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.