Listening and Speaking: Developing Oral Language in the Classroom

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Why oral language comes first

Children listen long before they speak, and speak long before they read and write; by the time they enter school they already use their home language with considerable skill. Listening and speaking are the foundation of literacy: a child who has heard many stories and talked about them has the vocabulary, sentence patterns and sense of how stories go that reading depends on. Listening is a receptive skill and speaking a productive one, but both are active. Hearing is the physical reception of sound; listening means attending to it, interpreting it and responding. A silent class is not necessarily a learning class, because children learn language by using it.

Sub-skills and stages of listening

Good listening involves telling similar sounds apart (ship and sheep, or kal and kaal in Hindi), recognising stress and intonation, getting the gist, picking out details, predicting, inferring a speaker's feelings and following instructions. Listening lessons work best in three stages. Before listening the teacher sets a purpose and builds interest (look at this picture: what might the story be about?); while listening the children do a task, such as ticking pictures, filling a chart or following directions; after listening they discuss, retell, act out or write. Useful activities include read-aloud stories, rhymes and songs, listen and draw, listen and do (Total Physical Response), Chinese whispers, dictation and recorded announcements.

Building speaking

Speaking develops when children have something to say and someone to say it to. Activities include show-and-tell, picture talk, telling about one's own experiences, storytelling and retelling, role play and dramatisation, puppet shows, interviews, discussions and debates, and information-gap tasks in which each partner has information the other needs. Reciting poems and rhymes builds rhythm and confidence. Pair work and small groups give every child more talking time than whole-class question and answer, in which a few children speak. Shy children speak more readily in pairs first, when given wait time after a question, and when the topic is close to their lives. Fluency, smooth and easy speech, and accuracy, correctness of form, both matter, but in the early stages fluency and confidence come first.

Storytelling, role play and discussion

Storytelling is the richest oral activity in the primary class. A story told with expression, gestures, repetition and pauses for children to predict gives comprehensible input, new words in context and a model of narrative; children can then retell it, change the ending, act it out or tell their own. Role play asks children to speak as someone else in a situation, such as a shopkeeper and a customer, which practises the language of daily life and lowers anxiety because the child speaks as a character. Discussions on topics from children's lives build the ability to give reasons, agree and disagree politely, and listen to others.

Language as a tool

Children use language to do things, not only to name them. Michael Halliday described seven functions of language in young children: instrumental (getting what one wants: I want water), regulatory (controlling others: do this), interactional (getting along with others), personal (expressing feelings and identity), heuristic (finding out: why is the sky blue?), imaginative (creating make-believe) and representational or informative (giving information). Vygotsky adds that language is a tool for thinking, and NCF 2005 wants children to use language to question, reason and express themselves. A good class gives children reasons to ask, explain, persuade, imagine and report.

Responding to errors in speech

When a child says I goed to the market, or in Hindi maine khana khai instead of maine khana khaya, the error is part of learning. Correcting every slip interrupts the child's thought and raises the affective filter, and children who are corrected harshly stop speaking. The teacher should respond first to what the child means and model the correct form naturally, a technique called recasting: Oh, you went to the market? What did you buy? Other gentle techniques are asking for clarification, pausing so the child can correct herself, and noting common errors for a short focused activity later. During fluency activities the teacher does not interrupt. A child's dialect or accent is not an error to be corrected through ridicule.

What CTET asks

The best response to a spoken error is to accept the attempt and model the correct form, not to stop the child and correct her publicly. Speaking develops through chances to talk in meaningful situations, not through memorising and reciting answers. Listening is an active skill that needs a purpose and a task, and storytelling, role play and discussion are the standard answers for building oral skills in the primary classes.

Key facts

Hearing is the physical reception of sound; listening is attending, interpreting and responding. Listening and reading are receptive skills; speaking and writing are productive.
Natural order of development: listening, speaking, reading, writing (LSRW); oral language is the base on which literacy is built.
Listening lesson stages: pre-listening (purpose, prediction), while-listening (a task such as ticking pictures), post-listening (discussion, retelling, writing).
Speaking activities: show-and-tell, picture talk, storytelling, role play, puppet shows, interviews, debates and information-gap pair work.
Pair and group work give every child more speaking time; shy children speak first in pairs and need wait time after a question.
Halliday's seven functions: instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, representational (informative).
Recast: the teacher repeats the child's idea in the correct form without saying it was wrong (Child: I goed there. Teacher: You went there? What did you see?).
Fluency (smooth, easy speech) comes before accuracy (correct form) in the early stages; do not interrupt fluency activities to correct.
Minimal pairs train sound discrimination: ship and sheep in English, kal and kaal in Hindi.

Quick revision

Oral language before literacy; listening (receptive) and speaking (productive) are both active; hearing is not listening; pre-, while- and post-listening; TPR, read-aloud, listen and draw, dictation; show-and-tell, storytelling, role play, debates, information gap; pair work, wait time; fluency before accuracy; Halliday's seven functions; recast, clarification, self-correction; accept dialect, no ridicule.

Practise this topic

All 8 lessons on Language Pedagogy (Language I and Language II)