:

• Facilitating environments for dramatic play where children can identify with different characters, roles and voices to understand how people use and manipulate language in society.

• Employing inquiry-based approaches for real-world and STEM-related projects to introduce new and distinct vocabulary which is meaningful to children’s investigations.

• Incorporating children’s home languages into the daily program, with dual-language books and recordings of favourite stories and songs by family members.

• The use of interactive apps such as Chatterkid that enable children to add a mouth and voice to any picture to support speaking and listening skills.

• Engaging children with obstacle courses and treasure hunts to support the development of directional language as they use their whole bodies to move around outdoor play spaces. Outdoor play equipment enables children to link words to physical objects and actions. Word association is integral to learning language and in later years, learning to read.

• Mark-making attempts, scribble and name writing attempts with a focus on emergent writing skills rather than perfected letter formation.

• Including environmental print relevant to the theme of dramatic play spaces such as universal signs and symbols (e.g., first aid, hospital, open and closed signs) and relevant texts such as magazines in a pretend hairdressing salon or doctor’s surgery.

• Children talking about and writing a menu for a pretend café, along with educators modelling writing by recording children’s contributions on a menu while saying, “slow down – you are talking faster than I can write!”

• Reading recipes together whilst cooking.

• Wondering out loud about punctuation marks in texts and showing fascination with how long the word “hippopotamus” is and how short “Anu’s” name is.

• Making your own alphabet books with the children’s drawings and/or photos of room resources.

• Supporting children to write signs saying “work in progress” for their creations not yet completed.

• Repeatedly focusing on a child’s name (and their friends’ names) as an essential connection between sounds in names and understanding about the corresponding letters/print.

Effective pedagogies also support children’s oral language development, including the use of questioning as a teaching strategy to discuss what is observed and to support analysis and evaluation in children’s responses. Marion Blank’s questioning framework provides one example of using levels of questioning to encourage children’s development of general language and vocabulary, as well as skills in comprehension, reasoning, inferencing, predicting and problem-solving. The teaching strategy of ‘sustained shared thinking’ supports adult/child and child/ child talk as educators and children work together in intellectual ways to solve problems, explore concepts and clarify understanding.

At school entry, children’s speaking and listening skills lead the way for reading and writing. In preparation for school, children need strong expressive language skills (speaking) to share their ideas, ask questions and communicate with others. They also need receptive language skills (listening)

Access to developmentally appropriate play-based approaches supports positive messages and attitudes about language and literacy learning. The challenge for early childhood educators is to provide rich opportunities that do not rely on formal and structured literacy learning but expose children to key elements of language and literacy through play-based mediums. When educators plan and design curriculum and environments meaningfully, they can trust that a play-based approach provides children with the skills and knowledge necessary for successful learning both now and following transition to school. This is particularly so for language and literacy learning in the prior-to-school years.

References

Blank M., Rose S.A., Berlin L. J. (1978a). The language of learning: The preschool years. New York, NY: Grune & Stratton.

Snow, P. (2014). Oral language competence and the transition to school: Socio-economic and behavioural factors that influence academic success. International Journal on School Disaffection, 11(1), 3-24.