5 minute read
ORAL LANGUAGE: The foundation of literacy
By Janelle Curry
Oral language skills are necessary to follow instructions, understand and respond to questions, retell an event, follow story lines in books, problem solve, express thoughts and ideas, engage in social interactions AND be a great reader and writer. If your child cannot understand words orally, they will not understand them written down. Similarly, if your child cannot tell you a wonderful sentence, they may be unable to write a wonderful sentence.
Learning to understand and use language is biologically natural, although children still need frequent exposure to language-rich activities and conversations. Children may hear many words from TVs, iPads, computers, but they do not learn these as readily. Children learn through live interaction; they say something, you say something, they say something and so on. This is what we call ‘serve and return’.
Some tips when interacting with children:
Model language.
Talk out loud about what you are seeing, hearing, doing, or feeling. Describe what your child is doing, seeing, or hearing. This provides great language exposure for your child. They do not need to repeat or imitate what you say.
Model language while playing with your child. Talk about the toys, discuss how to play with them, narrate what you are doing together with the toys. Pretend play is a wonderful way to expose your child to language and develop their imagination. Model correct word order, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
Expand on their message.
Add extra words or phrases to what your child has said when responding to them. This allows you to add new words and information to their thoughts by making your sentences slightly more complex than theirs. Keep the conversation going.
Keep the conversation going
The quality of the conversations you have with your child counts. Aim for at least five conversation turns to encourage positive and engaging experiences with language.
Everyday experiences.
Rich language experiences happen every day. Sometimes we need a reminder to be more intentional with our language. The same experience can be adapted to the different ages of your children by changing the vocabulary’s complexity. For example, with your 4-year-old you could use other words to describe ‘big’ such as ‘huge’ and ‘large’. For your Grade 2 child, you could say it’s ‘colossal’ or ‘gigantic’. Sing songs and nursery rhymes.
Read to your child.
This is the most important thing parents/carers can do to help develop their child’s oral language. Book reading encourages a child’s imagination and introduces new vocabulary, grammar, and narratives, while assisting with learning about the world around them.
Children also learn about story structure and print knowledge; that “squiggly lines” makeup words, and that print is read from left to right and from top to bottom of the page.
Book reading tips:
Ensure reading time is interactive and fun. Don’t just read at your child, read with them. You can simplify the book or make up stories about characters or pictures in the book.
Make connections between the book you are reading and your child’s life. For example, when reading about a family at the beach, remind them of a time when you were at the beach together and what happened.
Predict what might happen next in the story and what the character may do.
Discuss why characters feel the way they do. Compare these feelings to a time your child felt that way. These types of conversations whilst reading will help your child understand the world, use their imagination, and encourage them to think, predict and solve problems.
Read with expression and pause at dramatic moments. This will engage your child with the story and teach them about reading with fluency. Stop at full stops, pause at commas, read questions with rising intonation, emphasise words that are in capitals or with exclamation marks.
Encourage your child to tell the book’s story using the pictures. This will enable you to use modelling to increase their language.
It is fine if your child wants to read the same book over and over. Repetition helps children reinforce new vocabulary and sentence structures in books.
Explain the meaning of new words. Use pictures to support their understanding of new words and give examples from everyday life they can relate to.
For example: If reading a book and a character is walking too close to the edge of the pool, ask “Do you know what edge means?” If they don’t know, explain by showing them with pictures or objects.
“It’s the outside of something– edge of a paper, edge of the table.
“Arrrggghhh, I’m falling off the edge of the couch!”
Even with amazing interactive language experiences, some children still struggle with oral language. This may impact their ability to learn to read and write at school. If this is the case for your child, please have them assessed by a speech pathologist.
Janelle Curry is speech pathologist and has worked with children and their families for over 20 years. As much as she loves helping each individual child, Janelle wanted to make a bigger impact for children, so Educatable was born. Educatable’s mission is to help parents support their children in reading, spelling, talking, and writing with books and online courses that are easy to understand and follow.
