Planned and purposeful talk

COLLAPSEWhat aspects of oral language development are essential for young learners to acquire? 

What aspects of oral language development are essential for young learners to acquire?

In early years children should be provided with ample opportunities to orally communicate with each other. We can’t expect the children to use proper tone of voice or different gestures and body language, if we don’t explicitly teach and introduce them to these social conventions. In North American culture maintaining eye contact is consider important, while in some cultures like in South-East Asia direct eye contact with your adults while talking to them is considered disrespectful. Therefore, teaching the acceptable behaviour of our society is important and teaching them in early years will help them learn the norm from the beginning.

As early years educators, we should expose our students to these skills by carefully planning the program that allows the children to explore language and to communicate their thinking and learning in meaningful ways. Educators should listen to their students attentively and observe children’s responses and interactions. They can guide oral language development by providing models of richer responses to guide children’s thinking, and by introducing new vocabulary, by using different tone of voice while reading aloud and modeling during play-based learning time in centres like dramatic play. All these modeling and exposure will help build the foundation needed to develop oral language skills in early years.

Think-Pair-Share

We use think-pair-share in our classroom, however we call it Elbow Partner Talk. I believe this is a great strategy to support oral language because students take turns to both be a speaker and a listener. We ask our students to close their eyes and think about what they are going to say to themselves first, after 30 seconds we ask them to turn to their elbow partner and talk. They take turns to share their ideas and thinking after more or less a minute or so, we start counting down from five to zero, this is the warning for students to finish their sentence and turn and face the teacher. Almost all the time whenever we’ve used this strategy we have most of our students put up their hands to share their thinking and ideas. This strategy gives them a chance to express their thinking and listen to someone else’s thinking before they can share to the whole class. It’s less stressing to say something that’s on your mind to one person than to speak in front of the whole class. I believe that this strategy helps build up students confidence to speak in front of large crowd.