Making Oral language Engaging and Meaningful

To build oral language skills, children need opportunities to practice these skills in a supportive environment where they feel at ease.  The conversations need to be relevant and of interest to them so they can share their thoughts and opinions and actively listen to what others say and respond appropriately to what they hear.  They need to pay attention, ask questions and share their knowledge.

Peer learning is an important part of language development.  Children can learn much from each other when they work together, sharing opinions, expressing ideas fluently and coherently, exploring ideas and reach a consensus of opinion.  This helps a child build their own knowledge using vocabulary to describe what was possible and why and helps them learn to listen as well as to think.

Our Inquiry topic this term provided ideal opportunities to make oral language activities engaging and meaningful and to help children engage in their learning.  As a trip to the zoo was planned we based our focus question on making an enclosure for a zoo animal - Does my enclosure work for my animal?  The children had to think about the needs of the animal they had chosen - its diet, habitat, wellbeing, exercise and safety.  

 

Answering this question provided many opportunities for children to research and share information.  They worked in small groups and reported back to the class some of their findings.  In doing so they had to express their ideas fluently and coherently, participate in conversations, listen to other suggestions and justify their own ideas.  The sharing of information helped the children extend their vocabulary and understanding. 

This was a great opportunity for the children who are reluctant to share their ideas in a whole class situation to informally ask and answer questions, to discuss and explain what they have been doing as they interacted with their peers in smaller groups.   It helped those with more limited oral language to listen to others expressing their ideas and using language in a meaningful conversation.  They knew that all ideas were to be accepted and explored.  Knowledge was shared and connections made with their prior knowledge and they were to encourage each other,  and listen and respect others views.  They learnt new vocabulary and had the opportunity to practice it in a non judgemental group.

After the initial research about their animal the next step was to work collaboratively on planning, designing and building an enclosure.  They had to consider how will I make it?  What materials and tools will we use?   This required a lot of discussion to evaluate the design, to refine it and see if it could work.  What is the animals natural habitat like?  Can it play and exercise in it?  Does it keep the animal safe? It was exciting to hear the discussions and how inclusive the children were in their groups. 

During our visit to the zoo the children could be heard discussing and evaluating the different animal enclosures, observing, comparing and contrasting them to their own designs.  They were surprisingly accurate in their designs.  The language used showed how the activities had been meaningful and engaging and helped the children learn so much more about their chosen fact than that they live in the zoo.  They learnt how to work collaboratively, problem solved, made connections with their prior knowledge from their reading texts, encouraged others and practised their listening and speaking skills.  It was very encouraging to see how well the children engaged with each other.

         

Making Progress In Different Forms

 With the end of the term looming, I have been reviewing the oral language development of three children in my class that I have followed for my Inquiry this year.

Child A is still very interested in being social and communicating with others.  She is naturally outgoing, loves to chatter and is not put off by the fact that the children and I often find her English hard to follow.  Her hand is often the first to go up in class discussions and with help to reformulate her ideas and put them into more grammatically correct sentences she will repeat the sentence.  

When she gets excited she will repeat what she wants to say several times not realising that she has already said the same thing.  It is great to see her participation in retelling stories and trying to focus on class discussions.  She always has lots of ideas to write about and draws quite detailed pictures which she can orally discuss.     

She recognises emotions in others and she responds appropriately.  When discussing friends in our Inquiry topic Child A was able to describe what friendship looks like and feels like .  She still found it hard to talk about the playground picture and just said a few phrases about it despite prompting her to try to say more    

Child B continues to be a quiet member of the class but he too is finding the confidence to sometimes raise his hand during class discussions to offer a suggestion.  He, like his many of his classmates, is learning to put his thoughts into a sentence and to use more than a one word answer to a question. 

He finds maths discussions more easy to join in as he enjoys maths.  I ask the children to justify their answer, even if is a simple explanation that one number is bigger/ smaller than another and Child B is prepared to attempt to do so.

Child C has English as a second language but he made great progress with his oral language.  At the beginning of the year he was not a confident speaker and he liked to observe what was happening in the class.  He prefered to listen carefully to class discussions but not join in. Because he is such a focused learner he is now able to join in class discussions adding valued comments and information.

He is prepared to share his personal experiences and thoughts and justify them.  He is very good at retelling the sequence of a story to his reading group and remembering details.  His sentences are grammatically correct and he has begun to use longer and more complex sentences - person, action, object, time/place such as "In the weekend, I went to the beach with my family."  His grasp of grammar and phonemic awareness has helped him make very good progress with his reading and writing. 

These three children have come to school with a wide diversity of early language experiences.  Not only are they affected by their home language and early childhood experiences but their personalities, cultural expectations and their ability to hear or generate speech are all part of their oral language development.  It is up to us as teachers to make oral language activities engaging and meaningful in the classroom to help such children engage in their learning.