Teaching Oral Language
Teaching Oral Language Building a firm foundation using ICPALER in the early primary years
In Teaching Oral Language, Dr John Munro redresses this imbalance through the delivery of his step-by-step model, ICPALER. The Ideas–Conventions–Purposes–Ability to learn–Expression and Reception framework describes the various aspects of oral language from a classroom perspective, and demonstrates how teachers can best guide students to become effective communicators and language users. Designed to facilitate teaching and assessment, and to equip teachers to hear and see students’ speaking and listening skills, ICPALER promotes the use of self-talk and empowers students to become self-teachers of oral language. Representing the culmination of Dr Munro’s research and practice over many years, Teaching Oral Language explicates the ICPALER model for classroom implementation. This breakthrough program has been used to inform several major oral language projects commissioned by state and federal education departments, and is an indispensable resource for teachers and their students in the early primary years.
JOHN MUNRO
Associate Professor John Munro is Head of Studies in Exceptional Learning and Gifted Education in the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. A trained teacher and psychologist, his research interests include literacy learning and learning difficulties, maths learning disabilities, learning internationally, gifted learning, professional learning and school improvement. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders and a Life Member of Learning Difficulties Australia.
Teaching Oral Language
Oral language is widely recognised as an essential foundation for successful school learning. However, until recently, the acquisition of oral language skills has been largely overshadowed by reading, writing, spelling and numeracy, and has not been considered a key component of school curricula.
Building a firm foundation using ICPALER in the early primary years
ISBN 978-0-86431-920-3
9 780864 319203
Australian Council for Educational Research
JOHN MUNRO
Teaching Oral Language╯ Building a firm foundation using ICPALER in the early primary years
Jo h n Mu n ro
ACER Press
First published 2011 by ACER Press, an imprint of Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd 19 Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell Victoria, 3124, Australia www.acerpress.com.au
[email protected] Text copyright © John Munro 2011 Design and typography copyright © ACER Press 2011 This book is copyright. All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Copyright Act 1968 of Australia and subsequent amendments, and any exceptions permitted under the current statutory licence scheme administered by Copyright Agency Limited (www.copyright.com.au), no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, broadcast or communicated in any form or by any means, optical, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. Edited by Amanda Pinches Cover design by ACER Project Publishing Cover image: Students of Sholem Aleichem College / Photographer: Guy Lavoipierre Figure (p. 219): Shutterstock (Image ID: 71427319) Typeset by ACER Project Publishing Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Author: Munro, John Teaching oral language : building a firm foundation using Title: ICPALER in the early primary years / John Munro. ISBN: 9780864319203 (pbk.) Notes: Includes index. Subjects: Oral communication--Study and teaching English language--Spoken English--Study and teaching. Children--Language. Dewey Number: 371.1022
Contents Preface
....................................................................................................................... v
Part 1
The oral language framework
1
Chapter 1
Why a focus on oral language?............................................................. 2
Chapter 2
A framework for describing language................................................. 7
Chapter 3
Analysing the types of ideas or meanings communicated.......... I..... 13
Chapter 4
Analysing the use of the conventions of language....................C..... 36
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Analysing how language is used to achieve particular purposes......................................................................... P..... 54 Analysing students’ language learning capacity..................... AL... 73
Screening procedures to identify oral language knowledge in the classroom..............................................................................ER... 85
Part 2
Teaching 101 Chapter 8
Chapter 9
A teaching framework for enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms........................................................................ 102
Teaching word meanings and conventions......................................114
Chapter 10
Teaching students to comprehend and say sentence meanings...... 135
Chapter 11
Teaching discourse, topic meanings and conventions.................. 149
iii
Contents
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Teaching students how to use language to achieve their purposes and to interact socially......................................................... 160 Teaching that integrates using the meanings, conventions and purposes........................................................................................... 173
Chapter 14
Implementing a speaking and listening teaching unit..................... 187
Part 3
ICPALER in context 213 Chapter 15
Language learning, the culture and the brain................................ 214
A final message................................................................................................................228 Appendi x 1
Oral language screening profile – brief...........................................230
Appendi x 2
Oral language observational profile – in depth.............................. 233
References Index
...................................................................................................................242 ...................................................................................................................248
iv
Preface When I began my career in the 1960s I was thankful that I did not need to be concerned about oral language. I knew that all of the ‘huff ‘n’ puff ’ about language and literacy had no relevance to my work as a science and maths teacher. I felt sorry for my colleagues who had to take account of these factors. My experience in special schools in the early 1970s caused me to reflect on my beliefs about language and learning. Having the students talk about the ideas they were learning and say how they would learn them seemed to help them stay focused. Regular talk about what they had learnt helped them remember and transfer what I had taught them earlier. My experience at the Children’s Cottages at Kew certainly catalysed further my thinking about language. One student could recall verbatim each Wednesday the episode of ‘Homicide’ he had watched the previous evening. However, he had great difficulty expressing spontaneously an intention in a three-word sentence. A second student, believed by most of the staff to be mute, talked only when he perceived physical danger for a peer and when physical assistance for the peer was difficult. He could talk, but rarely did. Other students, who were ascertained as unable to speak, did learn to speak, but not English. The ward staff who took care of them spoke Spanish and Serbo-Croatian. The students learnt these languages through their interactions with their carers. Unfortunately, the parents of the children, who visited them periodically, could not understand these languages. Also during the 1970s, I completed a research study of how young children learnt to understand the meanings of terms such as ‘first’, ‘last’, ‘at the same time as’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, when these referred to the time relationship between two events. I became aware of some of the phases through which a child’s comprehension of a word’s meaning developed and the mechanisms proposed to explain these. I was also compelled to reflect on the implications of these findings for my teaching. A student’s vocabulary knowledge, I knew, provided the building blocks for their knowledge and learning. Teaching that did not take account of what a student knew about a word’s meaning and how to learn it would be less effective in helping the student build new meanings. I became interested in the models of vocabulary, or semantic network theories, that were emerging in cognitive psychology at the time. Teaching the students to link explicitly their word meanings into networks, to suggest synonyms and antonyms for the words they were learning, and to visualise their meanings or to link them with actions became important. Helping them to learn
v
prefa ce
how to teach themselves new word meanings and to see that they could be selfteachers of vocabulary was also important for me. I learnt, as well, another aspect of language that changed my teaching and how I think about life. I had been trained as a science and maths teacher at a time when the physical sciences were going to change the world and usher us into the utopian world of the future. Chemistry, physics and mathematics had taught me that the world was definite and certain. Scientific thinking and the scientific method could be relied upon to ensure that all ‘right people’ saw the world in the same way and to remove the messiness of subjectivity. In the 1970s this set of beliefs was challenged, very seriously. Dr Ian Campbell, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Melbourne, raised the possibility that our world is not necessarily objective and fixed. Instead, we construct representations of it, through our use of language. This is illustrated in the following example. Two students receive the same low score for a test. The first student interprets this situation as, ‘Yes, I knew I was hopeless at this subject. I just can’t do better. That’s how it is’. The second says, ‘This is a very bad score. What can I do to get a higher score next time?’ The notion that we use language to interpret our experiences and that what we tell ourselves can determine our response to it was new for me and had direct implications for my practice as a teacher. It also had implications for me as an individual. Was it possible that particular situations are not necessarily stressful or anxiety arousing? Did people talk themselves into being anxious, feeling threatened or helpless, being angry or vengeful? This, at the time, was the focus of Rational-Emotive Therapy (or RET), an approach to well being that focused on the self-talk we use to tell ourselves about our world. During the later 1970s I became involved again intensively in mathematics teaching and, particularly, in teaching students who had mathematics learning difficulties. As you might expect, my approach had changed. Given the task solve 2x + 7 = 19, I encouraged students to say it to themselves as, ‘I have 2 bags of bolts and 7 loose bolts. Each bag has the same amount. When we open the bags and put all the bolts together, we have 19. How many bolts were in each bag?’ When they were asked to factorise 2x + 8, I taught them to say it as, ‘I have 2 bags of bolts and 8 loose bolts. Factorise means to put them into equal groups. How many bags and loose bolts will I have in each group?’ When they were asked to work out 0.23 + 1 =, they were less likely to say 0.24 when I taught them to say it as, ‘2 tenths, 3 hundredths and 1 whole. How much all together?’ We used language to put maths tasks into categories. We described tasks like 2/6 + 3/6 as, ‘Says to add and ready to add’, while we described 1/3 + ½ as, ‘Says to add but not ready to add’. The students researched how many ways we can say plain old 1, for example, Year 9 maths students came up with (–1)2, √1 and 20 and the Year 10 students said sin2φ + cos2
vi
Pr e fa c e
and log1010. We played with using these alternative ways of saying 1 (or 2 or any other quantity). The students were using their language knowledge to build their maths knowledge. We applied the RET language to mathematics tasks and this seemed to alleviate the maths anxiety some students had. Instead of saying, ‘I can’t do this maths’, they learnt to say to themselves things like, ‘What does the task say? What picture does it tell me to make? What type of task is it?’ In the early 1980s I was asked to apply the language-based approach to literacy learning. What emerged differed considerably from the conventional language-based approaches to literacy in several ways. First, it focused on student learning activity, rather than on teaching activity. Reading involved the reader acting explicitly on the text information in particular ways. Second, it saw the role of the teacher as scaffolding or supporting and guiding readers to use these actions systematically. Third, it involved the teacher guiding the students to get their knowledge ready for reading in various ways. A key aspect of this was teachers guiding the students to talk about their relevant imagery and experiential knowledge in sentences, so that they could match this more easily with the sentences in the written text. Fourth, it involved the teacher guiding the students to review and consolidate what they had learnt in a reading session and to store this new knowledge in their long-term memory. This language-based approach to literacy learning was implemented with success in several schools. One school that attracted a good deal of publicity was Bellfield Primary School in inner-northern suburban Melbourne. In the early and middle 1990s, the school had low literacy outcomes. The literacy education program that I implemented began with building explicit phonological and phonemic knowledge and skills. From this we moved to a focus on the students’ vocabulary and the ability to talk about ideas in sentences, and to ask and answer questions as a means for building new knowledge. The students’ reviewing what was learnt at the end of each teaching session and storing this in their long-term memory, again through oral language activity, was important. From this beginning, the implementation involved targeting additional aspects of literacy, always building the oral language foundation first. Evidence for the need for this foundation was shown in data I collected in 2000–2001. Assisted by a group of special education trainees, I assessed the receptive vocabulary of the Prep cohort. The receptive vocabulary in the group of 21 five- and six-year-old students varied from an age score of 2.5 years to 6.4 years, with a mean of 3.8 years. Perhaps more disturbingly, we monitored the students’ interactions with their peers over several playtime sessions. The students who had lower vocabulary scores were more likely to interact non-verbally with their peers, usually physically. These data exemplified the spread of oral language knowledge that entered the Prep year at Bellfield and the communicative competence of the students. While
vii
prefa ce
this may be disturbing at Prep, it was obvious that if steps were not taken to close the gap, the difference between oral language ability and the ability to learn would only increase. The students whose language competence was lower in Prep would be more likely to experience a lower level of academic success. At Bellfield I led the implementation of an intensive oral language program. It was explicit in the sense that my focus was on what the students knew. Specific student responses, in speech and its interpretation and comprehension, were the key data. I also focused on teaching the students to use oral language to learn. This included them learning to use specific and explicit self-talk to guide and direct their learning activities. The literacy gains made by students at the school over the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected this focus. The improvement at the school was noted in Teaching Reading: Report and recommendations – National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (DEST 2005) and by Munro (2004). I was able to see the impact of oral language on academic learning more broadly when, during the 1990s and 2000s, I had the opportunity to work as a school reviewer for the Department of Education in Victoria. I reviewed the progress of primary schools in the northern and western areas of metropolitan Melbourne. Many of the schools I reviewed, like Bellfield initially, had low student outcomes. Discussion with the leadership teams in the schools suggested that students had comparatively low levels of oral language knowledge and skills. As well, they suggested the students did not know how to use oral language processes to focus and guide their learning. During the 1990s, I was invited to work more with schools to improve their work in oral language teaching. I looked for a model or framework to underpin this work. I knew there were many ways of describing language learning but teachers often found these impractical. I aimed to develop an approach that was teaching friendly, that addressed issues that concerned teachers and that could readily be implemented in classroom teaching. As teachers, we are interested in the types of ideas our students understand and express, what they know about the conventions for doing this, the strategies or actions they use to do this, and what they know about how to use language in the social context of classrooms to communicate orally and to learn. This became the Ideas–Conventions–Purposes– Ability to learn–Expression and Reception model or ICPALER. Increasingly, I came to believe that primary schools needed to implement, in the early years, an intensive oral language program that would prepare the students for their journey through primary and secondary education. When I was invited during 2002–2004 to train teachers to implement the Literacy Restart program by the Department of Education in Victoria for Year 7 underachieving readers, I extended this oral language foundation. Dr Ken Rowe, in Teaching Reading: Report and recommendations – National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy
viii
Pr e fa c e
(DEST 2005) commented on the success of this training: Key stndings from the evaluation of the Restart Initiative from 2002 to 2004 indicate that signistcant and sustained gains in reading achievement progress were achieved by students taught by Restart teachers, many of whom had been trained in strategic reading instruction techniques, and supported by professional development in explicit reading instruction strategies provided by Dr John Munro – a reading research specialist at the University of Melbourne. (p. 54) In 2001–2004, I led a University of Melbourne research study with the Catholic Education Office of Melbourne that traced the emergence of literacy knowledge in young children. We followed the reading development of approximately 550 students as they progressed through Year 1 and Year 2. About 400 of the group had reading difficulties. As part of the study, we assessed several areas of oral language knowledge: their knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and discourse structure; listening comprehension; short-term memory; rapid automatised naming; and phonological and phonemic knowledge. One of the remarkable (and frightening) findings was that the at-risk Year 1 readers were lower than their able peers on every measure of oral language. You can imagine the implication of this for their future learning, if this discrepancy is not addressed. Two invitations from the then Department of Education and Training in Victoria afforded me the opportunity to take the oral language work further. The first was to develop the content for the Language Disorder Program in 2004 and the second was to develop the Victorian Essential Learning (VELS) English continuum in 2005. In the Language Disorder Program, I saw an opportunity to assist schools to include oral language teaching in their practice. In the VELS English continuum, I saw an opportunity to develop a learning pathway that linked reading and writing with speaking and listening. Many of the schools I had reviewed did not have an explicit oral language program in the early years of formal education to close the gap in student knowledge that entered each school with the Prep cohort. As well, the speaking and listening strand in the English continuum in the Curriculum and Standards Framework was barely used at all. It was the ugly sister of the reading and writing strands. When I initiated discussion about oral language knowledge, many teachers and principals were unsure of exactly what this looked like. If they couldn’t see or hear it being used, how could they target it in their teaching? As well, many did not know how to teach it. They believed that somehow it would drip in, if only the students were immersed in it. They seemed to forget that immersion can sometimes lead— tragically—to drowning, particularly if you don’t know how to swim. Similarly, if you don’t know how to learn language, immersion by itself may not be very useful. I believed that teachers and schools needed a description of how oral language
ix
prefa ce
developed that was teaching friendly. Not surprisingly, I suggested the ICPALER model. The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development representatives accepted this and I used this model to develop this speaking and listening continuum and indictors of progress. A second education provider, the Catholic Education Office of Melbourne, also recognised the importance of oral language knowledge as a foundation for formal learning and, in 2007, it requested a version of ICPALER that targeted the Prep to Year 2 students. This was developed as a professional development activity and led to the project Oral Language Supporting Early Literacy (OLSEL). The ICPALER model, in the thinking of schools, is not restricted to the early years. Over the past decade the importance of teaching academic vocabulary in the senior secondary years has increasingly been recognised, in parallel with teaching students to use synonyms and to frame their content knowledge in verbal proposition. This book presents the ICPALER model as it stands. Its focus is on oral language learning in the early primary years. It takes a broad, multi-faceted perspective on oral language. It aims to equip teachers with a framework for hearing and seeing their students’ speaking and listening knowledge. You can judge its success.
Some children have a communication disability that restricts severely their ability to speak, to understand speech or to communicate effectively with others. These children require professional guidance and assistance that is beyond what can be provided in regular classrooms. This book does not deal with language and speech pathology. It is strongly recommended that children with difficulties in these areas access language and speech pathology services. The national professional organisation is Speech Pathology Australia. Its web site is http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/.
x
pa r t 1
The oral language framework
This part explains the framework used in this book to describe language. Educators and schools need a framework that is teaching friendly. Teachers are interested in the types of ideas or meanings their students communicate, their ability to learn and to use the conventions of language to achieve this, their students’ ability to use language to achieve their social purposes and their capacity to learn language. Each of these aspects comprises an aspect of the framework and is described in this part. The acronym ICPALER is used to refer to the framework.
1
C h a p t er 1
Why a focus on oral language? This is a book about teaching children oral language. At the outset, we need to say what it is and why it needs to be taught. At one level, we all know what oral language is. It is communicating using words when the words are spoken. It is about speaking and listening; that is, comprehending and producing speech. It is about sharing our thoughts, intentions, goals and feelings with others. It uses sound patterns we call words such as ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘black’ and ‘chase’ to represent items and events in our world. We link these words in different ways to express different ideas, such as, ‘The black cat chases the dog’ and ‘The black dog chases the cat’. It is, however, more than this. We know that the words we say do not necessarily look or sound like the items or events they represent; they are symbols we have learnt to use. We know that different languages use different symbols for the same items and link the symbols in different ways to describe the same event. We also know how hard it is to learn the set of word symbols other languages use. Oral language includes what we know about spoken words, what they mean and how to use them to understand and think about our world. It is not only what we and others say. It is what we know in our heads about the language, about how people generally say things and how they use language. This invisible oral language underpins how we speak and listen. This has been called our I–language to distinguish it from the language we use to interact with others, our E–language (Chomsky 1986), as illustrated below. I–Language
E–Language
I–Language
When we teach oral language, we need to focus not only on what students do when they speak and listen. We also need to give consideration to what they believe about oral language; what it is like, the patterns they have drawn out and how it can be used.
2
Wh y a f o c us o n o r a l l a n g ua ge ?
1.1 Oral language as a key foundation to students’ ability to learn 1.1.1 Oral language and academic achievement The ability to use oral language to communicate effectively is a key foundation for a student’s academic success in formal education. It predicts, for example, literacy and numeracy achievement (Lovett et al. 2008). Children’s literacy ability is linked with their ability to: • use words meaningfully (their vocabulary) • speak accurately and to use sound patterns in their language (their phonological awareness) • speak in sentences (that is, to use grammar) • stay on the topic of a message • use speech to communicate their goals, intentions and how they feel • teach themselves new words and ways of speaking. Children’s ability to think about spoken messages affects directly what they do when they read. As they speak and listen, they learn to: • link the ideas, to back track and to fit ideas together • sum up or consolidate what was said in two or three sentences in a story or in a conversation • build vocabulary • get a sense of where a spoken message is going, to think ahead, to anticipate and to infer • detect the general theme of a message • say sentences they hear in their own words • link a sentence they hear with the situation or context in which they hear it • ask questions about what they hear • detect attitudes and the disposition of the speaker in a spoken text. Learning to think in these ways in early oral language experiences provides a basis for using them later in early literacy and in learning more generally. It is useful to distinguish oral language from other forms of verbal communication such as literacy. In the present sense, literacy refers to using and comprehending written information. In recent years, literacy has also been used in a more general way to refer to how people understand other types of information such as visual literacy or financial literacy. The term oracy matches literacy. The two obviously overlap. Sometimes when we read we say aloud what we see; we convert the written information to a spoken form. On other occasions, we use our oral language to interpret or make sense of a written text, even when we don’t say it aloud.
3
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
1.1.2 Oral language and learning to think Oral language provides a platform for thinking about our world more generally. One example of this is how we use it to steer our way through a problem or an issue. Young children show this when they work through a challenge. They: • tell themselves about the situation and interpret the challenge, for example, ‘Why isn’t it moving?’ • say what they do to deal with the situation and think about a possible solution, for example, ‘I need to …’ • monitor the success of their actions and take corrective action if necessary, for example, ‘It still won’t move. I need to …’ This type of dialogue helps young children manage and direct their learning. It becomes part of their self-talk or inner language. This is used to guide their thinking generally. It is sometimes referred to as an individual’s metacognitive or self-management strategies. It helps children to become independent learners.
1.1.3 Oral language and interacting with others Children use their oral language to communicate with others. Their ability to use language influences how they use their social interaction skills to achieve various social purposes. They learn to use their oral language to: • share ideas, negotiate, manage interactions (for example, to initiate, maintain and conclude spoken exchanges for various purposes), learn how others communicate and communicate feelings and intentions • tap into the inner worlds of others: to hear how others interpret events and see the world (the use of language in joint play activities is important here) • form an impression of their place in a dynamic and changing world. Their selfimage and their self-confidence are shaped in part through the quality of their social interactions with others, including siblings and peers. This aspect of oral language begins to be acquired prior to school entry. The feedback children receive in social interactions can become part of their self-talk and influence later learning.
1.1.4 Oral language and learning in groups Teachers and students use oral language to manage and direct all aspects of classroom life. Imagine a Year 1 teacher reading the big book A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989) with her class. She asks the students to sit on the mat and tells some of them where to sit. She instructs them to pay attention and assumes that all of them can listen and comprehend what she says. As she reads the story, she asks class members to name the items she indicates, to talk about what pictures show, to answer questions, to repeat new words and to predict what
4
Wh y a f o c us o n o r a l l a n g ua ge ?
might happen next. She periodically instructs students to behave in acceptable ways. At the end of the story she asks the students to review what they had learnt. This scenario shows some of the assumptions a teacher makes about how students use oral language. The Year 1 teacher: • used speech to change what the students knew, even though the class was working through a picture book • said the ways of thinking she wanted the students to use to learn; she assumed the students could use these to shape their thinking • managed and directed student physical behaviours through language; she assumed the students could use oral language to manage their physical activity. We know that not all students in Prep to Year 2 classrooms are able to learn effectively in groups. They are not all equally able to use oral language in the ways assumed by the teacher. They need to learn how to do this.
1.2 Oral language: what is learnt and how? Before we leave this opening discussion about oral language, it is useful to think about what is learnt and how. We noted earlier that language involves using symbols. We learn to link the symbols with what they mean through our interactions with others. People around us teach us what is meant by the words and the gestures we use. This is important when we are looking at how young children learn to use language. Young children first use oral language in meaningful everyday contexts. From these they extract patterns about how it is used and apply these rules in the future. These form their I–language (Ingram 2007). Children differ in how they interact socially with others and use oral language in different ways. One person’s I–language will differ from that of others. Some children begin school lacking a sufficiently well-developed knowledge here. Unless they have the opportunity to learn it, their progress through formal education may be restricted. They will be less able to learn from the existing curricula or to operate effectively in classrooms.
1.3 Why this book? Children differ in their significant early language experiences. Our vocabulary knowledge, for example, is influenced by the number and range of words to which we are exposed in the early years. Joshi (2005) cites earlier research that shows how this varies with family demographics: Hart and Rinsley (1995) found both qualitative and quantitative differences in the words encountered by children from lower socio-economic status and
5
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
those from higher socio-economic status families. They found that children from higher socio-economic families were exposed to approximately 30,000 words per year while children from lower socio-economic families were exposed to approximately 10,000 words. (p. 211) You can speculate about the influence of this type of variation on students’ future learning pathways if the difference is not targeted. Teachers and schools need to know how to do this. Our oral language is extremely complex. It comprises a number of aspects that work together to allow us to communicate. Like any complex system, we can see the workings when we know what to look for and when we have tools to help make them visible. Teachers and schools need a framework for understanding oral knowledge, for analysing E–language, for monitoring students’ language learning and for implementing effective teaching. This book develops a teaching friendly model of oral language that can give educators: (1) a conceptual lens for unpacking and seeing early knowledge in this area; (2) an understanding of how this knowledge develops; (3) procedures for screening and monitoring it in the classroom; (4) procedures for teaching it. The framework uses concepts that are familiar to 21st century educators to highlight the aspects of language. It focuses on guiding teachers to know what to look for (or listen for) when interacting with students. It is referenced on the belief that students can tell us what they know about oral language and that they are more likely to use oral language when they have a reason for doing so. Oral language teaching (for example, speaking and listening) has not received the curriculum focus given to reading and writing in early years curricula around Australia. Teachers know less about oral language knowledge and teaching than literacy or numeracy. They are less familiar with what this knowledge ‘looks like’. The purpose of this book is to assist teachers in the early primary years to: 1 2 3 4
understand how oral language is learnt and used understand the relationship between oral language and other areas of learning identify when language problems arise implement teaching that helps students to improve their oral language.
It aims to provide teachers with the tools necessary for observing students’ oral language at any time as they progress along their learning pathway.
6
C h a p t er 2
A framework for describing language In this chapter we examine a framework for understanding how young children use language. Language and communication are complex processes. To be able to hear and see language being used, we need to know what to look for. In this chapter we develop a framework for describing and analysing how people use language. You can use this framework to help you to identify the major aspects of language, to describe what a person knows at any time and to see the aspects changing as people learn more about it.
2.1 A conversation between some four-year-olds and their teacher Read this conversation among a group of four-year-olds talking with their teacher about their pets. We finded a new doggie. Tom: Miss Brown: What’s he called, Tom? Tom: Woofa. Kath: Our dog was ran quick. It falled over our pool. Daddy gotted him out. Gee, did it get drownded? Will: No, it didn’t die. It just shaked and Mum towelled it. Kath: Our dog got three puppies. We call her Tess. Will: Miss Brown: Tom, tell us more about your dog. It is red and brown. Tom: Miss Brown: Does Woofa have any toys? Tom: We gave him a ball and he bited it and made it a hole. Daddy put the inside ball. Our dog barks all the time. He wakes me in the morgins. Kath: Will: The Smiffs’ dog barks and wakes up our baby. My mummy gets mad. She says, ‘One day I’ll kill that dog’.
7
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
We can unpack it to look at what the students seemed to know about how to communicate. To guide this, you could ask the following questions about it: How well are the ideas said or expressed?
What conventions or rules were the speakers following?
Why were particular ideas said?
What do those involved seem to know about how to communicate?
A conversation about pets
How well was the talk received?
How well does each child adjust what she or he says to the others?
What ideas are being communicated?
How willing are they to do this?
You can look for these aspects of language in the conversation. First, they were all able both to detect or receive what others said and could speak or express a message. They all showed they had both receptive and expressive language. Second, each of the speakers seemed to know various things about communicating. They all: • understood what was being said. They all seemed to be aware of the ideas that were being communicated. They all stayed broadly on the topic of pets and mentioned ideas about their pets. • knew how to say their ideas so that others would understand them. As well, each knew how the others were speaking. They all linked the words in ways that four-year-olds would. • wanted to say their ideas and to hear what others in the conversation said. They had a purpose for communicating. They took turns, extended what earlier speakers said and acted in ways to share their ideas. • had learnt how to do these things and believed they could use them successfully. We can integrate the two aspects into a framework that describes the conversation as a whole. See the table below. Each speaker and listener seemed to know
The forms in which they knew it Expressive
The ideas The conventions The purpose Ability to learn
8
Receptive
A fr a mewo r k f o r d e s cr ib in g l a n g ua ge
You can use this framework to analyse any instance of language use. Recall a recent conversation in which you engaged. The conversation probably involved: 1 an exchange of ideas that were, at any time, broadly on a topic. All of the speakers were ‘on the same page’. As the conversation continued, the topic may have gradually changed and one of the speakers may have intentionally changed the topic, but if the conversation continued after this, the other participants would have followed this change. 2 all of the speakers talking the same language. In order to understand each other, you would all have to be following the same rules for speaking and listening. The way you spoke in the conversation may not have been the way you always speak, but you adopted this style because it fitted the conventions or rules for that particular exchange. 3 each of the speakers doing this, which suggests they wanted to engage in the communication. How prepared were the conversers to play the game; to share ideas, to link with what others said and to follow the accepted social procedures for that conversation to achieve their goals? Communicators show how ready they are to listen to others. Listening attentively sends a different message from interrupting a speaker or doing things that suggest that the listener doesn’t value what is being said. 4 some of the speakers learning new ideas. The conversation may have introduced ideas or perspectives that were unfamiliar to some of the speakers. These speakers probably used language procedures to help them learn the new ideas. They may have asked the speaker to elaborate or clarify what was said. They may have asked questions that probed the new ideas and tried to link the new ideas with what know, for example, ‘Do you mean …?’, ‘Does it …?’ or ‘Is it like …?’ The conversers could express ideas and detect and receive the ideas expressed by others. Any communicator shows their understanding of each aspect of language through both the expressive and receptive modes. Each aspect, of course, doesn’t need to be spoken. One or more of the conversers may have used sign language or lip read. Some of the participants may have used hearing aids and/or other devices to assist them to express or receive information from others. In order to participate in the conversation, all needed to use the four areas of knowledge mentioned above. We can represent the framework by the acronym ICPALER, as shown on page 10. You can use the framework in your classroom to: • understand and monitor language use and the language needs of students and groups • identify the language demands of the teaching you use • identify areas that need to be targeted in teaching.
9
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
What each communicator knows
The ideas communicated I
The conventions The purpose for The ability used to do this communicating to learn how to use language C P AL
I C PA L ER E The forms of the communication
Expressing ideas
R Receiving ideas
2.2 How is the ICPALER framework similar to other frameworks used to describe how individuals communicate? Oral language learning and its use is a key focus for many professions, for example, speech pathology, child psychology and linguistics. The frameworks they use to describe oral language differ in a range of ways. • how they identify different categories of speech and language • the terms they use for particular aspects • how they define a particular aspect, for example, terms such as syntax, syllable or semantics are given different meanings by different professionals. Many approaches note four main components of language: 1 the phonology of the language: the sequences of speech sounds that are used 2 the semantics of the language: how meanings are expressed through words and links between them (its content or meaning) (Bloom & Lahey 1978) 3 the grammar of the language: the rules for linking words into sentences (syntax) and for using parts of words to indicate meaning 4 the pragmatics of the language: how it is used to achieve particular goals and purposes the ways in social contexts. Some approaches combine two or more components, for example, Bloom and Lahey (1978) combine the phonology and the grammar into the form or shape of a language. This refers to the sounds of words and the rules for combining them to form phrases and sentences. Ingram (2007) approached the development of a framework from an alternative perspective. He identified the minimum number of components a natural language user would need in order to communicate successfully. He noted four levels of language knowledge: discourse; sentence; word; and segment. Each level has both meaning and form aspects.
10
A fr a mewo r k f o r d e s cr ib in g l a n g ua ge
Lust (2006) took this type of framework further. He noted that a person’s oral language is made up of symbolic units that can be combined and sequenced to generate an infinite number of utterances. The symbolic units (words, sentences, paragraphs and topics) are structured hierarchically so that the topic of a spoken text determines how you interpret sentences, and the topics and sentences determine how you interpret words. Individuals use this knowledge to achieve their goals. The language user learns rules for combining the symbolic units to communicate. Combinations that do not follow these rules will not make sense. The ICPALER model uses the types of knowledge approach described by Lust (2006) and Ingram (2007). It was developed (Munro 1995a) to provide educators with a teaching friendly framework for describing and understanding how language is used in classroom contexts. Teachers are used to thinking about the ideas their students have, how well their students use language rules for sharing them, their preparedness to communicate and their ability to make language work for them. The following chapters examine various components of each aspect of the ICPALER framework. You can reflect on: • how the aspect is displayed by young children • the implications for monitoring how these students use this aspect of language • how the aspect can be used to decide the language needs of students and groups • how the aspect can be targeted in teaching.
2.3 ICPALER in context So far, I have suggested that we can identify, or see and hear a child using each aspect of the ICPALER model and use this to describe what the child knows about oral language. Given the complexity of oral language, this is somewhat simplistic, for several reasons: 1 What an individual shows in their use of oral language depends on what they think is appropriate in the context in which they find themselves. How we use language at any time is determined by what we think is relevant and appropriate for that context. 2 I have assumed that we can see and hear the aspects of the ICPALER model as if each one is separate from the others. The conventions a person uses in a context may be determined in part by their goals and by the ideas they are communicating. It may not be appropriate to assume that the aspects of ICPALER operate independently. 3 What a person shows in an oral language exchange is not necessarily what they know. Had they judged the context differently, they may have communicated differently. Their ability to show each aspect of the ICPALER
11
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
model is determined by the context. We need to collect information about their language use in a range of contexts. These observations do not negate the ICPALER model. They remind us that the aspects interact and are used in an integrated way by language users. The ICPALER model provides teachers and schools with a framework for observing and monitoring the emergence and use of students’ oral languages as they develop.
12
I
C h a p t er 3
Analysing the types of ideas or meanings communicated
In this chapter we examine the types of meaning typically communicated in language transactions by young children and the ways in which they do this. We call these the ideas in the message. It is the I aspect of ICPALER. The conversation between Miss Brown and her students illustrates the different ways in which meaning is communicated or shared. We will look at these in this chapter. A first type of meaning is the topic, theme or gist of the conversation. It links together what is said and gives it a context or a general reference. The conversation had a clear topic. All of the students talked about pet dogs and how they were part of the lives of their families. A second type of meaning is shown by the individual words and phrases. The students usually used words that were appropriate or relevant to the context or topic. Based on what they said, you might assume that they could select from their vocabularies the appropriate words for the topic. A third type of meaning is shown by the sentences. The sentence ‘Our dog was ran quick’ tells us more than the separate words dog, ran and quick. Even though the sentences the students said were often not correct grammatically, the responses of the other students showed they made sense. As we shall see later, some sentences have a more complex meaning than other sentences. A fourth type of meaning is shown by the set of sentences. While each sentence has its own meaning, we get a richer meaning from a sequence of sentences. In the students’ conversation we can see how the various sentences fit together. Kath’s description of how her dog fell in the pool led to Will’s question about whether it drowned, which in turn linked to Kath’s explanation of how her mother dried the dog. There is a meaning thread that links or connects the sentences together and allows the conversation to flow. We call this the discourse meaning.
13
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3.1 The main idea in any communication The message communicated in the conversation comes from the four types of meaning. As we speak and listen, we tap into each type and combine what each tells us. The connection between the types is not straightforward. The individual meanings integrate to give each sentence its meaning and at the same time the sentence gives each word its meaning. In a similar way, the individual words contribute to the topic and the topic determines how we interpret each word. Similar relationships exist between the other types of meaning. During a spoken presentation, the overall idea in the message gradually changes. Participants use information about the individual words, the sentences, the links between sentences and the topic to understand what is being communicated and what they could say next, as illustrated below. first overall idea of the message
words
second overall idea of the message
sentences
discourse
third overall idea of the message
topic
An effective communicator can integrate automatically the information from the types of meaning into the overall idea.
3.2 The four types of meaning in classroom communications We can look for these four types of meaning in how students communicate in a classroom. We can examine how well they: 1 understand and use the topic or theme of a spoken message. How well do the students work out the topic of a spoken presentation? How well do they stick to it and extend it? 2 understand and use individual words. Do they comprehend the meanings of words? Are they able to select and say the most appropriate words? 3 use and comprehend sentences. Do they usually say sentences that are sensible? What types of sentence meanings do they have difficulty comprehending? 4 understand the meaning of a sequence of sentences. Are they usually able to contribute to an oral presentation? Are they usually able to distil the intended meaning of a sequence of sentences? Can they integrate the meaning across sentences? Can they recognise the thread that links a set of the sentences?
14
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
We will examine how language users comprehend and produce each type of meaning. We will unpack the I aspect in ICPALER into the four components. This leads to the following elaboration of the table we are using to describe oral language. To understand what a child or group know/s about the I aspect, you need to explore the unshaded part of the table below. Expressive The ideas
Receptive
Individual meaning Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
The conventions The purpose Ability to learn
In the following sections we will examine the various types of meanings in the sequence shown below: individual meanings
sentence meanings
discourse meanings
topic meanings
3.3 Individual meanings Each of the students in the earlier conversation had a word bank. This is the store of words that they know, or their vocabulary. An understanding of words for young children comprises knowing how to say the word (that is, its phonological name), its meaning and its grammatical functions. The average 6-year-old English speaker can say 2000 to 3000 words, understand 8000 to 10€000 words, and can link these words in sophisticated and grammatically appropriate ways to communicate ideas (Owens 2001). For words the children can read, they also have a distinctive letter pattern linked with the meaning and the sound pattern. Their knowledge of vocabulary is strongly correlated with academic learning success. Teaching vocabulary enhances, for example, reading comprehension (August et al. 2005). We can identify some of the items in the word bank of Tom, one of the students in the earlier conversation. Each word has two parts; what it means and how it is said. The spoken part of the word is the label or name for its meaning. Tom’s word bank might include these items (note: the meaning and pronunciation are not shown here):
15
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Tom’s word bank doggie
ball
red
brown
toys
bite
hole
made
Each of the students also knew a second type of individual meaning. It is shown in how we distinguish between one or more items, or between the past and the present when talking about actions. Kath and Will used the suffix ‘-ed’ to indicate actions that had finished and Will used the suffix ‘-s’ to indicate plurals.
3.3.1 The two types of individual meanings: A morpheme The two types of individual meanings differ. The words dog, stop and ball each have unique meanings in the sense that ‘-ed’ or ‘-ing’ don’t. The suffix ‘-ed’ can be added to a variety of verbs and change the meaning of all of them in the same way; it tells you the action happened. The name for these individual meanings is morpheme. Morphemes are the smallest units: ‘the smallest meaningful constituents of words that can be identified are called morphemes’ (Haspelmath 2002, p. 3). The two types of individual meanings or morphemes are shown in the figure below: morpheme ‘Free’ morphemes
‘Bound’ morphemes
Some morphemes are words: ‘doggie’, ‘get’, ‘over’
Some morphemes are parts of words: ‘-ing’, ‘-ed’, ‘-s’
We will look at these differences in the following sections. Before this, we will look at how each individual meaning is stimulated during an oral exchange.
3.3.2 Morphemes have a sound address We noted earlier that each individual meaning has its own spoken name or label. When we hear a message, the sound patterns in it stimulate the matching names in our heads. This allows us to recall the meanings linked with them. When we hear ‘stopped’, we recall its meaning. You can know how to say words but not what they mean. This affects how well you can comprehend a spoken message containing the words. In this case, you will often try to discover what the word means. You might ask questions, look at how the word is being used or use the word and see how it fits in situations.
16
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
It is also possible for a communicator to have meanings, but without the label. You may know what you want to say but have difficulty finding the words to say it. This can be caused by various processes.
3.3.3 What do word meanings look like? In order to make decisions about the word meanings children have, we need to have an impression of what word meanings look like. The meanings of most words we know have two components: 1 One part we learn from our culture. It says the features that characterise the word. It can be a rule, similar to a dictionary definition of the word. 2 The second part comes from our individual experiences of the word. It is unique to each person and says the features the person usually links with the word. You can sometimes ‘see’ this component; you have an image of what the word means. A person’s understanding of the word ‘bicycle’ illustrates this. bicycle
The component that is a rule: a land transport vehicle that is powered by using one’s feet to pedal.
The component that is an image: one or more bicycles the person has experienced, what the person thinks typifies a bicycle.
The two components combine to give us a meaning for ‘bicycle’ that we use when we communicate. Most of us have the two components for most of the words we know and we use them in a balanced way. Some people may largely use rule definitions, while others mainly use imagery definitions. What do we mean when we say that a person knows the meaning of a word? What would a child have to say or do to convince you that they understood what ‘doggie’ meant? We need to look for evidence of the two components. You might see whether the child could: • tell us what a doggie is and say its key characteristics. These are the criteria we use to define the item uniquely. • say the typical features that allow you to distinguish a doggie from other things. • select pictures that show dogs or discriminate between pictures that show dogs and pictures that show other pets or items. • do actions that show what dogs do. What a person knows about any word develops gradually. Younger children think about word meanings differently from older children. We look at how they develop below.
17
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3.3.4 How word meanings gradually develop The criteria an individual uses to define the meaning of a word gradually change as the person grows older. The steps in a child’s understanding of a word are illustrated for the word ‘doggie’ below. Step 1: The word is a label The child uses the word as a label for a particular dog.
Step 2: The word is linked with perceptual features
The child links the word with perceptual features, for example, a ‘doggie’ has four legs, is often hairy and barks. They may apply ‘doggie’ to animals that are not a dog, for example, a tiny horse or a ferret. Other times, they might not recognise that a particular animal is a dog. Children can link both words and images with the word.
Step 3: The word is linked with functions
Later the child learns that dogs are defined by the things they do, for example, dogs are good at guarding things (while cats are not), some dogs are good at hunting and retrieving things.
Step 4: The word is linked with more general and more specific words
Later still the child learns there are different types of dogs and that some categories that include dogs also include other animals (e.g. ‘mammals’).
You can see from this sequence that children who understand ‘doggie’ in a Step 2 way would probably be unable to tell you how a doggie and a burglar alarm were similar. A child who used ‘doggie’ in a Step 1 way may have difficulty naming pictures of dogs in a story book. Young children will understand a word in a partial way. The young children in whom we are interested will probably have their word meanings across Steps 1 to 3. We need to take this developmental sequence into account when we ask children to tell us what they think a word means. Do they tell us: (1) what examples of the item look like; (2) what they do or are used for; or (3) how they are related to other general categories? To get an insight into how a child understands words, we need to see how the child makes decisions about what the word applies to and how it is used.
18
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
3.3.5 Content words and function words The nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs used by the participants in the conversation—such as ‘doggie’, ‘falled’ and ‘water’—have a concrete meaning. These are called content words. Other words don’t, for example, ‘what’, ‘to’, ‘with’ and ‘about’. These are function words and have more of a grammatical role. In children’s early speech the function words are more likely to be misunderstood, used incorrectly or omitted, for example ‘doggie barking’. They make these errors while using the content words correctly. Their speech is disrupted and hard to understand because it lacks grammar. This was first reported over 150 years ago by Broca and in its extreme form is called Broca’s aphasia (Purves et al. 2008). Some children who have specific language impairments have difficulty using function words. An example is how children learn to use articles such as ‘the’ (see Bortolini, Caselli & Leonard 1997; Paradis et al. 2003; Restrepo & Gutierrez-Clellen 2001). A second type of oral language difficulty involves individuals speaking fluently, but communicating little information. They use the function words well, but omit or misuse the content words. This was first reported in 1874 by Wernicke and in its extreme form is called Wernicke’s aphasia (Purves et al. 2008). The person’s comprehension is impaired and even simple sentences are not well understood.
3.3.6 Parts of words have meanings We noted in the earlier conversation that the students misused some of the word endings, for example, ‘-ed’ to indicate past tense: ‘finded’, ‘gotted’ and ‘bited’. They used others correctly, for example, ‘towelled’, ‘puppies’, ‘barks’ and ‘wakes’. Both prefixes and suffixes convey meaning, for example, ‘dis-’, ‘trans-’, ‘un-’, ‘de-’, ‘a-’, ‘mis-’, ‘-ish’, ‘-ness’ and ‘-ly’. This misuse is a part of normal language acquisition. Children both over-extend and under-use each meaning. With continued experience they refine their use. You should become concerned about a child misusing bound morphemes when the child continues making these errors after their peers have outgrown them. You also need to take account of possible reasons for it. The errors can arise because the child: 1 doesn’t understand the intended meaning. For the ‘-ed’ suffix, for example, the child may not understand the difference between an action continuing versus an action that has finished. 2 may not detect the difference in sound patterns between stop and stopped or may not be aware that there are two types of action words: those that use ‘-ed’ and those that use other devices to show actions that have finished. 3 has not had consistent exposure to the correct use of the suffix. Children need the opportunity to imitate correct language use in particular contexts and to see that it works for them.
19
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
A child who is learning language more slowly than peers may be less likely to cause concern than a child who shows a difficulty detecting essential aspects of oral language. Some children who have specific language impairments have difficulty learning to use bound morphemes (see Grela & Leonard 2000; Hadley & Rice 1996; Rice, Wexler & Cleave 1995). The bound morphemes that are most difficult to learn are the ones we add to verbs to show the intended tense and the ones we add to nouns to show number. This has been shown in English and in several other languages such as German and Swedish (Clahsen & Muysken 1989; Hansson 1997).
3.3.7 Helping students know the value of a knowledge of words Some students may not be aware of how their word knowledge can work for them and may not value this knowledge. Words are the building blocks of our oral language knowledge. The more words children know about a topic, the more effectively they can learn about it and can comprehend it. As well, they can get greater enjoyment and satisfaction using the ideas. They can also learn the value of using words specifically. They can be guided to see how ‘nice’ doesn’t communicate as rich a picture as ‘pretty’, ‘exciting’ or ‘yummy’. Our teaching and, more generally, our interactions need to encourage our students to explore word meanings and patterns in meanings, and to take risks with how they use them. They need to: 1 learn the power of words and also how they can work out the meanings of unfamiliar words 2 be encouraged to think innovatively about words and bound morphemes. The new words a student creates today may be part of our regular vocabulary in ten years’ time.
3.4 Sentence meanings In this section we unpack the single sentences component of the I or idea aspect. This is the unshaded part of the model below. We examine how single-sentence meanings are understood and produced. Expressive The ideas
The conventions The purpose Ability to learn
20
Individual meaning Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
Receptive
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
3.4.1 Sentences have meaning Look at these sentences. Each has a meaning. Each communicates a message. D: The girl eats the ice-cream, while the dog chases the cat. C: The girl eats the ice-cream. B: Eat the ice-cream. A: The girl eats the ice-cream, if it has a strawberry on top.
E: The girl eats the ice-cream and sits at the table near the window. F: The girl eats the ice-cream with the strawberry on top. G: The girl eats the ice-cream and her friend eats the strawberry.
The meaning of each sentence is a second type of idea. ‘The girl eats the icecream’ has a different meaning from ‘ice-cream’. Each sentence meaning links two or more individual meanings. It is called a semantic relationship or a proposition. Although we know that we can comprehend sentences, we usually don’t think of sentences having meaning. We talk more about their form or syntax. Teachers interested in students’ language use need to think about the meanings of sentences. This helps you to gauge the relative difficulty of sentences and to judge students’ ability to comprehend them. Sentence meanings or propositions differ in their complexity. Which of the above are easier to comprehend and which are more difficult? It is useful for teachers to know how to recognise this.
3.4.2 How to describe the elements that make up a sentence We need a way to describe the elements that make up a sentence meaning. You can do this in different ways. One useful way of doing this is to note the number of events in the sentence, how they are related, the number of noun phrases used to describe each event and how these are organised. Sentence D above is about two events and sentence C is about one event. For each event you can pick out the verb and the nouns (or ‘noun phrases’) that are linked with it. It is useful to divide each event into the subject and the predicate (from a traditional grammatical analysis, a sentence is made up of a subject and a predicate, that is, those words in the sentence that are not part of the subject). Sentence F has three noun phrases: ‘The girl’ is in the subject, and ‘the ice-cream’ and ‘the strawberry on top’ are in the predicate. You can use this to analyse the meanings of the sentences your students understand and the errors they make. You can see what parts a student seems to use well and those aspects you may need to teach.
21
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3.4.3 What do you need to do to understand a sentence? To help see what makes a sentence easy or complex, it is useful to look at what a person needs to do to understand it. In other words, how much thinking does the communicator need to do? Researchers (for example, Bock & Levelt 1994) suggest a number of steps are involved in comprehending and producing sentences. We will look at what you need to do to comprehend the sentence, ‘The girl eats the ice-cream with the strawberry on top’. 1 You select the verb or separate verbs in the sentence (if there is more than one verb). You use the verb/s to break the sentence into segments. In other words, you note the subject and the predicate that make each event. There is one verb: eats.
The verb breaks the sentence into two main parts.
The girl eats the ice-cream with the strawberry on top. 2 You work out the meaning of each noun phrase that is linked with each verb. You recall and build its meaning for that context. The topic can help. When there are two or more noun phrases linked to a verb, you need to work on each link separately. The more noun phrases there are, the more work you have to do. Sentence F has three noun phrases linked with the verb. ‘The girl’ means …
‘eats the ice-cream’ means …
The girl eats the ice-cream with the strawberry on top. ‘with the strawberry on top’ means …
3 You link the individual meanings into a relationship. To do this you use the grammar of the sentence. Part of this involves using the word order of the noun phrases to link the meanings. The meaning of ‘girl’ is the subject.
The meaning of this part is what she eats.
The girl eats the ice-cream with the strawberry on top. This tells us more about what she eats.
As the grammar of a sentence becomes more complex with more noun phrases and verbs, the sentence will make a higher demand on the thinking processes.
22
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
As mature language users, we usually do these steps relatively automatically. It is only when we need to read complex sentences that we become aware of needing to look for the verb/s first and to use these to organise the individual meanings in the sentence. As students’ language develops, they can apply the three steps to more complex sentences. Some students learn to do this more slowly. Others have difficulty using one or more of the steps. You may need to assess what aspects of sentence comprehension these students can do and teach them to comprehend and express more complex sentence meanings. Below we look at some of the types of sentence meanings that children gradually learn to comprehend and say.
3.4.4 Types of sentence meanings We can use the following way of describing sentences to talk about different types of sentence meanings. 1 A simple-sentence meaning talks about one event. It tells us the action and who or what did it. It may also tell us to whom it was done, how, when or where it is done. Examples in the conversation about the pets include: We finded a new dog.
Daddy gotted him.
It falled over our pool.
Our dog got three puppies.
The students found the single event sentence meanings relatively easy to understand. Students learn to use variations of the simple sentence. Each is used for a different purpose, for example, to gain information by asking questions or to instruct. Examples from the children’s conversation are shown in the following figure.
Type of function
Make a statement, describe or recount an event: a declarative sentence
Example
Our doggie falled in our pool.
Give an instruction or a command: an imperative sentence Tell me.
Ask a question: an interrogative sentence
What’s its name?
Comment on a situation: a two-event sentence
Tom, tell us more about your dog.
Some young students have difficulty using these different types of sentences to achieve their intended purpose. You can monitor how well your students use and comprehend each type. Keep in mind that students learn to use each type first in familiar contexts and later use them more generally.
23
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
2 A compound-sentence meaning talks about two events that are joined by a word such as ‘and’, ‘for’, ‘or’, ‘but’ or ‘so’ (these are conjunctions). Examples in the conversation about the pets include: Kath It just shaked and Mum towelled it.
Tom We gave him a ball and he bited it and made it a hole.
Will The Smiffs’ dog barks and wakes up our baby.
Other examples and the relation between the two events are: Ian comes but Ann doesn’t.
The two events don’t both occur; one event excludes the other.
The dog jumps the fence and chases the cat.
The two events have the same agent.
The conjunction in the sentence can change the relationship between the events. Had Tom said ‘but’ or ‘so’ instead of ‘and’, we may have interpreted the sentence differently. 3 A complex-sentence meaning has an independent event (the dominant idea) and one or more dependent events that are subordinate to it. The events are joined by a term such as ‘because’, ‘since’, ‘after’, ‘although’ or ‘when’ or a relative pronoun such as ‘that’, ‘who’ or ‘which’. The students in the conversation didn’t show examples of these. Sentences A to G above include some examples about the ‘eating the ice-cream’ event. A: The girl eats the ice-cream, if it has a strawberry on top.
D: The girl eats the ice-cream, while the dog chases the cat.
In sentence A, the part ‘if it has a strawberry on top’ cannot exist independently. It tells us more about the event of the girl eating the ice-cream. Similarly, in sentence D the part ‘while the dog chases the cat’ tells us when the girl eats the ice-cream. The subordinate or dependent parts tell us more about the main event. Each of sentences A–G involves two events. Each is complex because one event tells us more about the other event. Other complex sentence meanings can apply to more than one specific event. Over the primary years, students gradually learn to comprehend more complex sentence meanings. The trend in complex-sentence meanings includes comprehending and using reference to: • two events linked in time or space, for example, ‘After they got a dog they moved to a new house’ or ‘While they were moving to a new house they got a dog’. • a cause–effect or consequential relationship, for example, ‘The ice melts because it absorbs heat from the Sun’ or ‘He lifted it because the water was
24
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
rising’. Prior to understanding cause–effect relationships, children understand each event but do not link them causally. • general relationships, for example, ‘All dogs begin life as puppies’ or ‘All bicycles have wheels’. Before they understand a statement that applies to every instance, children understand the relationship for particular instances, for example, ‘The tricycle has three wheels’. • general inclusive relationships, for example, ‘Everyone with a pet stood up’ and general exclusive relationships, for example, ‘They all swam well except Jill’. • conditional or ‘if … then’ relationships, where one event will occur only if another event occurs, for example, ‘If they run fast they might catch the train’. Until they understand the notion of a possibility, they interpret the sentence as a sequence of two events with both certain to happen. This developmental sequence helps us see the order in which children learn to comprehend the sentence meanings. You need to be able to recognise the various types of sentence meanings so that you can see which meanings a student can use.
3.4.5 What makes a sentence more difficult to understand? A sentence is more difficult if a person has to work harder to comprehend it and needs to invest more thinking space into doing this. What makes a sentence more or less complex? You can estimate the relative complexity of the meaning of different sentences by asking the following questions. 1 How many events are described in the sentence? How much does it differ from a single-event description? The simple-sentence meaning with one event will be easiest and the complex-sentence meaning is the most difficult. For example, on page 21 sentences B, C, E and F describe a single event, G has compound meanings and A and D are complex meanings. 2 How are the noun phrases and verbs linked for each event in the sentence? For each type of sentence meaning the noun phrases can be arranged in different ways. Two simple-sentence meanings, for example, can have four noun phrases but one can be harder: The girl and her mother were eating their ice-creams near the window.
The girl was eating her ice-cream with the strawberry near the window.
The first sentence, with two phrases as the subject and two in the predicate, will usually be easier to comprehend than the second sentence with one phrase as the subject and three in the predicate. Two complex-sentence meanings can have the same number of noun phrases but one can be more difficult:
25
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
We got a doggie after we moved to our house.
The ice-cream that the girl sitting near the window was eating had a strawberry on top.
A complex meaning that links two events in time is usually easier than a complex meaning that has an event that modifies the subject or the object. 3 How well do the children know the meaning of the verb or the noun phrases in the sentences? Children use a new type of sentence meaning first in particular contexts and then gradually transfer it. All of the sentences A to G on page 21 describe events that would be familiar to young children. You might expect, for example, that early in their language experiences most children would hear and use the imperative form shown in sentence B. 4 What is the meaning relationship in the sentence? What type of sentence meaning does it say? Is it an example of a simple, compound or complex meaning? Is it acquired early or later? Sentence G on page 21 indicates that two events occur, while sentence D links two events in time, and sentence A expresses a probabilistic ‘if … then’ relationship. 5 How many separate noun phrases are there in the sentence and how are these distributed across the events? Having taken factors 1 to 4 into account, this can come into play. Sentence B has less information than the other sentences and C has less information than A, D, E, F or G. Teachers who are not aware of the importance of sentence meanings may expect their students to comprehend and use sentences that are in fact incomprehensible to them. This could arise in literacy activities, in teaching more generally when the teacher talks about key ideas, and even in the language the teacher uses for classroom management and control. Some students may behave inappropriately because they have difficulty comprehending language. Behaviour management strategies need to take account of this.
3.4.6 Do we need to comprehend sentences before we can say them? It is often assumed that we need to comprehend a particular type of sentence meaning before we can use it in our speech. This is the distinction between the expressive and receptive aspects of sentence meanings. In fact, the research suggests that we use expression to teach ourselves a new sentence meaning (Folger & Chapman 1978; Whitehurst & Vasta 1975). When children in the age range of three to six years hear a type of sentence meaning they are ready to learn, they often repeat it aloud. They are not saying the sentence to communicate to others, but are saying it to themselves. Imitating it allows them to put it in their minds, that is, to encode or represent it in their thinking spaces.
26
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
This imitation is not the verbatim, rote recall used typically in tests of auditory memory span. Instead, it is used by the child as a self-teaching tool. The children decide which aspects of what they hear they will imitate and how they will do it. They try to teach themselves about the new sentence meaning in various ways. They may • say the sentence slowly, or in parts • do relevant actions as they say the sentence; the actions seem to help them make sense of the sentence • repeat a new sentence type several times, as if to practise it and to automatise its form. Saying the sentence in these ways allows the children to build a template of its meaning and to use this later to comprehend and say similar sentences in their spontaneous language. It also allows them to get corrective feedback. They can use this to modify their understanding in a manageable way. If they don’t get feedback from others when they imitate the sentence form, but receive it only when they say it spontaneously, there could be too much information for them to deal with at once. Using imitation to learn new sentence meanings is an important language learning tool.
3.5 Discourse meaning During language interactions, we frequently communicate messages that are longer than single sentences. Conversations, stories, descriptions, sets of instructions or explanations are examples. In addition to the meanings of individual morphemes and sentences in a message, we also put together its discourse meaning. A third type of idea in the conversations above is the meaning you get by integrating the sequence of sentence ideas into a discourse idea. A discourse is a sample of language that is longer than one sentence. The sequence of sentences that make a discourse has a meaning or idea that is more elaborated than the meaning of each sentence in isolation. You develop it gradually when you participate in a language interchange. As you listen to a message you form an impression of where it is going. We can see an example of how the discourse meaning develops across the following sentences: Our dog was It falled over Daddy gotted ran quick. our pool. him out.
Kath
Kath
Kath
Gee, did it get drownded?
Will
No, it It just shaked and didn’t die. Mum towelled it.
Kath
Kath
27
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
The developing discourse meaning
Kath’s dog was running and fell in their pool. Her father got it out of the pool.
It didn’t drown. It shook itself and her mother dried it with a towel.
In this section we unpack the discourse component of the I or idea aspect. This is the unshaded part of the table below. We examine how discourse meaning is understood and produced. Expressive The ideas
Receptive
Individual meaning Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
The conventions The purpose Ability to learn
3.5.1 What does discourse meaning look like? Discourse meaning is not as easy to detect as sentence or word meanings. It is not explicitly shown in the language properties of a sequence of sentences. Rather we infer discourse meaning from the sentences by selecting key words and grammatical features. In the earlier conversation about pets, the discourse is negotiated or mutually agreed by those involved. The speakers and listeners showed this agreed understanding. The conversation illustrated several characteristics of the meaning of the discourse. These include: • The conversation is integrated or flows. Even when Kath took it in a direction perhaps not intended by Miss Brown, the sentence ideas still seemed to be in order. The notion of a direction for the conversation is relevant. From its first to its last sentence, a message that has a discourse meaning hangs together. • Ideas are linked across sentences. The ‘it’ was assumed both by Kath and Will to be Kath’s dog. Part of discourse meaning is the carry-over of meanings into following sentences. • There is a high level of predictability between most of the sentences. You can see where the message is going. When Tom said ‘We finded a new doggie’, you might expect the next sentence will enquire about its name and the third sentence will give it.
28
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
• The discourse meaning for a text is different from the topic. A possible discourse meaning for the earlier conversation is shown below. The topic for the conversation could be the pets in Miss Brown’s class. Discourse meaning It tells us about the dogs that children in Miss Brown’s class have. Tom has a new dog named Woofa. Woofa is red and brown. Woofa was given a ball that he ate. Kath’s dog fell in their pool and was rescued by her father.
3.5.2 Why is comprehending and using discourse meaning important? Often in speaking and listening we communicate ideas that are longer than one sentence. Examples are when students: 1 keep track of the unfolding plot in a narrative. They link ideas mentioned in different sentences, predict ideas that might be mentioned next and recognise when new ideas do not fit with the emerging context. Young children who understand the idea of a discourse show an emerging awareness of a narrative genre or a story schema. They recount events or tell stories that hang together. They refer to: • the main characters • where and when the story occurs • the plot of the story and the events in it. They recount the events in the appropriate order. They can recognise discourse errors and inconsistencies in the narrating of others. 2 put together the key elements in an explanation, for example, how worms breathe. They link ideas about how air is introduced into the worm’s blood and how it is carried around the worm’s body. They will be able to explain why worms need to remain moist to avoid suffocating. 3 understand the description of an event, for example, what it was like living in early Melbourne. 4 follow a set of instructions, for example, how to cross a road. They will be able to do the necessary actions in order. Children who have difficulty comprehending and using discourse meaning will be less able to link ideas in these ways. When retelling narratives, earlier events and experiences, a poor understanding of discourse may be shown in a difficulty: • • • •
keeping the thread of a conversation, staying on track recalling several of the main ideas; some sentence ideas are omitted linking ideas across sentences anticipating or predicting what might be said next during speaking, listening or reading.
29
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3.6 Topic meanings The final type of idea in the conversation is its topic or its theme. This could be ‘The dogs Miss Brown’s students have as pets’. This idea unifies what the different students and Miss Brown say. It acts as a coat hanger for the ideas. If you were to draw a concept map of the ideas mentioned in the conversation, the features shared by all of the contributions would fit with this topic. Spoken messages such as a conversation, a story, a description, a set of instructions or an explanation usually have a topic, a theme or a gist. Although the words that are the topic have specific meanings, in this context they refer generally to the idea that integrates or unifies the focus of the spoken exchange. The topic refers to the essential ideas that make up the message. It is often a summary of the discourse. What you know or believe about the topic of a spoken message influences how you interpret it. Once you have decided it, you don’t believe that all words or sentences are equally relevant. Instead, you decide that some ideas are more likely and relevant than others. In this section we unpack the topic component of the I or idea aspect. This is the unshaded part of the table below. We examine how topic meanings are understood and produced. Expressive The ideas
Receptive
Individual meaning Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
The conventions The purpose Ability to learn
The topic of a message can influence how you interpret it. It leads you to expect some ideas over others. Once you know or have decided the topic of the text, you retrieve what you already know about it and use this to guide your understanding. You enter different areas of your existing knowledge and use these areas. The topic guides you to decide which area of existing knowledge to retrieve from memory and use.
3.6.1 How do listeners work out the topic? One of the key things communicators need to do early in a language exchange is to recall what they already know about the topic. If they don’t know the topic at the outset, they need to work it out. To do this, you need to:
30
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
• use the first few sentences to make an informed guess about the possible topic • test your guess and modify it if necessary • retain in your short-term memory enough knowledge about what is said to make a judgement. Working out the topic when you are speaking and listening is sometimes more difficult than when you are reading. This is because individual ideas in speech are presented briefly. If the listener or speaker doesn’t retain what was said, it is more difficult to pick out the main ideas. Many young children will need to learn and practise how to do this. When told the topic, some will need to learn how to use this, for example, to take time to say to themselves, ‘If it is about …, what might it tell me? What things might I hear? What might I say about this?’
3.6.2 How does knowing the topic of a message assist you? Knowing the topic of a language exchange can assist you in a range of ways: 1 It helps you to link the exchange with what you already know. This helps you to anticipate what might be said, the words that might be used and to deal with ideas that might be unclear. You can evaluate what was said with what you know. You are more able to ask, ‘Do you mean …?’, when you know the topic. 2 It helps you to stay on the topic and say things that are relevant to the direction of the exchange. 3 It provides you with a tool for organising and linking the ideas that are said and to comprehend them. We use what we know about the topic as a coat hanger; we organise the ideas around it. This is important when the communication is being used to teach and to learn new ideas, not only in formal teaching but in everyday life.
3.7 Using the ideas in an integrated way So far we have examined the various types of meaning in the I aspect of ICPALER separately. In real-life communication, speakers and listeners use these in an integrated way simultaneously. Each contributes to the overall or main meaning. Students who have language impairments may concentrate or draw on some aspects more than others. They may need to learn how to integrate the main idea in any communication.
3.7.1 Vocabulary as a network of meanings A person’s vocabulary network provides a useful way of thinking about how the different types of ideas work together. The word meanings that you know are linked in a network. When you hear a message, the words in it stimulate matching
31
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
words in your network. As well as these words, you usually can’t help but think of other words that you have linked to these. The earlier conversation could have been based on the network of meanings in the figure below. Each individual word meaning is linked with others. Each link joins two or more meanings. The link ‘dog’ – ‘fall’ – ‘pool’ describes a particular event. This set of links becomes a sentence when it is said.
cat
chases
dog
barks
disturb
people
angry
name
new
play
fall
car
hit
road
toy
pool
get out
shake
ball
drown
puppy warm
escape
scare
rabbit
sleepy
bone
injured
dry
bite
These networks are personal and subjective. While all of the links shown are plausible and sensible, not all of the students necessarily had all of the ideas shown. For Kath, dog was linked with falling in their pool and barking. For Will, dog was linked with having puppies. These young students have linked up their meanings based on their earlier everyday experiences. Falling into a pool is not a feature that is common to all dogs.
3.7.2 The network of meanings scaffolds conversation Some students’ sentences stimulated questions and possibilities in the networks of others. Will already had the possibility of drowning in his network. Kath’s mention of a dog barking stimulated an alternative set of links in Will’s network. It is possible that each student’s network changed, with new links being learnt, during the conversation. As the conversation continued, the ideas that were the focus gradually changed. You can see the flow or direction through the network. This became the discourse meaning. Miss Brown knew what she wanted as the discourse meaning and attempted to direct it. You can see how each of the meanings in the network can belong to other topics and can also be a topic for other verbal concepts. Students gradually learn to use their networks in both of these ways. Some will need to learn how to work out the topic name for a set of words and to suggest particular meanings for a particular topic.
32
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
In other words, our vocabulary network model helps us see how the components of the I aspect of ICPALER are linked. Studies of how we use our brains while doing oral language tasks show how our knowledge is organised in a network-like way (Cappa & Gorno-Tempini 2009).
3.7.3 Developmental changes in meaning networks An adult conversation about pet dogs would probably differ in its quality from that of these four-year-olds. An adult discussion may be more focused, probing, objective and abstract, and less subjective or based in particular experiences. We noted earlier that children change gradually the ways in which they link their word meanings. As they develop further, they will link their word meanings in more abstract ways, in addition to the links based on their experiences. The richness of the person’s meaning or vocabulary networks and the number of meaning links they have affect how well they can comprehend and produce spoken messages. Imagine a situation in a classroom in which you intend to teach ten related ideas about a topic. When you mention the topic, student A recalls four relevant ideas and student B recalls 40. 40 ideas
4 ideas
Topic: 10 key ideas Student A
Student B
You would expect that student B, with a richer, more elaborated vocabulary network, would comprehend the language exchange more effectively and learn more about the topic as a result. You can see evidence of your meaning networks in how some words help you to read or remember others. Suppose you were asked to read the word ‘homogenised’, both when it appeared in a list of unrelated individual words and when it followed ‘milk’, ‘cream’ and ‘pasteurise’. You would most likely say it faster in the second context. A second example would be reading the word ‘sauce’, both after reading unrelated words and after reading ‘tomato’ or ‘hot chilli’. This effect is called priming. Because the meanings are linked in a network, stimulating some of the words can cause linked words to be stimulated also. This is what happens when you know the topic of a spoken text. The topic causes you to expect that some words will be more likely to be said than others. The links we know are determined in part by how the words have been linked in the cultures in which we have used language. Cultures differ in how they do this. We examine cultural effects below.
33
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3.8 Cultural influences on the ideas So far our focus has been on English. A major influence on the ideas communicated in any language is the culture in which the language is used. Given the multicultural nature of our classrooms, we need to be aware of this influence and teach in ways that take account of it. Cultures differ in how they perceive the world and the entities that comprise it. We are familiar with the notion that what one culture may see as a single category (for example, snow), another culture sees as several categories. Cultures differ in the boundaries they draw around items in their world, the features they see as important and the items they decide to name or label uniquely. Children’s early word learning reflects the cultural values and language patterns of the community which they are learnt in (Lovelace & Stewart 2009). This directly influences their vocabulary. Similarly, the ways in which children talk about links between individual ideas (that is, propositions or sentence meanings) differ. In other words, the ways of thinking about the world constructed by a culture contribute significantly to the ideas the culture talks about (Langacker 1995; Sharifian 2001). One key cultural difference between Indigenous and Western cultures is in how each constructs time. Western cultures conceive of time in a linear way, with the time line broken into observable segments or sections. The English language talks about ideas using this metaphor. The plot of an English narrative, for example, develops in this way. On the other hand, Indigenous cultures conceive of time in a more circular, cyclical way. Events in narratives are organised in terms of cycles rather than on a single time line. The ways in which a community or culture develops a discourse for discussing issues become cultural tools for scaffolding in part the thinking of its members (Wegerif et al. 2005). Cultures differ in how they prioritise and link ideas in dialogue about a topic. The dialogue between participants is not simply a way of sharing ideas. It represents a social mode for thinking and a tool for the joint construction of knowledge (Zhengdong 2008). The focus of this book is on fostering the effective learning and use of English. Students in our classes come from a range of cultures, each with its unique ways of representing the world and thinking about it. This cultural knowledge is mapped into the three aspects of language knowledge the students bring to our classes: their knowledge of how language is used (their I–language); the ways in which they communicate (their E–language); and the language conventions used by their culture. Our teaching needs to recognise this multiplicity of language learning perspectives, show that we value and respect it, and provide learning–teaching pathways along which each student can progress in learning to communicate in English.
34
A nalysi ng the ty pes of id e a s o r me a n in g s c o mmun i c at e d
3.9 Review of the types of ideas in a spoken communication The types of ideas in language use and comprehension are called the semantics of the language. They are a key aspect of early language development. The procedures we have discussed here will assist teachers to monitor language progress, compile language profiles for students and implement effective language teaching. You can use the following table to record the language ability of students and to compile their language profiles. Type of ideas being communicated
Receptive Language
Expressive Language
Individual meanings Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
We noted earlier the importance of teaching our students to celebrate their knowledge of the meanings of words. More generally, we can encourage them to pursue and value sentence, discourse and topic meanings and to see how these can work for them.
35
C h a p t er 4
Analysing the use of the conventions of language
C
In this chapter we examine the conventions we use during oral communication. These are the rules speakers and listeners use to put together the types of meanings. It is the C aspect of ICPALER. The table on pages 65–72 shows how these conventions are gradually learnt, in parallel with the emergence of meanings or ideas. While it is useful to describe how each strand emerges, it is important to keep in mind that language learners use these aspects in an integrated and strategic way to communicate. This chapter is intended to help you to use the developmental sequence in your work. Let us look first at what we mean by a convention. You can understand a speaker when you know the rules or patterns they are using to represent the individual meanings and to link them into sentences and discourse. The spoken symbol for the English word ‘friend’ is Freund in German and ami in French. Each culture uses an agreed sound pattern for the meaning. These languages also differ in the rules they use to link individual meanings into sentences. In English, ‘I want to go home’ is in German Ich möchte nach Hause gehen. If you translate the German word by word, it says, ‘I want to home go’. Each culture uses an agreed set of rules for linking the meanings into sentences and discourse. We call these rules conventions. They are arbitrary in the sense they provide alternative ways of expressing the same idea. However, to use each language successfully, you need to know the appropriate conventions or rules. We have already noted that the language we use is a complex symbolic system. These conventions are the keys to understanding and using the symbols. In order to be effective language users of English, children need to learn its conventions.
4.1 The types of conventions we use to communicate Most of us would probably not know explicitly the conventions we use in our first language. Even though we use them spontaneously and effortlessly, we
36
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
would probably find it hard to explain them. We can easily recognise when others use them incorrectly. When we learn a second language, we may use our first language conventions as a reference point. In other words, what we know about our first I–language is tacit. Think back to a situation in which you had difficulty comprehending what others were saying. You may have had difficulty: • deciding the words that were being said • comprehending the sentences because of the way they were formed • combining the sentences to get the drift of the message. A cause of language difficulty is an inadequate knowledge of the rules or conventions for forming or structuring language. Successful communicators use conventions to: • combine sounds into words and to analyse the sound patterns they hear in spoken language: the phonological conventions, for example, in the earlier conversation, Tom pronounced correctly ‘We’ and ‘new doggie’. • link individual meanings into sentences when speaking and to unpack sentences when listening: the grammatical or syntactic conventions, for example, in the earlier conversation Kath said, ‘No, it didn’t die. It just shaked and Mum towelled it’. • link sentences into stories, descriptions or conversations into discourse when speaking and to unpack discourse when listening: the genre or discourse conventions; for example, in the earlier conversation Tom responded to a question with, ‘We gave him a ball and he bited it and made it a hole’. In this chapter, we examine how communicators use conventions to produce and to understand each type of meaning. We will unpack the C aspect in ICPALER using these three aspects. These components of the conventions are the unshaded parts in the table below. Expressive The ideas
The conventions
Receptive
Individual meanings Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings Phonological conventions Grammatical conventions Genre conventions
The purpose Ability to learn
37
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
The pathway we will follow to examine the conventions is shown below. phonological conventions
grammatical conventions
genre conventions
4.2 Phonological conventions Being able to say and to recognise the sound patterns that make up a language is a key aspect of being an effective language user. These are the sound conventions that characterise any language. The speakers in the earlier conversation said sound patterns that approximated to English words. Some at least understood what: • Tom meant when he said ‘doggie’ • Kath meant when she said ‘falled over our pool’. The conventions we use to say words are referred to as the phonology of the language. Phonology includes the separate sounds and how they are combined into syllables and words. This is one of the conventions we use when we speak so that we can understand each other. It is shown in the unshaded part of the table below. In this section, we unpack the phonological conventions component of the C or conventions aspect in the ICPALER model. Expressive The ideas
Receptive
Individual meanings Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
The conventions
Phonological conventions Grammatical conventions Genre conventions
The purpose Ability to learn
Languages differ in the sounds that make up the language, how the sounds are actually said and how the sounds are put together, that is, which sounds are more likely to occur together. In English, some sounds are more likely than others to follow a particular sound, compared to other languages. Children whose native language is not English may know and use sound conventions that differ markedly from those used to express ideas in English.
38
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
What we usually notice about a person’s use of the sound conventions is how they say and recognise sound patterns. However, as we shall show in this section, this is the tip of the iceberg. To use the sound conventions you need two types of knowledge. First, you need to learn and store in your memory the sound patterns that make up words. This is your phonemic and phonological knowledge. Your phonemic knowledge is what you know about individual sounds, for example, you may hear the word ‘spon’ and recognise that it has the ‘p’ sound. Your phonological knowledge is what you know about sound patterns, for example, how words are said, and being able to recognise words that rhyme. You may hear an unfamiliar word such as ‘promptuary’ and recognise the sound patterns ‘prom’ and ‘tuary’. You have a sound pattern for each word and word part you know. A second type of knowledge is the set of actions you can do to perceive or detect a spoken message and the set of actions for making sound patterns. When you have decided the words you want to say in a message, one part of your brain, a speaking-motor part, tells the muscles in various parts of your body how to move to say the words. For example, it tells you how to move your mouth, your tongue, your throat and your lungs in the appropriate ways to articulate. Each word you can say has information about how it needs to be said. To say words accurately you need to: Know the sound patterns for the words: your phonological knowledge. Do the actions to produce the sound patterns.
To comprehend spoken words heard, you need to: Know the sound patterns for the words: your phonological knowledge. Detect the spoken message and filter out background noise.
Our brains store these two types of knowledge about the sound conventions for words. In the earlier conversation, Kath said ‘morgins’ for ‘mornings’ and Will said ‘drownded’ for ‘drowned’. Each of them had a meaning they wanted to share. Kath may have said ‘morgins’ because this is the sound pattern she has stored. Alternatively, she may know the sound pattern ‘mornings’ but her articulation capacity leads to ‘morgins’. Similarly, Will may have said ‘drownded’ for ‘drowned’ for either or both of these reasons. He may have stored ‘drownd’ and then added ‘-ed’. Alternatively,
39
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
he may be much more used to doing the actions to make ‘ownd’ than the actions to make ‘owned’. To analyse these further, it is useful to look at how children gradually develop their sound knowledge and abilities. Speakers may mispronounce words either because: 1 They have not stored the appropriate sound pattern. 2 They have not refined the actions for saying the sound pattern correctly.
4.2.1 Looking for the sounds in spoken English To assist in understanding the sound patterns children learn to use, it is useful initially to describe the set of separate sounds or phonemes that make up spoken standard Australian English. This gives us an idea of the range of sounds children need to learn to use. You would be aware that there are more individual sounds in English than there are letters. As well, a particular letter in English may be said in more than one way. The set of letters, therefore, is insufficient for showing the set of sounds. We need more symbols than the letters provide to show each sound. Linguists use various systems for describing the sounds used in spoken English. One widely used set of symbols is the standard set of phonemic symbols collated by Professor John Wells and used as a foundation for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (Wells 2008). This system has been used to describe the spoken form of standard English in England and also Australian English (for example, Cassidy et al. 2004); Australian English pronunciation patterns share some similarity with those used in south-eastern Great Britain (Gordon & Sudbury 2002). The phonemes identified and the symbols used by Wells (2008) to represent each are shown in the following table. The phoneme in each case is the sound linked with the underlined letter/s. Vowels ɪ
e
æ ɒ
fit, little, hymn, any, mess, led, head lad, map wash, plot, Tom
ʌ
cut, mud, other, flood
iː
peace, seem, machine
ʊ eɪ
aɪ ɔɪ
40
look, good, put may, pace, break smile, sigh, fly, climb moist, toy
Consonants p
b t
d
pat, happy bit, baby, nab top, time, cotton do, middle, end
k
kettle, clamp, school
tʃ
fetch, chew, picture
g
dʒ f
v
gone, haggle, ghost rage, lodge, soldier fit, lift, cough, phone visit, leave
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
Vowels uː
əʊ aʊ ɪə
eə ɑː ɔː
ʊə
loose, true, flew, group go, moat, know cow, found, fear, pier, here fair, mare start, father north, bore, claw, caught, warm impure, cure, manure, tour
Consonants θ
ð s
z ʃ
ʒ
h
m
thin, author, moth than, mother, lathe swan, city, cost zebra, loses, buzz shop, station measure, pleasure hat, whole, ahead mat, dimmer, him
ɜː
sir, purse, learn, infer
n
not, knight, gnat, canny, pin
ə
around, lemon, tepid (schwa, unstressed vowel)
ŋ
sang, hunger, longing
i
potty, mediate
l
loot, silly, fall
u
n̩ l̩ ˈ
you, influence, situation hidden, denude paddle, pedal (stress mark)
r j
w ʔ
ring, write, marry, around use, yellow, beaut, wet, white (glottal stop) hotdog, football
This set of symbols can be used to describe how individuals say words and the sounds in them. The symbol /.../ is used to indicate each phoneme. The sentence ‘Roos eat grass’ would be represented as /ruːz/ /iːt/ /graːs/. The following section describes how children gradually acquire these sounds in words they say. It uses this way of representing sounds to describe their speech. You can use this set of symbols to describe the sounds in a child’s speech at any time.
4.2.2 How children develop the phonological conventions Most children learn gradually the sound patterns in the same order (Tomasello 2006): 1 Their development begins with crying and develops through cooing or gurgling and then babbling. 2 They progress to saying recognisable sounds. The first two sounds they generally say are the two that are furthermost apart in the mouth: ‘b’ and ‘ar’, followed by ‘m’. The first recognisable syllable said is ‘ba’ and the first words are ‘baba’ and ‘mama’. 3 They say other recognisable sounds that are opposite sound pairs. They do this by learning to change the shape of their mouth and the position of their tongue and lips and using their nasal cavity. 4 They learn to say words, mini-sentences and then simple authentic sentences.
41
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4.2.3 How do children develop the ability to say the sounds conventionally? It is difficult to describe the order in which children generally learn the sounds because they don’t learn to say new sounds as separate, isolated sounds. Instead, they show them in the words they say. You can use the following conceptual tools to understand the order in which the sounds develop: 1 Distinguish between a voiced sound and its matching voiceless sound. Young children frequently say ‘pook’ when they mean ‘book’, or ‘ket’ when they mean ‘get’. Examples of voiced and voiceless pairs are /b/ and /p/, /g/ and /k/, /d/ and /t/, and /v/ and /f/. 2 Look at the position of the sound in the word. Children usually say new sounds at the beginning of words before they say them at the end of words. As well, they often say the new sounds first with particular vowels, for example, the short a (or /æ/) and u (or /u/), and oo (or /u:/). When you are concerned about a child mispronouncing sounds, note whether the incorrect sound occurs in the initial, middle or final part of the word. 3 Remember that sounds made by more precise tongue movements are learnt later than sounds made by the tongue at the front of the mouth. They may say ‘tat’ for ‘cat’ (they replace /k/ with /t/), say ‘doh’ instead of ‘go’ (they replace /g/ with /d/), or say ‘ban’ when they mean ‘bang’ (they replace ‘ng’ or /ŋ/ with /n/). 4 Distinguish between sounds that flow on and sounds that stop sharply. Some sounds flow on, for example, /ƒ/, / v /, / s /, / z /, ‘sh’ (or /ʃ/), ‘zh’ (or /zə/), ‘th’ (or θ) and /h/, while other sounds stop more sharply, for example, /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/ or /g/. Children learn to use the stop sounds first and may use these for the flow-on sounds. A child may say ‘past’ for ‘fast’. These are the types of distinctions to look for in early speech development. Children generally learn the sounds in the broad developmental sequence shown in the figure below (Bowen 1998; Grunwell 1997). b, g, m, d
n, h, p, k, f, y, w, l, t, ng
sh (she), z (measure)
ch (choose)
j (jug), s, z (as)
r (red)
v
th (teeth), (then)
4.2.4 Children’s errors indicate their progress developmentally As the children progress through this sequence, they show common types of errors in how they say particular sounds, for example: 1 They replace a voiceless sound at the beginning of a word by its matching voiced sound, for example, they say ‘big’ for ‘pig’, or ‘gat’ for ‘cat’.
42
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
2 They either replace a voiced sound at the end of a word by its matching voiceless sound or they delete the final consonant altogether, for example, they say ‘bat’ for ‘bad’, ‘dock’ for ‘dog’ or ‘cay’ for ‘came’. 3 They replace sounds made by more precise tongue positions by sounds made when the tongue is at the front of the mouth, for example, ‘shop’ is said as ‘sop’. 4 They replace flow-on sounds by stop sounds, for example, ‘fall’ is said as ‘tall’, ‘soap’ is said as ‘toap’, ‘very’ is said as ‘bewwy’. 5 They omit or delete some sounds or syllables from words; for example, they delete: • /l/, /r/, or /w/ when they follow another consonant in words such as ‘blue’ or ‘bread’; they say ‘bue’ or ‘bed’. • /s/ when it precedes a second consonant in words such as ‘spoon’ (‘poon’), ‘step’ (‘dep’) and ‘swung’ (‘wung’). They can say ‘s’, but only in some sound contexts. • unstressed syllables from words that have two or more syllables, for example, for ‘because’ the child says ‘cos’, and for ‘orange’ the child says ‘onge’. 6 Deleting the sounds helps children learn them because it simplifies or reduces the complexity of the sound patterns. This developmental sequence is linked with how students learn to control their breathing and to move their mouth, tongue and lips. As well, they get auditory feedback for the sound sequences they say. The feedback helps them detect and say segments of speech. All children are likely to make the above types of inaccuracies as they progress through learning how to say words accurately.
4.2.5 Phonological and phonemic awareness Another aspect of children’s knowledge of sound conventions is their awareness of sound patterns within words. This ability has been shown repeatedly to predict later reading and spelling skills (Munro 1999). This knowledge develops along the following path: 1 Children first show they can recognise implicitly sound patterns in words. They show this by playing with sound patterns in words; for example, they rhyme and alliterate words. They can recognise and say a rhyming pattern even though they are not able to say how they do this. They engage in songs and nursery rhymes. 2 They next learn to segment one-syllable words into two parts, typically into onset and rime. They hear a word and say it in two separate parts by breaking it at the vowel, for example, they can segment ‘flip’ into ‘fl’ and ‘ip’, ‘train’ into ‘tr’ and ‘ain’, or ‘slow’ into ‘sl’ and ‘ow’. The rime is the vowel and the consonants that follow it and the onset refers to the sound/s that come before the vowel. At the same time, they hear an onset and a rime and can blend them into a word, for example, they hear ‘dr’ and ‘ob’ and can say ‘drob’.
43
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
They can also segment one-syllable words into two parts that identify the first and last sounds; for example, they can segment ‘flip’ into ‘f ’ and ‘lip’, or ‘train’ into ‘trai’ and ‘n’. They can select a word that begins with a particular sound; for example, ‘Tell me a word that starts with b’, and isolate a sound in a word, for example, ‘What is the last sound in cat?’ 3 They can segment one-syllable words into separate, individual sounds or phonemes. They can hear a word and say its separate sounds in order, for example, they hear ‘flip’ and say ‘f ’, ‘l’, ‘i’ and ‘p’ (that is, /f/, /l/, /I/, /p/), or hear ‘train’ and say ‘t’, ‘r’, ‘ai’ and ‘n’ (that is, /t/, /r/, /é/, /n/). This is called phonemic segmentation. They show they can recognise explicitly single sounds in words by counting the number of sounds in a word and by tapping for each sound. They can also blend a string of sounds into a one-syllable word, for example, they hear ‘c-l-o-t’ and say ‘clot’. At around the same time, they show they can recognise the syllables in twoand three-syllable words. They hear the word ‘secret’ and they can clap or tap for each syllable, that is, ‘se’ and ‘cret’. 4 They can manipulate sounds in more complex ways. They hear a one-syllable word and can delete sounds from it and say the word left, for example, ‘Take the “m” out of “camp”. What word would be left?’ They hear the word ‘blink’ and swap the ‘l’ for ‘r’ and say the word. 5 They can manipulate sounds in two- or three-syllable words. Most two- or three-syllable words differ from one syllable words in an important way: the vowel in at least one of the syllables is de-stressed. It is said with very little sound value, as a very short ‘uh’. Listen to how you say the ‘a’ in ‘around’, the ‘e’ in ‘spoken’ or ‘butter’, the ‘i’ in ‘tepid’, or the ‘o’ in ‘demon’. You don’t say the ‘a’ as /æ/ or the ‘en’ as /en/. The sound you say for each of these vowels in these words is not the sound you would say if the vowel was in a one-syllable word. You say it with almost no sound, often as a very short ‘uh’ or grunt. This vowel sound is called the schwa. As we have seen above, each of the vowels can be said as a schwa, with little or no sound value or stress. Students gradually develop an awareness of the schwa. They learn to hear it in words and to transfer it between words. They also learn how to change how they say a three-syllable word such as ‘family’ when they add a syllable to make ‘familiar’. You can hear this when you add ‘ence’ to ‘infer’ or ‘defer’. Students learn to segment two-, three- and four-syllable words into sounds by recognising the schwa. As well, they blend two or three syllables by de-stressing one or more vowels to produce the schwa. Students in the middle primary years (and beyond) often have difficulty working out how to read or spell two-, three- and four-syllable words because they haven’t learnt effectively how the schwa operates.
44
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
As children progress through this developmental sequence, they are using their phonological and phonemic knowledge in increasingly complex ways. There is a second aspect of this you need to take into account. Children can apply each of these skills accurately to short one-syllable words before they can apply the same skill to words that are longer. These skills provide children with knowledge of sound patterns within words. They can use this knowledge to listen for particular sound patterns in words and also to say new words. The phonological and phonemic skills are also critical for literacy learning. They provide foundation knowledge for learning to read and spell words. Dyslexia is more likely when children lack these phonological and phonemic skills (Munro 1999).
4.2.6 Phonological patterns in sentences and discourse So far we have looked at the sound conventions to do with saying individual words. Another aspect of sound development is how young children learn to use stress and intonation patterns in sentences. The focus in this section is not so much on why speakers use stress patterns in sentences, that is, the meaning associated with the use of stress patterns or the intention the speaker is intending to convey. (This is discussed in a later section examining our purposes for using language.) Our focus here is on how children learn to recognise, interpret and use stress and intonation patterns. When we are having a conversation, or telling a story, we don’t say all of the words with exactly the same stress or volume. We say some words faster than others, some words louder, some words with a higher frequency and some words with more tone. The people that we are communicating with understand what these differences mean. An example of this is the sentence, ‘You put it there’. You would say this differently to someone depending on whether you intend it to be an instruction (you’ve already said it twice!); you are asking a question incredulously; or you are reminding a child, in passing, of where they put their toy that they have lost. You will be able to hear the difference between, ‘You put it there!’, ‘You put it there?’ and ‘You put it there’. These types of sound patterns are called the prosody or the melody of speech. We can alter both the meaning of a sentence and its emotional force by using prosody. You can imagine how often we use this in classroom dialogue for general communication, for teaching particular topics and for classroom management. Students learn to use these prosodic conventions gradually over the early years of primary education, after they have made substantial progress in learning to use grammatical conventions (Doherty et al. 1999). You often hear young children over-use stress by emphasising some words inappropriately. Brain-imaging studies (for example, Pihan 2006) indicate that the right and left hemispheric processes are used to interpret prosody. The right hemisphere activity draws out the emotions from the tone of voice heard. The left hemispheric
45
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
activity deals with the language aspects, for example, how to say the sentence and how to link the stress pattern with relevant parts of the sentence. The prosodic patterns are not only important for early oral language. They are also important in learning to read fluently and to link ideas in sentences. Some children have difficulty recognising and using prosody. For example, they may not be successful in recognising and conveying emotions in communication, that is, recognising and communicating affective prosody. Alternatively, they may be less able to decide whether a sentence they hear is a statement, a question or an instruction. Early intermittent middle ear infections can restrict children’s ability to detect prosodic patterns. Some research of affective prosody has gone further and shown how different parts of the cortex deal with different types of emotional expression, for example, happy, sad and angry intonations are processed by different areas of the brain (Rymarczyk & Grabowska 2007).
4.3 Grammatical conventions We noted earlier that language users have rules for combining individual meanings into sentences and discourse. Speakers use rules to form sentences by arranging words and parts of words in particular ways. Listeners know how to unpack and interpret what they hear using these rules. The conventions we use to do this are referred to as the grammar of the language. It is the second component of the C or conventions aspect in the ICPALER model. Speakers need to know these rules to communicate with others. Young children do not use grammar in the way that adult speakers do. The students you teach are probably progressing towards an adult understanding. Expressive The ideas
Individual meanings Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings
The conventions
Phonological conventions Grammatical conventions Genre conventions
The purpose Ability to learn
46
Receptive
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
As mature users of English, we use its grammatical conventions relatively automatically. You can tell when a sentence is said with incorrect grammar, even though you may find it hard to describe explicitly how you string meanings together to convey what you want to say. Your ability to recognise when grammar is used incorrectly is called your syntactic or grammatical awareness.
4.3.1 Grammatical conventions in the conversation In the conversation in Chapter 2, each of the speakers showed they were developing an awareness of word order as a convention we use to communicate. First, they formed sentences by arranging words in an order to communicate their intentions: • Tom sequenced some words to describe the ball his doggie had. • Kath said, ‘It just shaked and Mum towelled it’. If she had said, ‘Mum just shaked’ or ‘It towelled Mum’, she would have communicated a different idea. Second, they seem to use grammatical rules to unpack and interpret what others said. Tom’s responses suggest he understood both the question and the instruction. They all made responses that were consistent with using the order of words to understand the sentences said by others. You should note here, that we cannot for certain say that they did use these rules. When they heard Kath say, ‘Our dog … falled over our pool’, they probably knew that it was more likely for a dog to fall in the pool than for the pool to fall over a dog. It may have been enough for them to hear the separate ideas to be able to comprehend what happened. To see if they were using word order, it would be necessary to see if they interpreted a sentence like, ‘The girl hit the boy’, differently from, ‘The boy hit the girl’. There are various types of grammatical errors in the earlier conversation. One type involved using incorrect word order or inappropriate words. Tom said, ‘Daddy put the inside ball’, instead of, ‘Daddy put the ball inside’; and, ‘… and he bited it and made it a hole’, instead of, ‘and he bit it and made a hole in it’. The listeners seemed to understand these sentences. All of the students misused the verb ending ‘-ed’ by applying it to verbs that in English don’t use it. Tom said, ‘We finded …’, Kath said, ‘… falled over …’, and, ‘… Daddy gotted …’, and Will said, ‘… drownded?’ These errors are morphological. What they need to learn is that there are exceptions to some of the language rules we use.
4.3.2 What develops in the children’s knowledge of sentence conventions? It is sometimes said that children know most of the sentence conventions they will need to speak English by the time they begin school. At one level this is true. Slobin (1995) reviews evidence that shows this for languages from around the world.
47
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
However, a four-year-old, an eight-year-old, a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old differ in how they use the conventions. The four-year-old child may use relative pronouns such as ‘what’ or ‘who’ and correctly ask or answer, ‘What is that?’, but will still be less likely to use or comprehend, ‘What might happen if that were not here?’ Children continue to develop the language conventions during the school years (Reilly, Zamora & McGivern 2005). They learn that a particular sentence meaning can be said using alternative grammatical forms (Jisa et al. 2002; Reilly et al. 1998) and learn to use the conventions in a wider range of genres (Berman & Slobin 1994). These changes are illustrated in the following scenario. Suppose Aiden saw Carlo throw a book and then sit down, and you asked Aiden what happened. Aiden could describe the sequence of events in several ways, depending on your question. Possible answers are shown in the figure below. 1. As two simple active voice sentences. Carlo threw a book. Carlo sat down.
2. As a sentence made by joining the two active voice sentences. Carlo threw a book and then he sat down. Aiden saw Carlo throw a book and then sit down and then told his teachers what happened.
The boy who sat down threw the book first. 7. As a sentence having a relative clause.
It was Carlo who threw the book and then sat down. 6. As a cleft sentence.
3. As a sentence using a temporal adverb. Carlo threw a book first and then he sat down. 4. As a passive voice sentence. The book was thrown by Carlo. Then he sat down. 5. As a sentence having a main clause and a subordinate adverbial clause. Before Carlo sat down, he threw a book.
These ways of describing the same situation illustrate some of the conventions children learn. Each is a response to a particular question. As well, the order from 1 to 7 shows the gradual emergence of the different forms. They are learnt in the 6–10-year-old age range with the child initially misusing them and receiving corrective feedback.
4.3.3 Types of grammatical conventions Each of the sentence types above requires the use of various types of grammatical conventions. These emerge gradually in the language of young children (Chapman 2000; Miller & Paul 1995). Conventions include knowing how to: 1 Use verb tense appropriately to indicate when an event occurred. For example, ‘I throw’ versus ‘I threw’, ‘I was throwing’ or ‘I will throw’.
48
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
2 Use the bound morphemes such as ‘-s’ to show the plural forms of nouns, ‘-ed’ to show the past tense of weak verbs, and ‘-ly’ to show adverbs. For example, saying, ‘He walked slowly’, instead of, ‘He walked slow’; or, ‘He saw three birds’, instead of, ‘He saw three bird’. 3 Use words from various grammatical categories correctly. For example, saying, ‘What did he do?’, instead of, ‘What he do?’ An example of how this gradually develops is shown in learning to say, ‘I won’t do it’, in the following figure. No do it.
I no do it.
I not do it.
I won’t do it.
This sequence shows how children may first omit particular grammatical categories from a sentence. They later say sentences that include the various categories, but use inappropriate items from the category. For example, they may know that a personal, possessive and/or relative pronoun is needed in a sentence, but use an incorrect one: they may say, ‘Them gave it to me’, instead of, ‘They gave it to me’; ‘The girl what was running’, instead of, ‘The girl who was running’; or, ‘Me not want it’, instead of, ‘I don’t want it’. These errors may suggest a lack of agreement between parts of speech. Sometimes, just before correct use, children use two words from the same category, one of which is redundant, for example, ‘Me, I won’t not want it’. 4 Use sentence templates and word order correctly. We saw in sentences 1–7 above how the same event can be said in two or more forms. Another example is learning to use the passive voice form, for example, to describe the event in which a girl hits a boy. You can describe this in the active voice form, ‘The girl hit the boy’, and in the passive voice form, ‘The boy was hit by the girl’. When children who haven’t yet learnt the passive voice form hear, ‘The boy was hit by the girl’, they may interpret it as if the first noun, ‘the boy’, is doing the action. 5 Use the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. For example, ‘We had the bestest time’ and ‘It was worser than that’. 6 Use the correct preposition or conjunction to link two or more events (Nippold 1998) in a relationship. Some sentence meanings link two events in time or space, for example, ‘He opened the door after he turned on the lights’. Some children assume that the order in which the events are mentioned is the order in which they occur. Sentences containing ‘if ’ and ‘because’ are more easily understood when the event flagged by the term follows the main event, for example, ‘He put on his coat because he was feeling cold’ and ‘You’ll hurt yourself if you fall off ’. The alternatives, ‘Because he was feeling cold, he put on his coat’ and ‘If you fall off, you’ll hurt yourself ’ are more difficult initially.
49
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
7 Use relative pronouns such as ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘which’, ‘what’ and ‘that’. There are two types of sentences here: those in which the event flagged by the pronoun follows the main event such as, ‘The girl spoke to the man who was here’; and those in which the event with the pronoun is embedded in the main idea such as, ‘The girl who hit the boy went home’. Generally, children understand the first type of sentence before the second type. Both types are easier to understand than those from which the relative pronoun has been deleted, for example, ‘The girl the boy hit went home’. 8 Use modal verbs such as ‘you should’, or ‘we ought’ (Nippold 1998). These verbs express the attitude or mood of the speaker: ‘you must’ refers to obligation; ‘I may’ and ‘I might’ to probability; and ‘I could’ to possibility or inference about ability. Preschool children who have specific language impairments use ‘can’ to express their ability (‘I can go’) and to seek permission (‘Can I go?’), but not as well as their able-learning, same-age peers (Leonard et al. 2007). They have greater difficulty using ‘could’ to refer to ability in the past.
4.3.4 Using conventions that make the meanings agree: Morphological conventions Grammatical conventions involve using words in the acceptable or correct order and making the various individual meanings agree. Statements exemplified by, ‘I playing in the park’, ‘He saw three bird’, ‘He wented slow’, ‘We had the more baddest time’, ‘They has to go’, and ‘They musts eat it’, are typical errors made by young children learning to use sentence conventions. One of the problems in all of these sentences is that the morphemes in each sentence don’t agree with each other. The speakers are misusing bound morphemes such as ‘-ing’, and ‘-ed’ to communicate the time of an action, ‘-s’ to indicate plurals and ‘-est’ for adjectives. What these children haven’t yet learnt is morphological awareness. This involves children knowing that the word ‘trees’, for example, comprises two components: the idea of a tree and the idea of more than one. They need to be able to separate these two parts or combine the two parts if necessary. This is made more difficult when the word can be both a noun and a verb, for example, ‘walks’. In this case, you need also to look at its role in the sentence to decide whether it is talking about an action that is presently happening or whether it refers to more than one walk. In some of the examples above, the children may be aware that the words they say and hear comprise two meanings, but are not yet using the correct ones. Children continue to develop morphological awareness throughout their childhood and into adolescence (Kieffer & Lesaux 2008). Some students will need teaching that directs their attention explicitly to the morphological parts of words and guides them to use these parts. Morphological awareness is often more difficult for students from non-English speaking backgrounds because the morphological conventions differ. While in
50
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
English we say, ‘I ate three cakes’, in some languages (such as Indonesian or Japanese) a speaker may say the equivalent of, ‘I ate three cake’ (Aronoff & Fudeman 2005), while a speaker of the Warlpiri language indicates the plural of a noun by repeating the singular word, ‘I eat cake cake’ (Isac & Reiss 2008). Teachers need to know that some of their students may come from language backgrounds where adding the suffix ‘-s’ to a noun is not how a plural is indicated.
4.3.5 What do students know when they comprehend a grammatical convention? If you can understand any of these grammatical forms, you can identify what was done (the action), who did it (the actor or agent of the action) and possibly other information, such as when, where, how or why. This is also the information students need when they are learning a grammatical convention. This understanding links the convention aspect with the ideas aspect in the ICPALER model. A sentence convention doesn’t have meaning for a language user unless they can end up with this level of understanding. It provides us with a criterion for deciding whether a convention has been learnt. It also indicates directly how the sentence conventions and meanings interact with each other.
4.3.6 Useful tasks for examining students’ understanding of grammatical conventions One way of investigating students’ understanding of different grammatical forms is to use the whodunit task, described by Feldman, MacWhinney and Sacco (2002, p. 339). In this task, students listen to a sentence or a grammatical form and decide the actor. By measuring how long it takes the students to make the decision, you can see which forms are more complex. A range of studies summarised by Feldman et al. (2002) have compared how well children can do this for three types of sentences that had simple noun (n) phrases and short verb (v) phrases. Types include: (1) The cat bit the dog (nvn); (2) The cat the dog bit (nnv); and (3) Bit the cat the dog (vnn). The sentences also varied in terms of whether each noun was an animal that could do the action. These studies have reported developmental trends in sentence processing strategies (Von Berger et al. 1996). Adults select the first noun in nvn forms as the agent and second noun in both nnv and vnn forms. Children aged seven years show adult performance for nvn forms but not for the nnv and vnn forms for at least another two years. Those with expressive and receptive language difficulties are more likely to be distracted by whether the noun is animate, that is, they are less likely to use the order of the nouns in the utterance to make the decision (Evans & MacWhinney 1999).
51
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4.4 Genre or discourse conventions As well as the conventions for sentences, children learn the conventions for linking sentences into a discourse or a genre. As they move through the primary grades, for example, sentence connectors such as ‘also’, ‘however’, ‘still’ or ‘nevertheless’ begin to appear in their dialogue. They gradually use and comprehend pronouns across two or three sentences. They hear a sequence of sentences that include, ‘The cat fought the large black rat. When puss was too tired to go on, the vermin pounced’, and use the phrases ‘the cat’ and ‘puss’ to infer that the rat defeated the cat. We saw this in the conversation. The students used conventions to link the sentences. When Miss Brown asked, ‘What’s he called?’, they knew the ‘he’ was Tom’s new dog. They all seemed to know the convention of staying on the topic and said sentence ideas that fitted with it. Speakers use a range of techniques to maintain the cohesion between a set of sentences. These include the use of: • sentence connectives and ties such as ‘on the other hand’, ‘as well’, ‘too’ and ‘then’. Others include ‘still’ (as in ‘Still, you could have gone’), ‘as’, ‘also’, ‘however’ and ‘moreover’. • topic sentences when speaking and listening; these provide a theme for the following sentences. • a brief introduction that charts the direction of the sentences, for example, ‘Hi’ and ‘No’. • synonyms and re-wordings of a phrase. • pronouns, noun-pronoun agreement conventions across sentences and verbtense agreement across sentences. • tag questions that are added to a sentence and invite a response, for example, ‘isn’t it?’; ‘did they?’ and ‘wasn’t it?’. Young children often know they need to use discourse conventions, but don’t know how to do this. For example, they may use ‘and then’ to link a sequence of sentences. In recounting an experience, they may not sequence the ideas in terms of an effective story schema, mentioning the context and the main people in the recount early in the presentation.
4.5 The conventions are learnt and used in an integrated way The three types of conventions contribute in an integrated way to a child’s use of language at any time. This integration is shown in the automaticity with which they use the three types. In the course of moving towards automatic use of one of them, children may temporarily seem to forget what they know about the other conventions. They may, for example, regress in their use of sound conventions
52
A nalysi ng the us e o f t h e c o n v e nt io n s o f l a n g ua ge
while learning new grammatical forms. On other occasions, their use of grammar may lapse when learning to use new sound patterns. Children need time to learn this integration. They need time to link or synthesise the new knowledge with what they know. This often includes the opportunity to practise the new convention initially in specific situations. Without this opportunity, immature use of any one of the conventions may occur. This can reduce the child’s capacity to communicate effectively. Immature phonological development may mean that a child mispronounces words, confuses words with similar sound patterns and says sentences with less intonation, while using grammatical and genre conventions correctly. Immature grammatical development, on the other hand, may mean that the child comprehends and uses sound patterns efficiently but has difficulty comprehending and using sentence forms.
53
C h a p t er 5
P
Analysing how language is used to achieve particular purposes
Think back over recent oral language exchanges. You may have asked someone for assistance, discussed a movie, novel or sporting event with a colleague or shared jokes with a family member. In each exchange, you had a goal or purpose for communicating. To achieve it, you used ideas and conventions. By themselves, however, they may not have been sufficient. To achieve your purpose you probably thought about how you would say the ideas and the words you would use. How you express an opinion to a close friend may differ from how you express it to a stranger or a superior at work. Being able to use language for particular purposes is what language learning is all about. This is why we engage in communication. This applies in your teaching. Whenever you communicate with students in your class, you have a purpose or a reason. You may want to see what they know, to help them to learn, to encourage them to think in particular ways, to behave in particular ways, to have particular feelings or to do particular things, for example, to transfer ideas to another context. Many classroom management and discipline problems arise because, at the time, the teacher and students differ in their goals for communicating. Your goal may be to teach new ideas. Your students’ goals may be to share experiences with peers, work on their position in the peer pecking order or to work on their presence in the peer group. These goals can clash with your goals. A student may ignore or disobey an instruction, for example, because they want to direct their activity or to challenge your authority. A student may speak rudely to you using language they use with their siblings or peers because their goal is to offend you or to show their independence. These goals can lead to inappropriate and undesirable behaviours in your classroom. If you respond to the behaviours and ignore the goals that led to them, it is likely that the continuing goals will lead to other inappropriate behaviours.
54
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
There are two issues here: • the appropriateness of the purpose or goal • the language the student uses to pursue it. Two students can have the same goal or purpose, but may use their language quite differently to achieve it. Our focus is on what a student knows about how to use language to achieve their purpose or goals. Given its importance to being an effective communicator and language user, it is surprising that this aspect of language usually receives less attention than either the ideas or conventions. In formal education, students are usually expected to learn these aspects of language incidentally and automatically as they interact with others. Some students come to school having begun to learn this knowledge. Others are less well developed in this area. They are immediately disadvantaged. They are less able to interact effectively with peers and teachers, and to use language to achieve their purposes. Without the opportunity to learn this knowledge explicitly, they are likely to be increasingly disengaged and alienated from successful classroom interactions. The purpose of this chapter is for you to understand this aspect of language in how you communicate, to recognise it in the communication of students, to be aware of its importance and relevance in real classroom interactions, and to be able to identify when to implement teaching to help develop it where necessary.
5.1 The purpose aspect in ICPALER In this section, we examine how children learn to use oral language to achieve their goals. In our ICPALER mnemonic, this is the purpose or P aspect. It is shown in the table below. Expressive The ideas
The conventions
The purpose
Receptive
Individual meanings Sentence meanings Discourse meanings Topic meanings Phonological conventions Grammatical conventions Genre conventions Manage and direct language use Adjust to context and audience Use language for different goals Listen and speak between the lines
Ability to learn
55
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Compare two recent conversation situations, one in which each person seemed to achieve their goals for conversing and one in which they didn’t. In the latter, some participants may have become uninterested, bored or alienated. Some may not have understood what was being said. Some may have been turned off by the inappropriate social behaviours of other participants. What made a difference? What made one conversation more successful than the other? What features led to less effective communication? They could have included a converser who: • dominated the air play, didn’t take turns, talked over other speakers and spoke too loudly • did not use conversation protocols satisfactorily, for example, turned to talk to others in ways that were inappropriate for the context • did not judge how much information to give at any time and told others things they already knew • used language that was not appropriate for the audience, for example, offensive phrases • misinterpreted the body language of the audience and didn’t adjust to their increasing irritation and disengagement • did not listen between the lines or infer what the other speakers were saying • did not initiate the conversation well. Knowledge of how to use language in social interactions to achieve various purposes or goals for communicating is called the pragmatic or the semantic pragmatic aspect of language use.
5.2 How language is used in the conversation You can look at how the students used language for different goals in the conversation in Chapter 2. Different participants seemed to have different goals for engaging in it. Who else was there affected this. Miss Brown probably directed the students’ talking more than she would the talking of her colleagues. You can infer the possible goals from what was said in the context. Participant
What was said
Possible goal or purpose for saying it
Miss Brown
‘Tom, tell us more about your new doggie.’
To direct the conversation, to invite Tom to talk about his dog.
Kath
‘Our dog … falled over our pool. Daddie gotted him out.’
To redirect the conversation to have an opportunity to talk about her dog.
Will
‘Gee, did it get drownded?’
To express his feeling of concern and to obtain more information.
56
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
We can also look at how the participants used language to achieve their goals. They: • took turns and shared air-play time, possibly because the teacher was present • stayed on the topic, and extended and elaborated it. They showed they could maintain the topic: when Kath used ‘it’ in ‘It falled over our pool’, they probably knew she was talking about her family’s dog and not Woofa; when Tom said ‘It is red and brown’, they probably knew he was talking about Woofa. Speakers use language to achieve a range of purposes. Knowing how to do this in everyday contexts is a key part of our knowledge of language. Young children gradually learn these. We can elaborate the ICPALER framework to show the components of the purpose or P aspect. We will examine how they learn to use the four aspects shown in the table below. Expressive
Receptive
The ideas The conventions The purpose
Manage and direct language use Adjust to context and audience Use language for different goals Listen and speak between the lines
Ability to learn
We will examine each of these components of the purposes for communicating more closely below. Some students come to school not using these types of knowledge effectively. They need explicit teaching that enables this to be learnt.
5.2.1 How do communicators manage and direct their use of language? Effective communicators manage and direct their use of language in various ways. These include being able to: 1 initiate, maintain and terminate conversations in social exchanges 2 take turns in conversations, for example, how they wait or invite others to take a turn 3 how they stay on the topic 4 how they adjust what they say to fit the audience and the context. This is shown in how they adjust their tone and volume, and use phrases such as ‘you
57
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
know’ to link to experiences with the audience, and how they use greetings selectively for the teacher and peers. You can observe how well your students show these behaviours in activities in which they share listening to and telling stories or recounting experiences, discuss events and engage in other verbal interactions. The analysis of the earlier students’ conversation showed that they had begun to develop these language abilities. Generally, students learn to use these first in particular situations and gradually learn to transfer and generalise them. The four key elements of managing and directing language use are shown in the following table. Expressive
Receptive
The ideas The conventions The purpose
Manage and direct language use
How they initiate, maintain and terminate conversations How they take turns How they stay on topic How they adjust to audience and context
Adjust to context and audience Use language for different goals Listen and speak between lines The ability to learn
5.2.2 How communicators adjust their use of language to particular context and audience Effective communicators are aware of the need to take account of those they are communicating with and the particular context or situation in which they are communicating. They adjust and modify what they say in a range of ways; for example, they:
58
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
• judge what others might know about the topic and adjust what they say. During a conversation or an informative talk, for example, they try to see what others know and use this to shape their communication. If their goal is to assist others to learn more about the topic, they may shape what they say to target what their audience knows. If their goal is to use their knowledge to show supremacy, they may communicate in ways that restrict the comprehension of others and show where others’ existing knowledge is inadequate • decide how much information to give at any time; they read the audience to decide what it might want to hear, know or discuss • select the most appropriate words, sentence meanings, conventions and intonation patterns to suit the group. A communicator whose goal is to persuade others may use different language from a communicator whose goal is to inform objectively • know when they haven’t given enough information for the audience and, again, according to their goals, take appropriate actions • use the context to assist in communicating the message, for example, using body language and gestures. Communicators whose goals are to persuade others or to exert power may use gestures and tones more likely to elicit emotions and affect relevant to their goals. Young children are often egocentric in their ability to estimate what others might know about a topic or to decide what is most appropriate in particular contexts. These skills develop gradually. Some young children communicate with most adults in the ways they communicate with their parents. They may assume that what the audience knows about a topic matches their knowledge. Expressive
Receptive
The ideas The conventions The purpose
Manage and direct language use
How they initiate, maintain and terminate conversations How they take turns How they stay on topic How they adjust to audience and context
Adjust to context and audience
Judge what others might know during conversation Judge how much information to give Select appropriate words and conventions
59
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Expressive The purpose
Receptive
Use the context to assist understanding Link ideas in relation to a particular context Use language for different goals Listen and speak between the lines
The ability to learn
5.2.3 How communicators use language for different goals or purposes Individuals differ in their goals or purposes for using language. We need to be aware that: • the goals of our students at any time may differ from our goals. It is often useful to infer these. To do this we need to tune in to how our students are using language at the time. • students differ in how they achieve their goals by speaking and listening. Two students may want to avoid doing a task, but use their language in quite different ways to achieve this. One may skilfully manage us, while the other simply digs a bigger hole for themselves through their use of language. • students differ in how well they can infer the goals of others from what is said. Some students may not infer our goal when we use sophisticated speech techniques such as speaking softly, changing emphasis or tone, rhetorical questions or sarcasm. It is useful for teachers to express purposes as explicitly as possible. Saying, ‘I’m waiting’, isn’t as effective to a class as, ‘I’m waiting for you to be quiet’. Teachers and students frequently use intonation and prosody to communicate their intention or purpose. Each of the sentences in the following figure has stress on different words (shown in bold). Read each sentence aloud. What would be the goal of each statement?
60
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
I didn’t say that.
Sit there please. Sit there please.
Sit there please.
I didn’t say that.
I didn’t say that.
I didn’t say that.
Young children often know what they want to communicate before they can infer what others are intending. Some students have difficulty using language to express their goals. When this happens, they often use physical means to communicate their feelings and intentions. For example, they may push or grab inappropriately instead of verbally requesting or attempting to resolve a conflict or a problem by talking and listening. Some students begin school using physical rather than verbal means to communicate. If they do not have the opportunity to learn how to do this in verbal ways, they will be increasingly disadvantaged. Expressive
Receptive
The ideas The conventions The purpose
Manage and direct language use
How they initiate, maintain and terminate conversations How they take turns How they stay on topic How they adjust to audience and context
Adjust to context and audience
Judge what others might know during conversation Judge how much information to give Select appropriate words and conventions Use the context to assist understanding Link ideas in relation to a particular context
Use language for different goals
Infer the goals for an oral communication Identify the goals for an oral communication
61
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Expressive The purpose
Receptive
Listen and speak between the lines
The ability to learn
5.2.4 How well do people use language to communicate non-literally? Young children will frequently be expected to comprehend non-literal expressions such as, ‘Get a wriggle on’, ‘Put on your thinking caps’, or ‘Cut it out’. They are expected to show their comprehension by acting in particular ways, for example, ‘I want to be able to hear a pin drop’, means, ‘You need to be very quiet and not talk’. Teachers frequently use non-literal expressions as part of their classroom dialogue, for example, for the purposes of behaviour and classroom management. Not all students understand them. Many interpret them literally. As a consequence, they do not respond appropriately. Often we are not aware that we are using them. For example, Kerbel and Grunwell (1998) found that teachers who believed they rarely used idioms in their classrooms actually said an average of 1.7 figurative expressions each minute. Comprehending figurative expressions demands the ability to infer. Communicators more generally need to do this when they take a conversation further, that is, to extend a message into related areas. Merely repeating what has already been said is functional. To do this, they need to infer, by linking what has been said with what they know. This helps them think about where the conversation might be going. Expressive The ideas The conventions The purpose
Manage and direct language use
How they initiate, maintain and terminate conversations How they take turns How they stay on topic How they adjust to audience and context
62
Receptive
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
Expressive Adjust to context and audience
Receptive
Judge what others might know during conversation Judge how much information to give Select appropriate words and conventions Use the context to assist understanding Link ideas in relation to a particular context
Use language for different goals
Infer the goals for an oral communication
Listen and speak between the lines
How they read in a message its intended meaning
Identify the goals for an oral communication
How they use idioms and metaphors How they extend a language exchange
The ability to learn
5.3 Using the four components of pragmatics in an integrated way To achieve their purposes for communicating, children ultimately need to learn to use the four components in an integrated way. They need to initiate and maintain an exchange, adjust their language to the particular context and audience, use language selectively for specific goals and functions, and infer what others are saying in terms of the context and their goals for communicating. Knowing how to use language in social situations for particular goals and purposes gives communicators the power that comes with language. Being able to communicate effectively in a range of contexts according to one’s goals or purposes is what language use is about. In the classroom, teachers use this knowledge to direct and to motivate effective student learning. By teaching and modelling aspects of it, they can guide and lead students to become more effective language users and to use language to manage and direct their own learning.
63
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
The effectiveness and quality of student–teacher interactions will be determined in part by the teacher’s knowledge of it. Its use for classroom management and discipline has already been noted. It will also help students to understand the power relationships being communicated through language between teachers and students and within the student group. These inferences are relevant to social interaction in the classroom and in everyday living. Individuals infer and synthesise characteristics of other communicators from what they say and how they say it. We synthesise speaker characteristics and the content of what is said. We judge others, using ourselves as reference points. These judgements involve self-talk. Some individuals have an atypical self-referential mechanism. Not only do they have difficulty making the high-level inferences but they also have difficulty managing the self-referential activity. This type of language processing is required constantly in classroom interactions. It is not surprising that a large proportion of students who have social, emotional and behavioural problems also have speech and language difficulties (Tommerdahl 2009). While the direction of causality is usually assumed to be from language to social and emotional development, it is more likely that a reciprocal longitudinal relationship exists. Inappropriate social interactional behaviours may, for example, restrict the quality of early language interactions available to a young child. Adolescents receiving interventions for emotional and behavioural problems frequently have previously undetected language difficulties (Benner, Nelson & Epstein 2002).
5.4 How aspects of oral language develop A summary of some of the steps in the ideas, purposes and conventions aspects of the oral language learning pathway is shown in the following table. The ideas and purposes aspects are combined under the heading ‘The emergence of meanings’. The reference to age is only to provide a basis for sequencing the gains in each aspect. While it is useful to describe the learning that occurs in each strand, it is important to keep in mind that students learn the various aspects in an integrated way in their communication activities. There are dangers in partitioning such a complex activity into segments, as there is some obvious overlap for many of the items that are mentioned. You may believe, for example, that some of the items in the emergence of the conventions aspect would be better located in the emergence of meanings aspect. When should you be concerned about a student’s use of grammatical and discourse conventions? You may be concerned when a student cannot either comprehend or use in their speech the grammatical discourse forms you expect. You could record the samples of the student’s speech and use the table to work out the student’s location on the developmental pathway. You can use this to describe the student’s knowledge of grammatical, phonological and ideas/meaning aspects.
64
The children: • show more contrasts in consonants using their lips in initial positions • practise perfecting sounds • say most vowels, but not all perfectly • use medial and final consonants.
The children: • use 20–100 words • are understood by others for one-quarter of their utterances • Describe events in two- to four-word utterances • respond to commands in everyday contexts • ask simple questions using ‘what’ to request information and begin to answer questions such as ‘what’ or ‘where’ • begin to refer to immediate past events • begin to transfer what they say in one situation to others
2–3
The children: • use single-word utterances spontaneously • imitate two- to three-word sentences that have nouns, few verbs, adjectives and a few pronouns • begin to refer to possession by adding ‘s’ to a noun (for example, ‘Mummy’s cake’) and to use the articles in some instances (‘the’ and ‘a’)
The children: The children: • learn to say the sounds • say telegraphic sentences that show /m/, /p/, /b/, / l/, /ʌ /, an awareness of nouns, verbs and /ɒ/, /t/ and /n/ in the adjectives, for example, ‘want milk’ initial position only and and ‘big doggie’ the vowels a and oo • ask telegraphic questions using ‘what’, • repeat sound patterns for example, ‘What dat?’ and begin to control volume.
Grammatical and discourse development
The children: • use individual words for names of items and actions in their everyday words both to label and to request • show a simple awareness of some everyday categories, such as food and toys • imitate how others say words • show a positive emotional response to the speech of others, listen to a short story and look at a picture or object as it is being described • describe events in one- or two-word utterances • say three or four single real words consistently in jargon-like sentences • combine voice and gesture meaningfully.
Phonological development
The emergence of the conventions
1–2
Age range
The emergence of meanings
Developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
65
66 The children: • can say two-thirds of adult speech sounds and fairly intelligible speech; substitute, omit and distort many sounds inconsistently • use final consonants more regularly • show speech melody and usually wellcontrolled voice.
The children: • say sentences of up to five words: ‘Mummy car stop’ • use their own grammatical rules; they both over-extend and under-extend particular rules • use personal pronouns (‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘his’) and demonstrative pronoun (‘that’), for example ‘That boy naughty’ • use phrases to designate events, for example, ‘What that thing go round?’ • use ways of saying negation, for example, say ‘no’, ‘can’t’ and ‘don’t’ • form plurals not only by adding ‘s’ to nouns; for example, they change vowels to go from ‘mouse’ to ‘mice’ • can say, recite and sing common nursery rhymes and rhyming narratives.
The children: • have average vocabulary of 896 words • use mainly egocentric speech • dramatise; they combine words and actions for their own pleasure • ask ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ questions about persons, things and actions in relation to everyday events • stay on topic in a conversation about a shared book or experience on several occasions • name common colours, shapes, sizes, locations and main body parts, and can say their full name and gender • say their toilet needs.
3–4
Grammatical and discourse development • begin to use some morphological endings, but over- and under-extend (for example, say ‘He goned’ or ‘He wented’).
Phonological development
The emergence of the conventions
2–3 • use simple language forms for various purposes, (cont) for example, to ask for objects/outcomes or help, to initiate and to refuse interactions, to describe/ comment on events or objects and to refer to others.
Age range
The emergence of meanings
Developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4–5
The children: • have average vocabulary of 1540 words, which includes the concepts for quantity, shapes and location • use slang • comprehend one-event sentences and some two-event sentences, particularly compound sentences in which the events are linked by ‘and’ and those in which they are linked by ‘because’ • understand isolated word meanings, but deal with whole sentences without analysing words • use ‘how’, ‘when’ and ‘why’ questions in response to what others say • talk about a topic and recount past events from a perceptual, realistic, first-person focus, but increasingly refer to objects, persons, events not present. They can think ahead and predict or anticipate what might happen in familiar everyday contexts and stories • express feelings, emotions and empathy for others • have monologues with other children but there is little co-operative thinking • tell tales in which the topic or theme is clear and may combine reality and fantasy • can answer questions about the names of siblings, the town and street where they live • can maintain a topic in a conversation over several exchanges • make requests in more complex ways and comprehend instructions that specify two events.
The children: • use speech that is 98 per cent intelligible • use all English vowels and following consonants: /m/, /n/ and /t/ in all positions, /k/, /p/, /b/, /f/, /w/ and /h/ in initial positions and /w/, /p/, /b/ and /f/ in medial positions • omit some medial consonants and syllables from words • may not say unstressed parts of words • often show interrupted flow or rhythm in sentences they say; they stumble or block on initial syllables • speak at a faster rate. The children: • say and comprehend some compound sentences of up to six to eight words long, for example, sentences with prepositional phrases (for example, ‘She put the doll under the bed’), sentences with verb infinitives (for example, ‘She wants to go’) and sentences with multiple adjectives (for example, ‘She holds the big blue hat’) • begin to experiment with alternative ways of saying a sentence idea, can modify or transform simple one-event sentences • say and understand sentences that contain nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, interjections and articles • recall verbatim sentences of up to ten words.
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
67
68
5–6
Age range
Phonological development
The children: • use the grammatical classes needed in a sentence but often select inappropriate words from the class, for example, ‘Daddy took me at the circus’ and ‘Them childs are happy’ • self-correct spontaneously the sentences they say • say a one-event sentence idea in multiple forms and transform simple one-event sentences • use conjunctions and embedded clauses. They comprehend two-event sentences that have: (1) the relative clause following the main clause, for example, ‘The girl spoke to the man who was here’; and (2) adverbial clauses, such as ‘He opened the door before he turned on the lights’ • recall verbatim sentences of up to 12 words.
Grammatical and discourse development
The emergence of the conventions
The children: The children: • have average vocabulary of 2072 words and can now • articulate in generally comprehend relative words for quantity (for example, intelligible ways, ‘bigger’ and ‘heavier’) and time (‘before’ and but phonemes /z/, ‘after’), the names of parts of their body, recognise/ /v/, /r/ and /s/ are select items that belong to a category (for example, not necessarily said select or name examples of ‘pets’ or ‘toys’ accurately in all • can define simple words positions in a word • comprehend some two-event sentences, particularly • can recognise and say complex sentences in which the events are linked by rhyme and alliteration ‘when’, ‘so’ and ‘who’, for example, ‘The boy who has in words; and can strip a blue jumper stood up’ away the first and last • use responsive talk and move from egocentric speech sounds in one-syllable to exchanging information words. • talk about the perceptual features of number, speed, time and space • relate experiences and mention specifics and details of personal experiences • retell the plots of stories and children’s plays (television and theatre). Their narratives show a clear plot with sequence and closure • can adjust their speaking style to take account of the audience (for example, their age, what they might know) • name and describe common items and objects in pictures
The emergence of meanings
Developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
6–7
The children: • have a vocabulary of up to 4000 words • say and comprehend synonyms and antonyms for word meanings, for example, girl–boy, black–white, big–little, sweet–sour, etc • anticipate closure in speech of others; they predict what others might say in a conversation or a story • ask for explanations, motives of action, etc. • understand differences between time intervals and seasons of the year • use terms to refer to space and time, for example, they can use left and right when referring to themselves • can talk about and comprehend causal relationships • participate in conversations, take turns, share, don’t monopolise, answer a phone effectively and communicate simple messages
5–6 • make and comprehend inferential requests, for (cont) example, hear ‘It’s dark in here’ and know they need to put on the light • use some imaginative thinking, but are mainly realistic with little abstraction • categorise concrete events by saying how the events or objects are similar and/or different • can answer personal questions about their birthday, home phone number, parents’ names, etc. The children: • use the sounds /l-/, /-l/, /-l-/; /-t-/; /-0-/; /-r/; /j-/ • show adult melody and experiment with rhythmic patterns • use facial expressions that accompany rhythm changes in their speech.
The children: • use simple relative pronouns such as ‘who’ and ‘what’ accurately, for example, they are less likely to say ‘The boy what ate the apple was sitting there’ • say sentences that include all grammatical categories, but select particular words incorrectly, for example, they may not distinguish between mass nouns (milk, water, etc.), and count nouns (dolls, toys, etc.), for example, ‘I want much water’ • show subject–verb agreement, for example, they are less likely to say ‘The dogs was swimming’
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
69
70 The children: • use all speech sounds, including consonant blends /-z-/; /-st/; /lz/; /-tr/ and /-kt/
The children: • use sentences of mean length 7.2 words • use most sentence forms; for example, they comprehend sentences with embedded relative clauses, ‘The girl who hit the boy went home’
7–8
The children: • comprehend 6000–8000 words and use 2600 words • are less likely to use egocentric speech • use and comprehend complex and compound sentences • follow fairly complex directions with little repetition • show communication ability; they share ideas and carry on adult-like conversation • understand causal or logical relationships in sentences and short discourse
Grammatical and discourse development • use the easier conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘before’ to link two events when real-world support is not available, for example, ‘She knocked on the door while he was playing with his train’ rather than ‘She knocked on the door and he played with his train’ • know that the order in which concepts or events are mentioned in a sentence does not necessarily match the order of action, for example, in ‘The boy was hit by the girl’, the agent of the action was not the noun that was mentioned first • begin to show an awareness of exceptions to some grammatical rules.
Phonological development
The emergence of the conventions
6–7 • are more skilled in adjusting their speaking style to (cont) take account of the audience (for example, adjust how they speak to suit the audience and context: use appropriate words to request an item from a teacher versus a friend or a parent) • describe similarities and differences between concepts and define words.
Age range
The emergence of meanings
Developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
8–9
The children: • understand generalisations, causality and consequence in relation to real-life contexts • comprehend word meanings in functional ways • comprehend the functional meanings of words more broadly and understand that words can be defined by the functions linked with them; for example, ‘bite’ means an action that isn’t necessarily done with teeth • understand and use simple figurative language that applies more broadly; for example, ‘He let the cat out of the bag’.
7–8 • relate involved accounts of events, many that (cont) occurred in the past; for example, sub-plots in a narrative • link some word meanings in speech in functional ways; for example, understand how cars and boats are similar • understand and use simple figurative language that applies to them, their peers and their world; for example, ‘Get a wriggle on’ or ‘Pull your socks up’.
The children: • understand and use more complex grammatical forms with relative and subordinate clauses • understand the link between two or more sentences in connected prose and use sentence connectors such as ‘however’. • use a range of common grammatical features to connect ideas, such as the past-tense agreement to indicate the intended relationship between two events.
• appropriate control of • begin to use appropriate terms to rate, pitch and volume, connect sentences in a paragraph. They show noun–pronoun and subject– use subtle rhythms and intonational contours verb agreement across two successive in speech melody. sentences; for example, they are less likely to say ‘The dogs are in the water. It swims near the boat’ • use temporal and spatial connectives, such as ‘while’, ‘before’ and ‘when’, and verb–tense agreement to link two events when access to real-world corroboration is not available; for example, ‘She knocked on the door while he was playing with his train’.
A nalysi ng how language i s use d to a c h ie v e pa rt icu l a r p urp o s e s
71
72
9–10
Age range
The children: • understand logical inclusivity in language and can identify a sentence that is more general/specific than another • comprehend word meanings in abstract ways • understand how some words refer to concepts that are more general or more specific than others; that word meanings can be linked by inclusive relationships; for example, apples and oranges are included in fruits and Jonathans are included in apples • understand generalisations in sentences when they refer to concepts in everyday contexts • comprehend more complex idioms such as ‘I’ll wait until the cows come home’.
The emergence of meanings Phonological development
The children: • show more complex grammatical agreement both within and between sentences, including (1) verb–tense agreement and subject–verb agreement; (2) noun–pronoun agreement, for example, they are less likely to misuse ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘whom’ (for example, ‘The girl spoke to the man whom she knew’ versus ‘The girl spoke to the man who was here’); ‘that’ for ‘what’ (they are less likely to say ‘The dog what did it has gone’) and ‘that’ for ‘which’. • comprehend and use more complex relative clauses adverbs, for example, sentences in which relative clause is embedded within the main sentence; for example, ‘The girl who hit the boy went home’, ‘The girl whom the boy hit went home’ and ‘The girl the boy hit went home’. • comprehend the differences between a command, a request and a promise. They can distinguish between ‘I told him to leave’, ‘I asked him to leave’ and ‘I promised him to leave’. They can also distinguish between ‘ask’ and ‘tell’, and between ‘I may’, ‘I will’ and ‘I can’.
Grammatical and discourse development
The emergence of the conventions
Developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
AL
C h a p t er 6
Analysing students’ language learning capacity
The language a person uses at any time is influenced by their capacity to learn it. It is possible that some students are not as well developed in this capacity. To help them to learn language, we need to answer the question: what do they need to know in order to learn language? In our ICPALER model, this is the AL aspect (ability to learn). All of the other aspects depend on how well the person can learn. Expressive
Receptive
The ideas The conventions The purpose Ability to learn
6.1 What learning abilities did the students in the conversation have? The conversation in Chapter 2 between the four-year-olds provides a starting point. Each of them had been able to learn language. How did they need to think, in order to achieve this?
6.1.1 Forming and using symbols The students could think about items and events that weren’t present. They talked about dogs that were not with them at the time. In other words, they used symbols for both items and events. They could symbolise actions, such as, ‘It just shaked’. Had the students been unable to symbolise, they would not have been able to talk about the ideas when they weren’t present. They used sound patterns to symbolise
73
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
the ideas. The spoken word ‘doggie’ doesn’t sound like the animal it represents. They symbolised actions such as ‘bited’ and ‘falled’. Young children learn to use symbols in the following order: 1 2 3 4
They first symbolise salient items in their lives, such as the faces of their parents. They symbolise actions and concrete items. They use spoken words to symbolise individual items and groups of items. They learn to use pictorial symbols, such as the ‘golden arches’. When they see a visual symbol or hear a spoken symbol, they can recall what it means. 5 They learn the alphanumeric symbols used in writing and reading, the letter clusters and numerals.
6.1.2 A symbol stands for a category or a concept The students understood that ‘doggie’ referred to more than one particular item. They believed it applied to a category of items, that is, as a mental category or an idea. For them a ‘doggie’ had particular features: it barked, bit, was a pet, etc. They understood ‘doggie’ as being different from ‘cat’ or ‘chair’. As children develop, they first think that all of the items in a mental category need to look, sound or feel the same, that is, share particular perceptual features. This can be a misleading criterion of putting things into categories. Not all things that are an example of ‘five’ or ‘aunt’ look the same. These categories are often called percepts. Later, they learn to think about the categories in logical ways. These mental categories are called concepts. The concepts associated with ‘five’ or ‘aunt’ are not based on how things look. Concepts are a key aspect of language learning. For the word ‘doggie’, children learn to store in their memory what it symbolises or means and how it is said. Each spoken word is linked with its meaning. They also learn how each word is used in language. They wouldn’t say, ‘Peter will doggie the car’, because they know that ‘doggie’ is the name of an item, not a verb. They learn that some words are the names of objects, some name actions and some name attributes or properties such as ‘smallness’ or ‘redness’. The meaning of a word, how it is said and how it is used in language are linked in the child’s memory and are collectively referred to as the child’s concept of a word. Now the children know how to join words in sentences in novel ways. They have begun to form a word bank from which they can select words to form sentences and to communicate. As well as teaching students new vocabulary directly, you may need to teach some students how to learn new vocabulary for themselves. They need to learn how to say and remember new sound patterns and to work out what they might mean. In teaching, we call these vocabulary learning actions.
74
Analysi ng stud e nt s ’ l a n g ua ge l e a r n in g c apa cit y
6.1.3 Linking symbols in sequence or order The students in the conversation arranged word meanings in order to express their intentions in comprehensible sentences. They also used the word order to work out the intended meanings of sentences they heard. Being able to arrange ideas in order and to comprehend by using the word order are key abilities in learning language. Without it, children may have greater difficulty learning to comprehend and say sentence meanings, and to use various grammatical conventions. Children learn gradually how to do this. They first learn to recognise two items in order, then three and finally more. They show this in how they first learn to sequence two items (for example, big – little, large – small and light – heavy), then three items and then more. You may need to teach some students how to link two or more symbols in order. To learn the days of the week or months of the year or to learn to wash your hands before you eat, for example, students need to learn that sequence is important, how to repeat particular names in order, or do particular actions in order, and then apply this to types of names or actions. You wash your hands, for example, before you eat, regardless of the sink where you wash your hands or what you will eat. Learning to use self-talk to retain the symbols in order is important here. In teaching, we call these sequence learning actions.
6.1.4 Linking the ideas in meaningful relationships The students in the conversation linked single ideas into sentences ideas. They understood sentences that linked two or more ideas and linked them with the topic. They understood the links between ideas. One relationship they seemed to understand in a limited way was cause and effect. Tom understood the connection between having a ball and biting it. Kath understood the link between falling into a pool and being dried. Will understood the link between falling into a pool and drowning. As children develop, they learn to link ideas in more complex ways: 1 First, they link ideas through actions into an event. 2 Later, they learn how to link symbols. When they hear the event, ‘The cat drank the milk’, they can imagine the event. These are the simple sentence meanings mentioned in 3.4.4. 3 Later still, they understand two linked events, for example, ‘Before the cat drank the milk, it played with the toy’. These were some of the complex sentence meanings mentioned in 3.4.4. 4 Much later, they understand general links (for example, ‘All puppies are dogs’) and conditional links (for example, ‘If the car runs out of petrol, it will stop’).
75
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
You may need to teach some students how to form new sentence meanings for themselves. While listening to a story or watching an event, the students can tell themselves what happened, or make a picture of it in their minds. They can then say what they saw and/or heard in sentences or longer discourse. In teaching, we refer to these ways of thinking as sentence learning actions and discourse learning actions.
6.1.5 Transferring what they know Individuals transfer their knowledge of language and how it is used to other situations. Kath transferred what she had heard about Tom’s dog by linking with her dog. Will linked Tom’s dog with his dog having puppies. This capacity to transfer what they know is an important capacity for young children. Teachers need to understand how young students do it. It would be inappropriate, for example, for Miss Brown to tell Will to ‘stay on the subject’ (which would be about Tom’s dog). The experiential links these young students are showing in their language illustrate the developmental stage of their capacity to link and to transfer.
6.1.6 Building a bank of language experiences The language learner needs to experience language in a range of contexts and to build a bank of language experiences in memory. They can then use these experiences and extract a knowledge of language that they transfer and use in novel contexts. This process is shown in the following figure. Earlier language experiences
analyse Take apart and put together in novel ways
knowledge of language • ideas • conventions • purposes
Trial, transfer and apply
Language experiences in novel contexts
The quality and the range of a child’s language experiences can influence what they learn about language. Children’s earlier language experiences can differ. Consider two three-year-olds, Lachlan and Ava, who see a ferret and say, ‘Look, Mummy, doggie’. Look at how the two mothers responded in the figure below.
Look, Mummy, doggie.
Lachlan
76
No, it’s a ferret.
Lachlan’s mother
It’s a ferret. It looks like a dog. But see how it has pointy Look, ears. Its body is different. See Mummy, how it is long and thin. It’s a doggie. ferret. It doesn’t bark. What’s it called? Again? Ava
Ava’s mother
Analysi ng stud e nt s ’ l a n g ua ge l e a r n in g c apa cit y
Ava received feedback that tuned her in to looking at the features of the object she was naming. With enough of these types of experiences, her bank of language experiences will be of a higher quality than those of Lachlan. Being aware of some of the differences in students’ earlier language experiences can help you understand why students know what they know about language. Children: 1 are exposed to different versions of spoken language. Some infants hear a version of language that is slightly ahead of where their language is. Others hear versions of adult language, sometimes shortened or abbreviated. 2 differ in the quality of the positive feedback they receive when they speak and listen. This feedback affects how they value language as a way of communicating, how prepared they are to experiment with it and their selfconfidence in using it. 3 differ in the modelling and the encouragement they get to imitate oral language. Some learn to imitate language selectively and some learn to imitate how to produce it. 4 differ in the extent to which language is paired with related motor activities in their experiences. Some infants have a lot of experience pairing what they say with actions they do. They bang a drum while saying, ‘Bang, bang’, and repeat, ‘Jump, jump’, while jumping. This provides a link between verbal and motor activity. Each type of language experience teaches the child particular aspects of language learning. If students have not had enough of any of these types, they are more likely to have later language-learning difficulties. You may need to address this in your teaching. Infants store in their memories what they have heard and link this with what was going on at the time, including the actions they were doing. These experiences contribute to their capacity to learn language.
6.1.7 A belief that they can use language successfully: How willing are the students to use language? The speakers in the conversation in Chapter 2 were prepared to communicate and even to take control of the conversation. They seemed confident about their ability to communicate. They seemed to believe that they could make sense or be successful when they talked. Children need to believe that they can use language successfully. This confidence has a significant influence on how they use it. A positive belief means they are willing or prepared to engage in oral communication and to experiment with it. Children who believe that they are less likely to use language successfully are less willing to communicate orally. They store these beliefs in their earlier experiences.
77
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
An individual’s dispositions or attitudes to language use and to themselves as language learners are critical for later language learning. Without the intrinsic motivation to learn, progress will be slower. It is important that students see that they can learn language successfully and that using language works for them. A key factor in building a positive self-efficacy and an associated self-confidence is the quality of the feedback that an individual receives. For children learning language, the feedback on occasions needs to help the child see that they can communicate meaningfully. It also needs to help them see what they have in place in terms of meaningful communication and indicate what they can do next to improve this. It is often needed to model the next step in learning. An unfortunately too frequent observation is that some students are prepared to speak only in a restricted range of contexts. They may even, in the extreme, present as selective mutes in the classroom context. This sometimes arises because of earlier experiences that have led to the students developing a negative self-efficacy as language users. Selective mutism is often linked with high levels of anxiety; the child may want to speak, but their anxiety stops them from making any voice. In other words, it is involuntary, in that the child can’t activate the mechanism for speaking. Without effective language expression, a preparedness to experiment and to try out new ideas, and a knowledge of how to use feedback for what they say, the future language development of students whose self-efficacy for language is low will be limited. It is critical that this is targeted in teaching.
6.1.8 Being able to perceive oral language To learn language, children need to detect the sound patterns that make it, to sort them out from other noises that occur at the same time, to retain them and to integrate them. Auditory perceptual abilities include being able to: 1 hear adequately the range of sounds that make up speech (that is, acuity). Children who detect only some of the sounds that make up words will form incorrect versions of them and will have greater difficulty recognising regularities in speech patterns. Those who have intermittent middle-ear hearing loss, for example, may hear sound sequences differently on different occasions. This can disturb significantly their experiences of oral language. 2 attend to a spoken message when there are competing sounds, for example, to attend to what the teacher is saying when students are rustling papers in the background, or there are footsteps in passage (that is, auditory figureground differentiation). 3 direct and maintain attention to a particular spoken message and to listen to it selectively when other people are also speaking (auditory selective attention). 4 make or form a complete interpretation of a message either when you only hear part of it or when you hear the message in parts (auditory gestalt or closure).
78
Analysi ng stud e nt s ’ l a n g ua ge l e a r n in g c apa cit y
In a classroom, part of a spoken message may be interrupted by other noise, so the student only hears part of it. 5 retain and say immediately the information they heard (short-term auditory memory). All of these auditory perceptual abilities are required for successful learning in most classrooms.
6.1.9 How do you need to think to learn language? To learn language, an individual needs to be able to think in the following ways: Perceive oral language Link ideas, for example, cause–effect
Use symbolism Conceptualise and categorise Sequence and order
Learn and store language experiences
Transfer what they know
The more young children use these ways of learning, the more efficiently they can use them to learn language. Without them, children are less able to learn to communicate effectively.
6.2 Later developments in the ability to learn language The ability to learn language develops further when young children begin to use what they know about language to direct their future learning and thinking. We noted in Chapter 2 that our oral language helps us to think about our world and affects how we interact with it. It provides us with a vehicle for thinking and learning. It is a key part of our language learning motor.
6.2.1 Learning self-talk Children show a change in how they process verbal information, usually when they are about four or five years old. When they engage in an activity—for example, playing with toys—they talk to themselves about it. They say what they are doing and what they will do. Their goal is not primarily to communicate socially with another person. Instead, they are thinking aloud or they are talking to themselves about the event and what they are doing or feeling. It is called egocentric speech. After a period of time, children use egocentric speech less. At the same time, they show other changes in their thinking. They become more reflective and link
79
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
what they know with the context in which they find themselves. They learn to go backwards and forwards in time and can link an event they are in now with earlier events and then predict a future consequence. They can do these things now, it is proposed (Vygotsky 1989), because they have acquired the capacity for inner speech, a key aspect of their thinking. The egocentric speech has been internalised as inner language and the children are now using it silently. They use their inner language to tell themselves how to think and what to do in particular situations. They can now converse with themselves about a problem or an issue without talking aloud. They can link ideas better in their minds by using language and can retain ideas more easily by talking about them in various ways. They can also tell themselves about ideas that are novel or unfamiliar, say them over to themselves and store them in their memory. Generally, they are learning to monitor, manage and direct their learning activity and to respond in ways that are context appropriate (Ramscar & Gitcho 2007). They use this self-talk to focus their attention and their thinking resources at any time. This activity is a key aspect of their thinking. This capacity for self-talk develops from the child’s egocentric speech. The egocentric speech is seen as a transition between the child first learning to use language to communicate socially and then to use it privately as inner speech, a key aspect of their thinking.
6.2.2 Learning to manage your language learning activity The development of self-talk equips young children with thinking capacities that are critical for subsequent language learning and use. We noted above how it enables them to cross time barriers, to think into the future and to plan. More generally, they use it to guide their thinking and learning activity. Part of their self-talk is referred to as their metacognitive knowledge or selfmanagement strategies. These help children to become independent learners in a range of ways: 1 When children are beginning to listen to a story about an unfamiliar topic, they can tell themselves to plan how they will listen. They can suggest ideas the story might say, words it might use and questions it might answer. These all help the children to get what they know ready for speaking and listening. They can also plan how they will listen and the actions they might use as they listen. This activity helps them retain and learn from what they hear. 2 As they listen to the story, they can tell themselves to think about the ideas they are learning in multiple ways. They can tell themselves to make a mental videotape of what they hear, to say what they heard in their own
80
Analysi ng stud e nt s ’ l a n g ua ge l e a r n in g c apa cit y
words, to pick out the main ideas or to say what might happen next. These actions help them retain the ideas they heard and to understand them in multiple ways. 3 At the end of listening to a text, they can tell themselves to review what they have heard, to say the main ideas in different ways, to link them with what they already knew and to say what they know now that they didn’t know earlier. These actions help children store the new ideas in their long-term memories and to recall them better on later occasions. The quality of a child’s self-talk is determined by the language ideas and forms they use in their social interactions. A child whose social language is less welldeveloped is more likely to learn immature self-talk. This in turn will limit their capacity to think in order to learn and to use language further. A key issue, then, is: can students be taught to improve the quality of their self-talk? Teaching students to use metacognitive strategies when they are listening improves their understanding of the listening process, their confidence as listeners and their awareness of how to act strategically when they encounter comprehension difficulties (Desautel 2009; Goh & Taib 2006). Less able listeners are assisted more by the teaching. Similar outcomes for reading comprehension have been observed when Year 1 students are taught explicitly to use metacognitive strategies that help them to make text connections, predict and sequence oral language knowledge learnt while reading (Eilers & Pinkley 2006). In summary, children learn gradually to teach themselves about language. To do this, they need to learn how to think about and to retain the language information. Their metacognitive knowledge, their beliefs about whether they can learn and use new language effectively, and their ability to transfer and apply their knowledge are important elements. This constitutes their power house or motor for subsequent oral language learning. Children differ in how well they can do this. They differ in how well they can act to build new linguistic knowledge and how well they can link it with what they already know. It will be necessary to teach many students to improve their ability to learn language in these ways.
6.2.3 How well do your students use self-talk? You can observe how well students in your class use self-talk in a range of ways: 1 You can observe whether they tend to use egocentric speech when they play or do a task. Some students take a lot longer to internalise the language they use socially. These are often the students a teacher may ask to work quietly. 2 Before they begin a task—for example, listening to a story—you can ask them to say what they think the story will tell them and what they will do as they
81
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
listen to it. This will help you see how well the students can plan into the future and link new information with what they already know. 3 You can ask them to think aloud as they work through a task, that is, say what they are looking at and thinking about as they complete a task. 4 As they listen to a story, you can ask them to say what they have just heard in their own words.
6.2.4 Self-efficacy as a language learner and user It is not sufficient that students know how to learn language. We noted earlier the importance of a young language learner linking positive rather than negative emotion with language use. When children reach the capacity to reflect on and evaluate how they use language, they further develop their beliefs about whether they can use language successfully. A child’s identity as a language user, their self-confidence and their self-efficacy is maintained by the self-talk they use. Children who tell themselves, ‘I can’t tell other people how I feel’, or, ‘I’m not good at saying what I think’, are unlikely to improve their ability to learn language. To learn to use language independently, they also need to believe that they can learn it and feel safe about taking risks with the ideas they say. When children feel unsafe talking about their thoughts or feelings, or believe that they will be valued less for the ideas they say, their self-efficacy is likely to be lower. Negative self-talk about language learning capacity needs to be replaced by more positive self-talk. This is more likely when the feedback that a child receives tells them that they can make sense when they communicate and that using language works for them. Students need to learn this in specific classroom contexts. I recently asked a student in a Year 8 class to say the meaning of ‘scuffling’. She replied, ‘I don’t know’. I asked, ‘Have you got a picture in your mind of what people are doing when they are scuffling?’ She answered, ‘They are pushing and shoving each other and tripping over’. I discussed with the class the importance of giving yourself time to ‘say your mind pictures in sentences’. At the end of the lesson I asked the class to review what they had learnt about how to learn better. One of the things that most of the students wrote down was to say my mental pictures in sentences.
6.3 Cultural differences in teaching the ability to learn language Cultures differ in how they teach their children to learn language. There is not the space in this book to examine these differences in depth. Instead, some of the main ways in which they differ are noted so that teachers can be aware of these and look for evidence of them in their teaching. They include:
82
Analysi ng stud e nt s ’ l a n g ua ge l e a r n in g c apa cit y
1 the opportunities they provide for language learning 2 the aspects of language they value and prioritise, what they see as valuable language outcomes, what they encourage the students to talk about and what is taboo 3 the contexts in which they encourage language use 4 the ways in which they scaffold the learning—some cultures may encourage students to be analytic about language from a young age, while others may encourage imitation 5 how they provide feedback for the language students use. These areas of variation affect the implicit beliefs children have about how to learn language and how they and others are expected to behave in language transactions. They shape how a child will approach a language learning activity in a deep way. Teachers of multicultural classes need to be aware of this multiplicity when implementing language teaching programs. It is unlikely that students will be able to talk about these differences. Teachers need to be aware of the assumptions they are making in their teaching about how students learn language and be prepared to examine options when teaching students from different cultures.
6.4 The need to integrate and automatise the aspects of language Each aspect of the ICPALER model is relatively complex. For this reason we have unpacked each aspect separately. This is not the way that the aspects are used in effective communication. From a young age, each communicator uses the aspects in a synthesised, integrated way when they speak and listen. They gradually learn to do this automatically. This capacity to integrate covers all aspects of the ICPALER model. The aspects do not operate in isolation but are intricately linked and related. To illustrate this, let us review the location of vocabulary in the ICPALER model. Vocabulary is located in the Ideas aspect. While this is its main role, vocabulary is in all parts of the ICPALER model. Word meanings can be influenced by the ways in which they are combined in sentences and longer discourse using grammatical and discourse conventions. The purposes of language are also influenced by vocabulary. How well we adjust language to take account of the context and audience, or use language to achieve different goals, will be influenced by our vocabulary and our ability to select the most appropriate words. How well we understand and use idioms and metaphors will also depend on our vocabulary. As well, the aspects of the ICPALER model are linked with emotions that are based on a person’s earlier language experiences. Children who have had fewer
83
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
positive experiences or who don’t think they can use language successfully will link more negative emotions with the aspects of language. The integration of the various aspects occurs in the children’s thinking spaces or short-term working memory. The more efficiently a child can use this, the more a child can bring together the various aspects and integrate them. A child’s ability to learn language provides this integration for the other aspects of the ICPALER model. Some children will have difficulty integrating some aspects into their language use. For example, they may attempt to communicate what are for them complex ideas but use the conventions in an immature way. Others, in their haste to communicate complex ideas, may achieve their purpose in immature ways. It is easier to integrate aspects of knowledge when you can use each aspect relatively automatically. Children whose language use suggests they have not automatised aspects can be assisted by continuing to practise those aspects simultaneously with the aspects they are doing more effectively. From a teaching perspective, some students will need time and practice in order to automatise what they know about oral language.
6.5 The need to contextualise In order to automatise their oral language, children need to use it in a range of contexts and use the feedback they receive from others. Part of the transfer process involves being able to see how to fit their purpose or reason for communicating into the particular context. Some children may have difficulty doing this. They may find it hard to communicate in unfamiliar situations or be reluctant to communicate. They may not feel confident of their oral language in the situation or they may not see how what they know fits in. They may need teaching that helps them in both areas.
84
ER
C h a p t er 7
Screening procedures to identify oral language knowledge in the classroom
In this chapter we examine how you can screen your students’ oral language using the ICPALER model. Each of the I, C, P and AL aspects involves several components. To do the screening, you need to use tasks that enable you to see each component in the student’s activity. The focus is not on assessing students’ oral language knowledge to work out their age or year norms. There are several available texts that can give you this information (for example, Newcomer & Hammill 2008; Reynell & Gruber 1990; Semel, Wiig & Secord 2006). Rather, the focus is on screening what students know at any time to assist teachers to put together an oral language profile of the students and to plan the next step in teaching. The screening looks at how well students use particular aspects of the ICPALER model in regular classroom contexts. It helps teachers learn more about how their students use language in authentic, real-life situations. It will help teachers to develop a lens for seeing and hearing language use, the oral language knowledge and skills students have, and the problems of students who have language difficulties. From this, teachers can plan effective teaching programs for the group as a whole and intervention programs for those who are having difficulty.
7.1 Screening for pronunciation difficulties One of the first things you will notice about students’ oral language is whether they have pronunciation difficulties, which will make their speech difficult to understand. This can be due to either a speech disorder or to language disorder. A speech disorder relates to the E aspect, the expression of language. Some students may show a broad-based expressive difficulty with adequate language comprehension. Their speech is difficult for others to comprehend. It may be dysfluent, effortful and have defective sound patterns. It may comprise short
85
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
unintelligible utterances and the child may have difficulty imitating sound sequences. Sentences may be sequenced incorrectly. Speech disorders occur because some children have difficulty performing the actions needed to produce speech. For example, they may have difficulty moving their mouth cavities, their tongues or their lips. This difficulty can be due to several causes: • Children may have difficulty co-ordinating the muscles needed for speech. Sometimes this is caused by poor muscle tone. Children may have motor difficulties in other areas as well. • Children may have impairments to the parts of the body used to produce speech. They may be tongue tied, have dental abnormalities, a cleft palate or have inappropriate movement of the soft palate so that it doesn’t close off adequately the nasal cavity from the mouth during speech. • Children may have learned misarticulations. They haven’t learnt to say some sounds accurately, even though they don’t have any of the above causes. Children with articulation problems consistently mispronounce particular sounds and sound sequences. A frequent speech difficulty is stuttering, where children repeat words, syllables or sounds, prolong sounds or stop voicing sounds by blocking the air flow. It is often accompanied by severe negative emotional reactions such as anxiety, frustration and embarrassment. These children require access to speech pathology guidance and management. The Australian Stuttering Research Centre’s website is a useful resource <www.fhs.usyd.edu.au/asrc>.
7.1.1 Pronunciation difficulties due to a phonological impairment Some children mispronounce some sounds when they are followed by certain other sounds. Their phonological and phonemic knowledge, described in 4.2.5, is restricted in particular ways. Their articulation patterns can either be typical of younger children or may show unusual sound patterns. They may show the misarticulations either consistently or inconsistently. These are phonological impairments and can be due to: • the slower development of particular sound patterns; some children learn particular sounds more slowly than peers • the speech patterns a child has heard; children learn sound patterns through their interactions with others, in their family and school environments • specific difficulties learning and storing knowledge about how words are said; some children may have auditory or hearing difficulties that affect how accurately they hear the sound patterns. They may also have difficulty actually storing the sound patterns in their memory and thinking about them in the required ways. A phonological impairment is more difficult to analyse than a speech disorder because the child says particular sounds accurately in some contexts but not in others.
86
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
7.1.2 When should you be concerned about a student’s word pronunciation? You may be concerned when a student mispronounces words you would expect them to know. Your first step is to describe as precisely as you can the aspects of the student’s speech that concern you. You can record samples of their speech and use section 4.2 Phonological conventions to decide the sound patterns the student can articulate and those that cause difficulty. The table in the section 5.4 How aspects of oral language develop, Developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language (DSIPC) , will help you to decide whether a student’s speech pattern is typical for the student.
7.2 Observing students’ oral language in classroom activities Once you have dealt with pronunciation difficulties, you can screen students’ use of oral language to note the I, C, P and AL aspects they have in place. This will help you see how students generally use the aspects in the classroom and which students are having difficulty.
7.2.1 How do your students use each aspect of the ICPALER model? You can begin by observing how the students handle each aspect of the ICPALER model in a range of contexts or activities. You can do this as part of your regular teaching. At the Prep to Year 2 year level, this may include observing their use of language while listening to stories, doing gross-motor and perceptual-motor activities, completing spatial activities and puzzles, doing art, talking to the group in show-and-tell activities and in spontaneous conversations. To do this, plan one or more tasks for each aspect of the ICPALER model in each context. Examples of these tasks are shown in Observing oral language behaviours (OOLB): Examples (pp. 89–95). The main aspects of the ICPALER model are in the left-hand column. Possible types of tasks for each context are shown in the remaining columns. You can use these examples to design particular tasks for your students. These will be your test items. They will usually be the types of things you assume most of your students can do. You can get pointers for what to look for in Chapters 3 to 6. You may want to know whether the language behaviours you are assessing are relevant to the age range of your students and where your cohort is situated on the language development continuum. You can use the DSIPC table (pp. 65–72) in four ways: 1 To see where the tasks that you design and the language behaviours you plan to assess sit on the continuum. You can see the lowest age range of typically developing students likely to be able to complete the task.
87
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
2 To see where your students are located in the developmental sequence, once you have collected the observation data for your group. 3 To see the location of individual students who have difficulty with some of the tasks. You can use the errors they made to locate their level of language development. 4 To see the types of language knowledge and skills your students could learn next. You can use the OOLB group checklist (pp. 94–95) to record the performance of each student in your class on each aspect in a context. Use a checklist for each context and write the tasks for each aspect in the Tasks column. Write the names of the students across the top row. Record each student’s response to each task as a ✔ or ✗. The OOLB group checklist includes three additional criteria to those in the OOLB examples table (pp. 89–93). These relate to the student’s overall willingness and preparedness to use oral language, the overall fluency with which the student does this and whether the student shows co-occurring difficulties. As well: 1 where students use language incorrectly, it is useful to record exactly what they say. 2 record where students use language less efficiently; for example, take a long time to say a word or sentence or frequently have difficulty recalling the appropriate words. You will need to record these observations separately. In any one session in one context, you may have time to observe the responses of only five or six students. If you are recording students’ responses in a context for two or more sessions, you may need to change some of the specific tasks. In the big book listening comprehension context, for example, your tasks for the first session may refer to the first six pages, when you observe how well particular students name items and say in sentences what pictures on these pages show. In the second session you may observe how well other students name items and say in sentences what pictures on the next six pages show. Before each session, decide which students you will monitor in each context. If you covered three contexts in a day, it may be advisable to monitor different students in each context. It is advisable to monitor each student’s language use in more than one context. This will allow you to observe whether a student shows difficulties in a range of contexts.
88
names items in the pictures in the story says accurately the names of items in the story comprehends and/or acts out one or two events described in the story says a sentence that links two or more items in the story
names parts of the body and the actions they do
says accurately the names of parts of the body and actions
comprehends and/or acts out oneevent and two-event instructions
describes how to do actions and gives instructions
describes one or more actions in a particular form, for example, ‘After you … ’
uses words appropriately (IE: words)
says words accurately (CE: words)
understands sentences (IR: sentences, reception)
repeats sentences heard (IE: sentences)
says sentences with a particular grammar (CE: sentences)
says one or more actions in art activities using a particular grammatical form
says a sentence about events in the art activities
comprehends and/or acts out instructions and descriptions of one or two events in art activities
says accurately the names of items in the art activities
names and describes actions, items and attributes in art activities
recognises and comprehends the names of items and actions used in art activities
The student:
Art activities
The symbols used refer to the aspect of language (ideas (I), conventions (C), purposes (P) or ability to learn (AL)) and whether the behaviour involves speaking (that is, expression (E)) or listening (that is, reception (R)). Thus, IR refers to listening to ideas and CE refers to using conventions in speech.
says one or more events in the text in sentences using a particular grammatical form
recognises and comprehends the names of items and actions in the pictures in the story
recognises and comprehends the names of parts of the body and the actions they do
comprehends vocabulary (IR: words)
The student:
The student:
Context Listening to story presented as a big book
How well the student:
Gross motor
Observing oral language behaviours (OOLB) examples
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
89
90 comprehends and recalls the events that have happened on a page just heard says in sentences the events that have happened on a page just heard shows effective social communication skills during listening and reading activities, can say why characters in a story take particular actions, how they might feel
listens to, comprehends and acts out two or more instructions
gives a sequence of instructions about physical activities to others
shows effective social communication skills in physical activities and games
can attend to spoken information, can sequence spoken ideas in physical activities, can learn and recall new ideas in language forms.
listens, understands and retains what was heard (IR: discourse)
says a message longer than one sentence (IE: discourse)
uses language effectively in social contexts to communicate (PE & R: all components)
learns new language and uses language to learn (AL: all components)
recalls the names of unfamiliar items mentioned earlier in the story, recalls what happened on earlier pages.
shows comprehension of sentences that have a particular grammatical form
comprehends one or more actions said in a particular sentence form, for example, ‘After you … ’
comprehends sentences with a particular grammar (CE: sentences)
The student:
The student:
How well the student:
Gross motor
Context Listening to story presented as a big book
Observing oral language behaviours (OOLB) examples (continued)
recalls and comprehends the names of items used in art activities.
uses language effectively in social interactions during art activities, requests materials effectively from peers, discusses art outcomes of peers
describes in sentences the events that have happened during art activities
comprehends and recalls a sequence of events that happened during art activities
comprehends events in art that are said in a particular sentence form, for example, ‘After you … ’
The student:
Art activities
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Recalls and uses the names of items, actions and adjectives in spatial activities and puzzles
recalls the names of items and actions mentioned in the events described
says accurately the names of items in the events
comprehends / acts out one or two events described in the sentence
says a sentence that links two or more items in an event
uses words appropriately (IE: words)
says words accurately (CE: words)
understands sentences (IR: sentences, reception)
repeats sentences heard (IE: sentences)
says a sentence that links two or more events in spatial activities and puzzle contexts
comprehends and/or acts out one or two events in spatial activities and puzzle contexts
says accurately the names of items, actions and adjectives in spatial activities and puzzles
recognises and comprehends the names of items, actions and adjectives in spatial activities and puzzles, for example, comprehends terms such as ‘beside’ and ‘longer’
comprehends the names of items and actions mentioned in the events described
comprehends vocabulary (IR: words)
The student:
The student:
Spatial activities and puzzles
How well the student:
Morning talk
Context
uses sentences effectively to communicate intentions in conversations with peers
comprehends and/or acts out one or two events mentioned in conversations with peers
says accurately the words used in conversations with peers
recalls and uses appropriate words in conversations with peers
recognises and comprehends the words used in conversations with peers
The student:
Incidental conversations
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
91
92 describes one or more actions in a particular form, for example, ‘After you …’ comprehends one or more actions said in a particular sentence form, for example, ‘After you …’ listens to, comprehends and acts out two or more instructions in spatial activities and puzzle contexts gives a sequence of instructions about events in spatial activities and puzzle contexts
comprehends sentences that have particular grammatical forms during morning talk activities
comprehends and recalls the events mentioned in morning talk
participates in morning talk activities by comprehending and using a sequence of sentences
comprehends sentences with a particular grammar (CE: sentences)
listens, understands and retains what was heard (IR: discourse)
says a message longer than one sentence (IE: discourse)
The student:
Spatial activities and puzzles
uses sentences during morning talk that have particular grammatical forms
The student:
Morning talk
says sentences with a particular grammar (CE: sentences)
How well the student:
Context
Observing oral language behaviours (OOLB) examples (continued)
contributes effectively to and participates in peer conversations
listens to and comprehends peer conversations
comprehends particular grammatical forms spoken by peers in conversations
uses particular grammatical forms effectively in conversations
The student:
Incidental conversations
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
effective social communication skills in morning talk activities, for example, asks for clarification of ideas mentioned by others, asks questions, takes on board what peers might know about an event
learns and uses new vocabulary and language forms mentioned in morning talk.
learns new language and uses language to learn (AL: all components)
The student:
Morning talk
uses language effectively in social contexts to communicate (PE & R: all components)
How well the student:
learns and uses new vocabulary and language forms in spatial activities and puzzle contexts.
shows effective social communication skills in spatial activities and puzzle contexts, uses language that focuses her or his activity and that supports the participation of peers
The student:
Spatial activities and puzzles
Context
learns new vocabulary and ideas by participating in peer conversations, and can recall new ideas mentioned by peers in conversations.
converses effectively with peers; initiates and maintains a conversation, listens well and shares effectively
The student:
Incidental conversations
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
93
94
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
say sentences with a particular grammar (CE: sentences)
say sentences heard (IE: sentences)
understand sentences (IR: sentences, reception)
say words accurately (CE: words)
use words appropriately (IE: words)
comprehend vocabulary well (IR: words)
Does the student:
Tasks
Observing oral language behaviours (OOLB) group checklists Students’ names
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
show learning difficulties in other areas
use language fluently
use language confidently and willingly
learn new language and uses language to learn (AL)
use language effectively in social contexts to communicate (PE & R)
say a message longer than one sentence (IE: discourse)
listen, understand and retain what was heard (IR: discourse)
comprehend sentences with a particular grammar (CE: sentences)
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
95
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
7.2.2 What to listen or look for in students’ use of language When you are observing students’ language use, you can look for: 1 How willingly does a student engage in using language? Some students, for a range of reasons, may be less prepared to do this, even though they can understand and express ideas. They may lack confidence in their ability to communicate, believe they cannot communicate successfully. They may fear the consequences of talking. Students need to feel comfortable about using language in each context. You may need to put in place the climate and culture to support and foster it. 2 How fluently does a student use language? Some students are less fluent in particular aspects of the ICPALER model. Some may take much longer than their peers to recall or say words or to act out what they hear. Some may need to hear a sentence more often than their peers before they can comprehend it. By observing how students use oral language in multiple contexts, you will see how consistent any problem area is. 3 How broad based is the language difficulty? Oral language difficulties can range from broad-based to specific difficulties in particular areas. You can use the table below to assist in unpacking this. Expressive
Receptive
Are there difficulties with the meaning aspects of language? Individuals say words accurately and say sentences and discourse that are grammatically correct and fluent. However, what they say is either not sensible or may express immature meanings. They may, for example, have difficulty finding particular words they want and tend to: • talk around an idea • say inappropriate or incorrect words in their spontaneous conversations, ask ‘how do you say it?’, use fillers such as ‘er, er …’
Individuals have difficulty comprehending words or sentence meanings correctly. They may take a comparatively long time to work out what individual words or sentences mean. The difficulty is meaningbased, rather than convention-based.
Are there difficulties using the conventions of language? Individuals know what they want to say but have difficulty saying it. They may: • use immature or incorrect grammar, or other language forms such as incorrect morphology. They may omit function words such as ‘the’, ‘a’ or pronouns, misuse prepositions and morphological endings such as ‘-ed’. • say words inaccurately or show articulation patterns typical of much younger peers.
96
Individuals have difficulty using conventions to help them understand what other people’s language means such as: • how words are said • how grammar is used.
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
Expressive
Receptive
Is the use of language inappropriate? Individuals can use meanings and conventions but have difficulty using language effectively in ways that work for them. They may be less able to: • initiate or engage in conversation, although they can comprehend what it said • use language in context and either ramble repetitively or tangentially link ideas without regard to the listener.
Individuals have difficulty understanding how language is used in context, for example: • the signals people use to initiate or conclude a conversation • non-literal interpretations of language, for example, ‘You need to pull up your socks’. • the goals or intention of others, such as those shown in stressing ‘that’ in ‘I want you to do that’.
4 Does a student’s language difficulty co-occur with other conditions that can restrict learning in the classroom? As you observe the student’s use of language in a range of contexts, you can also see whether a student possibly has an associated intellectual disability or social-emotional difficulties. One of the values of the model is that it suggests you ask: Which aspects of oral language does the student have in place?
7.3 Assembling ICPALER oral language screening profiles After you have observed the students’ use of oral language in the various classroom contexts, you can compile a profile for the class as a whole and for individual students who may warrant further assistance. You can use the Oral language screening profile – brief (OLSP–B) (Appendix 1) to collate how often a student or a group of students shows each aspect of the ICPALER model. You can complete the OLSP–B using the data you have collected from your classroom observations and from what you remember about your students’ use of language. A higher rating on this profile suggests more effective use of the aspect. This will identify the students whose language use may not be appropriate. From this screening you can see which students merit a more in-depth profile. Select those students whose language use was not appropriate and collate an in-depth profile for each. For this you can use the Oral language observational profile – in depth (OLOP–D) (Appendix 2). Again, you can use the data you have collected from your observations of students and from what you remember about their use of language. Higher ratings on this chart suggest greater difficulty or less mature language development. For a student who shows inappropriate language use, you can use this to identify the areas of language use that are causing difficulty. For the I and C
97
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
aspects, the expressive and receptive aspects are treated separately so you can see any differences. Both the OLSP–B and the OLOP–D treat articulation by itself, so that you can look at it separately. Several items are not appropriate for all year levels. You may need to focus on those that are age appropriate for the students you are assessing. The DSIPC table (pp. 65–72) indicates these. Once you have identified the areas of difficulty, you can analyse them further. A key thing you need to know for any area of difficulty is what the student has in place. You can use the different components of each aspect of the ICPALER model to do this, as described in the earlier chapters. Below are two examples.
7.3.1 Example 1 For a student with difficulty in the word area of the ideas aspect, you may want to know the types of word meaning the student finds easiest and hardest. You can analyse samples of the student’s conversations and use the table below to collate the number of each type of error. You could ask the student to take you through the story in a big book familiar to them and count the number of errors for each type of morpheme. Examples of errors
Number of errors
Content word errors Function word errors Bound morpheme errors
This will help you see where most of the student’s individual meanings errors occur in the conversation.
7.3.2 Example 2 For a student with difficulty in the ideas area of the discourse aspect, you can look for evidence of a difficulty in discourse understanding in the student’s conversations, storytelling and retelling of earlier events and experiences. After you have read a big book to the student, you can ask them to retell the text, using the book as a prompt if necessary. You can monitor how the student uses and understands discourse meaning systematically by using the following table.
98
identifying oral language knowledge in the classroom
How well does the student:
Expressive language
Receptive language
recall all or most of the main ideas in a message?
The key ideas are mentioned or not omitted.
The key ideas are recalled and understood.
recall and use or apply sentence ideas in the correct sequence?
The sentence ideas are said The sentence ideas are in order. comprehended in order.
continue a key idea across the Ideas that are on track are The ideas mentioned earlier sentence? said; elaborates, supports, are used to interpret and questions, debates or respond to what is heard. refutes ideas mentioned earlier. anticipate or predict what The ideas in each sentence What might be said next is might be said or heard next? and across sentences flow predicted. or hang together in their meaning.
You can use this table as a behavioural checklist to monitor students’ behaviours in the following activities: listening to and telling stories; recounting experiences; discussing events; and engaging in other verbal interactions.
7.4 Using the profiles to plan teaching You can use the profiles to plan a teaching program for individual students and for groups of students. For individual students, the Oral language summary and the ICPALER profile you compile will indicate the aspects of the student’s oral language knowledge you need to target in teaching. On the OLSP-D, the aspects you may need to target in teaching are those that have a rating score of more than three. You can use the OLSP–B and the OLOP–D (Appendices 1 and 2) to group the students into teaching groups. You can find the recommended teaching activities in Chapters 8–13.
99
pa r t 2
Teaching
Part 2 describes teaching procedures you can use for each aspect of ICPALER. A key focus here is on enhancing children’s capacity to learn the various aspects of oral language. Students are scaffolded to become self-teachers of oral language. As well, they learn to integrate their oral language knowledge and skills at any time and see that they can be successful language learners.
101
C h a p t er 8
A teaching framework for enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
In this chapter, we look at how you can use the ICPALER model to teach oral language knowledge and skills. An early decision you will need to make is where to begin the teaching, that is, which aspects of the model you will teach.
8.1 What to teach? You can decide what to teach in various ways, depending on your purpose: • You may be planning an intervention program for an individual student or a small group who have oral language difficulties, based on their OLOP–D using the assessment procedures provided in Chapter 7 or other assessment information. • You may be planning future teaching activities for a group of students as part of their regular curriculum in typical classroom activities. You can use the table Matching the ICPALER Profile with a Teaching Plan on page 103 to identify and plan the aspects you will teach either to a class or to individual students. You can use the table Matching the ICPALER Profile with Teaching Activities on page 104 to identify the teaching activities you will target. In this table, the numbers matched with each aspect of the ICPALER model indicate the relevant section in the following chapters that describe the reading activities. The distinction between the expressive and receptive components has been removed; it is recommended that you teach both.
102
Ability to learn
Reception
use language in a range of ways using the words most appropriate to a context use the context to inform what they say
Use the context to interpret what is said
use vocabulary extension, sentence meaning, discourse meaning and topic learning actions learn to articulate sound patterns learn to use auditory perceptual skills, discrimination and sound localisation skills develop positive self-efficacy as a language user and learner
Use language learning actions
Articulation patterns
Perceive speech
Build self-confidence as a language user
produce and comprehend speech that suggests the aspects of the ICPALER model are integrated
retain between sessions what they have learnt
Use long-term memory
Integrate the aspects of language
retain, recognise and recall information in short-term memory activities
Retain ideas short term
use the context while listening
follow a conversation and stay on topic
understand what other people say and mean
recognise adjustments necessary for context and audience
comprehend imaginative and figurative references
Stay on the topic
comprehend the topic of a discourse
comprehend the topic of a discourse
Goals for language use
refer to the topic of a discourse while speaking
say and use the topic while speaking learn topic expresssion actions
judge how much information to give when speaking
Reception
listen effectively and comprehend discourse conventions
comprehend spoken discourse comprehend links between sentences learn discourse comprehension actions
talk about ideas in imaginative ways
use discourse conventions in speech
recount, retell use sentence links correctly in speech learn discourse expression actions
Topic Expression
Adjust to context and audience
comprehend grammatical forms
comprehend and act out sentences learn to comprehend forms of sentence meanings; question and instruction forms infer cause– effect and the order of events
Reception
Listen and speak between lines
Expression
use grammar correctly in speech
say and use sentence meanings learn to say various forms of sentence meanings; to ask questions, to instruct talk about cause–effect and the order of events
Expression
Discourse
manage the speaking and listening aspects of conversing and discussing topics, initiate conversations with peers, take turns, know when to stop and respond to social cues from the audience
recognise segments and blends
comprehend vocabulary learn to understand new meanings comprehend bound morphemes
Reception
Manage and direct language use
segment words into sounds and blend sounds into words
Conventions
Purpose
say and use vocabulary correctly learn to say new word meanings use bound morphemes name items rapidly
Ideas
Sentence Expression
Expression
Reception
Vocabulary
Matching the ICPALER profile with a teaching plan
enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
103
104
Manage and direct language use – 12.2
Purpose
Ability to learn
segment spoken words into sounds and blend sounds into words – 9.6
Conventions use grammar correctly in speech and comprehend grammatical forms – 10.4
Use the context to interpret what is said - 12.3
Ability to transfer language knowledge – 13.7
Integrate the aspects of language – 13.2–13.5
Build self confidence as a language user – 13.8
Use language learning actions – 8.4.5
Perceive speech – 8.4.4
Articulation patterns – 8.4.3
Use long-term memory – 8.4.2
Retain ideas short term – 8.4.1
Reception
say and comprehend sentence meanings – 10.1 learn to say and comprehend twoevent sentence meanings – 10.2 infer and talk about complex sentence meanings such as cause–effect – 10.3
Stay on the topic in the most recent version of the text - 12.3
Goals for language use – 12.4
Adjust to context and audience – 12.3
Listen and speak between lines – 12.5
say, use and comprehend vocabulary correctly – 9.1 learn to say and understand new word meanings – 9.2 recall the names of items – 9.3 rapidly use and comprehend bound morphemes – 9.4 link meanings into a vocabulary network – 9.5
Ideas
Sentence Expression
Expression
Reception
Vocabulary
Name of student / group:
Matching the ICPALER profile with teaching activities
Reception
listen effectively and comprehend discourse and use discourse conventions in speech – 11.1
recount, retell and comprehend spoken discourse – 11.1 learn discourse comprehension actions – 11.2
Expression
Discourse
Reception
refer to the topic of a discourse while speaking – 11.5
work out, say, use and comprehend the topic of a discourse – 11.4
Expression
Topic
Date:
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
8.2 Incidental and spontaneous learning or systematic and explicit teaching? There will be aspects of oral language that students in your class can learn incidentally and spontaneously. They simply need to be immersed in these aspects and interact with them. To learn like this, they need a sufficiently well-developed knowledge to incorporate the new ideas. They also need to know how to learn, to see a reason for learning and believe they can learn. There will be other aspects that you need to teach explicitly and systematically. The students will not have the same level of existing oral language knowledge for these. They may not have been exposed to using language in these ways. They may not have learnt how to learn language in these ways. Whatever the cause, their existing knowledge will not scaffold learning incidentally. Students entering Prep vary in their existing oral language knowledge. Aspects that can be learnt spontaneously by some students will need to be taught explicitly to others. The teaching activities described here are intended for those students who are less able to learn those aspects incidentally and spontaneously. We recommend you teach them in a systematic, consistent way with a focus on explicit student outcomes. The goal of this teaching is always towards assisting the students to become spontaneous language learners, able to teach themselves, as shown in the figure below. incidental spontaneous learning
Oral Language Learning Continuum
Most language is learnt here
systematic explicit learning and teaching
Need more learning here
Given that we recommend structured, systematic oral language teaching for some students, we need to examine how this is structured. A set of principles for designing and implementing this teaching is described below.
8.3 Principles for designing the language teaching Any teaching makes assumptions about how learning occurs. Teaching language skills to young students is no exception. This section describes some of the key assumptions made by our approach to teaching (Munro 1995). Teach language skills and knowledge: 1 that assist young students to communicate effectively their understanding and intentions at any time. Their understanding of their world at this time is
105
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
2
3
4
5
changing rapidly. This is reflected in the types of ideas they intend to convey. The teaching needs to take account of a student’s overall understanding at any time and expect and allow it to evolve. that help students to achieve their goals or purposes. Young students learn language more effectively when they see that it works for them. You may need to guide them to see this, through the feedback you give. Encourage them to use language to pursue their goals and motives in a range of contexts that are not restricted to the language teaching sessions. that matches what they know about language and their world at any time. Teaching is most effective when it begins with what a student does know. Some students’ knowledge of a topic is better developed in non-verbal, experiential forms rather than in language forms. To help these students use what they know in language exchanges, teach them how to say their imagery and action knowledge and to talk about their mental pictures in sentences. Young students also differ in their self-beliefs as learners, in how they have learnt to use language to note detail in situations, to label items, to imitate what they have heard, to retain ideas briefly or to gain information by asking questions. The teaching needs to take account of these differences. Many students learn language more effectively and can recall what they have learnt when they link distinctive actions, called motor mediators, with the ideas. They recall the word ‘drink’, for example, when they act out raising a cup to their mouth. Teaching kindergarten children to link actions with letters, for example, by running their fingers over raised letters, helps them read words better. Music also helps students to learn, for example, singing unfamiliar words (Schön et al. 2008). This could be because similar areas of the brain process music and language. Ways of using music to enhance young students’ vocabulary, grammar, awareness of rhythm and turn taking are provided by Beaton (1995). Singing activities can assist language learning for English-asa-second-language students and for students learning to sign in American Sign Language (Schunk 1999). in contexts in which the students communicate interactively. Some approaches to language teaching put students in a recipient role, in which they are communicated upon, responding to information from others. What they will learn has been decided earlier; it is pre-programmed. Their responses at any time do not shape the information they receive next. Our assumption is that students learn language more effectively when they can share their knowledge and to receive feedback for this (Munro 1995). in contexts in which the meaning of the message is unambiguous, clear and obvious to students, for example, where they talk about events they are experiencing or actions they have done. It is easier to learn from particular events where the features that the language refers to are obvious and stand out clearly for the student.
106
enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
6 in natural exchanges in the student’s world where they communicate real or authentic messages. The real world is frequently complex, with much happening at once. Language teaching programs often simplify or reduce its complexity. Even in these situations, however, it is recommended that the messages the students share are authentic. 7 so that the students have the optimal opportunity to use their knowledge of language and practise their emerging communication skills. 8 by following a pathway that is based on normal language development. This pathway is used to decide what to teach next. Some language programs sequence the knowledge and skills students will be expected to learn in a ‘logical’ order. These sequences of language skills may not match the developmental path followed by language acquisition. We recommend a sequence that is based on how students actually acquire or develop language. These principles are used to guide the teaching recommendations in the following sections.
8.4 The contexts for teaching the aspects of language There are three components to the issue of contexts in language teaching that it is useful to consider: 1 The different ways in which you present the language information and the activities you will use to teach the aspects 2 The topics of themes you will use as a focus for the activities 3 The size of the learning group; whether you implement the teaching individually with students, in small groups or in large groups. We will examine these components in this section. You can teach the aspects of the ICPALER framework in various information contexts (Munro 1995), for example, in the context of: 1 action comprehension: students do action sequences with toys in play activities, drama and other action sequences in which they can link actions and language. This could be toy play around the theme of a farm, your street, the beach or the zoo; acting out a group experience such as an excursion; acting out occupations such as an office worker, a fireman or a train driver; actions in physical education; and actions in learning school topics such as mathematics or science. Students use oral language to talk about what they do, follow instructions and learn new vocabulary by doing actions. 2 picture comprehension: students see a poster, a sequence of pictures that show an event or real-life situation or a film that tells a story and describe
107
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
and comprehend what they saw. Students use oral language to describe and comprehend what they see. 3 listening comprehension: students listen to longer spoken prose such as a serial narrative, a big book, a description, a set of actions or an explanation. Students listen strategically, show comprehension by gesturing or speaking, recalling and applying their knowledge. 4 speech and storytelling activities: students talk about experiences, tell stories and convey ideas spontaneously. They can talk about their favourite story or television program, recent event or a picture that no one else in the group can see. The students communicate their ideas to others. These contexts differ in how the students think about the information and in how they teach each aspect of the ICPALER model. It is often useful to teach a new aspect first in the action comprehension context, then in picture comprehension, then in listening comprehension and finally through speech and storytelling. Learning it first as actions helps students understand it better and engage with it. Their actions can become their ways of thinking about the ideas. You can select the texts you will use for the action, the picture and the listening activities based on the oral language knowledge and needs of your students. Examples of the types of activities that you could use in each task context for each aspect of language are shown in the figure on page 109. They are illustrated for a class learning about how fish, frogs and tadpoles live in a pond or creek near the school (or in the classroom aquarium). The aspects of language you intend to teach are for the students to: • recall and practise listening strategies and learn new listening strategies • review and practise the receptive and expressive vocabulary they know, learn new vocabulary, and link synonyms and antonyms • use and learn new sentence meanings, answer questions and learn new question forms, follow instructions and act out sentences they hear • learn to use new grammatical forms, act out an event and learn to say what they did in multiple ways • learn to use visualising and verbalising strategies, for example, ‘Imagine you are a goldfish talking to a shark. What would you say?’ • retell what they know about an event, a picture or a story, for example, progressive memory activities such as, ‘In the story I met …’, or make up a play action story for peers • organise oneself as a listener and to learn to be a disciplined listener • on later occasions, recall what they remember about the context and the new vocabulary, the key ideas and the images they had learnt. They can use pictures of the new vocabulary on flash cards to name items more rapidly and to talk about the items in sentences.
108
enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
Action comprehension context • The students play with toy fish in a wading pool or pretend to be fish. They: • learn new words by doing the actions that define the words • pretend they are fish and act out various sentences, follow instructions from others and give instructions • describe in sentences actions they do as fish, how they live and their adventures • learn to say an event using the passive voice form, for example, they say ‘The shark chases the goldfish’ and then ‘The goldfish is chased by the shark’ • invent stories about being fish, for example, they hear a topic such as My Birthday Party Under the Sea, make up a story and act it out.
Listening comprehension context Students listen to a story about the lives of a family of fish presented in a serial. They: • revise the words they know for key ideas • comprehend sentence meanings by visualising the sentences they hear • say in sentences what they heard and retell sentences by paraphrasing them, for example, the title • suggest questions they could ask the fish • recall and practise listening strategies and learn new ones • answer and ask ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions during the listening • talk about new ideas in the discourse, retell what they remember about the text, for example, take turns to recount what they know about the story • say the things they can do to help themselves listen better.
How fish, frogs and tadpoles live in a pond or creek near the school Picture comprehension context The students look at a set of pictures that show how the pond changes with the seasons. They: • talk about what the pictures show, using vocabulary, sentence meanings, grammar and spoken discourse • describe posters that show various ponds and find those described by peers • ask peers questions about the pictures, for example, ‘What can you see under the water?’
Speech and story-telling comprehension context Students: • plan what they would say if they were a fish living in the lake and what they do each day • talk to the group about the things they would do as a fish in the lake • imagine they were a fish being interviewed and plan what they would like to say.
In line with the principles of teaching language in authentic real-life contexts in which students can learn to communicate their intentions, each of your set of language teaching sessions can have a theme or context that evolves over one or more weeks. Examples of themes you could use at the Prep to Year 2 level are: • eating out, for example, going to a fast food restaurant • keeping pets
109
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
• common everyday experiences, for example, getting up, watching TV or what we eat • particular animals, for example, how possums live in the trees in a nearby park • going shopping • magic • a night walk • a bus or train journey • playing with toys around a theme, for example, a farm, our street or the zoo • a group experience such as an excursion, for example, the beach • occupations and areas of work, such as working in an office, being a fireman or a bus driver. In these contexts, the teaching tasks you use will be based on that student’s language learning profile at the time. This will influence how the task is framed and the feedback you give.
8.5 Teaching the ability to learn language You may need to guide students to improve their ability to learn oral language in each of the contexts. Across the four contexts you can teach these abilities using the following activities. These help the students learn new oral language more easily.
8.5.1 Short-term auditory working memory strategies These strategies or actions help students retain and retrieve spoken information in short-term auditory memory activities during learning. To help the students here, you can have them listen to a short story or a conversation and, as they listen, teach them to: • make a picture in their head of each sentence they hear and describe their images in a sentence, and talk about the mental video they made of what happened in the story • repeat in unison or by themselves sentences they have heard • recall key words and take turns to say what has happened in the story. You can ask them to recall events, characters in the story they heard, the actions they did or the pictures they saw. You can gradually increase the number of things they have to recall, for example, an Old MacDonald activity based on, ‘In our pond there lives a …’, or an I went window shopping activity such as, ‘I was swimming in the pond and I saw a …’
8.5.2 Long-term memory and retrieval strategies The strategies below help students store new knowledge about language in their long-term memory and to recall and use ideas they have learnt in earlier sessions.
110
enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
To do this, at the end of each teaching session you can ask the students to review and talk about what they have learnt in the session. You can guide them to: 1 say what they have learnt in more than one way, for example, they can say the new word meanings they have learnt and link them with synonyms and other words they know 2 visualise or make a picture of the new ideas and/or link key actions with them 3 say how the new ideas fit with what they already know 4 say the questions they can answer now using the new knowledge. They also practise recalling these ideas in later sessions. You can guide them to: 1 think back to the context in which they met the ideas, give them time to rebuild them in their awareness and to talk about what they see 2 think about particular aspects of what they remember, using cues to direct their attention to particular details, for example, say part of key words or show them parts of pictures they saw in the earlier session. One important long-term memory activity involves students learning how to recall as rapidly and efficiently as possible the names of objects, actions and events in the listening, picture and action comprehension contexts. You may need to have the students develop and practise this often. Particular activities relevant to aspects of oral language are described in the following sections.
8.5.3 Articulation strategies Some students may need to learn actions they can use to improve how they articulate sound patterns in words and sentences. In addition to the phonological activities described in the next chapter, you may need to scaffold the students to: 1 listen to words they hear and to practise moving their mouths, tongues and lips to repeat these 2 listen either to a word repeated or two words that have similar sounds and decide if they are the same word and to discriminate between soundlocalisation skills 3 listen to words spoken softly and either imitate or decide if they differ 4 imitate intonation patterns in sentences in the four contexts 5 do action sequences, for example, pick up a toy truck, relocate it behind a doll’s house and say in sentences what they did 6 listen to part of a sentence and decide, from its intonation, whether it is a question, an instruction, etc. It is important that you have procedures for assisting students when they do not complete a particular language task correctly initially. In section 9.4, we illustrate how you can scaffold students’ oral language learning in the listening activity.
111
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
8.5.4 Language perception strategies A key component of learning oral language is being able to perceive and attend to spoken information. You may need to teach the students to: 1 continue to attend to a task or a spoken message in situations in which distracting background information is presented. Can they, for example, listen to a story and keep track of what is being said in the presence of increasing background noise? 2 look at relevant visual information—for example, pictures in a story—and tell themselves what it says 3 listen to speech when it is gradually said more rapidly. They can engage in a listening activity such as Old MacDonald had a farm, in which the names of the animals are said increasingly faster. 4 continue to attend to a spoken message as the speaker moves around the room. They can practise listening to a story as the storyteller walks around the room.
8.5.5 Using language learning actions We said in Chapter 6 that a key component of the ability to learn involves students learning to direct and manage their ability to learn language. They do this by learning to tell themselves to do various things, depending on the task. For example, if they hear an unfamiliar word in a sentence, they can work out what it might mean by telling themselves to make a picture of the sentence or to try replacing it with other words and see what fits. By using these types of self-talk, students can learn more about language. They learn a self-script for each of the key language learning actions or strategies. Some students don’t spontaneously build this awareness of how to learn. They don’t automatically learn the most useful self-talk. Some students, for example, may not tune themselves in to listening to a story. You may need to teach them how to do this. For example, you may need to teach them to tell themselves what they hear, to visualise what they hear, to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words when they hear them and to ask themselves ‘What do I know so far?’ while listening to a story. You can teach students any of these strategies by using the following sequence: 1 Have the students learn how to do the strategy or action when they are speaking and listening. Through your teaching, guide or direct them to do it through your scaffolding. 2 After they have some time practising doing the action, guide them to say the action in words after they do it and to say how it helped them. This helps them to build the self-talk for the action and to be motivated to use it in the future. Once they have learnt it as self-talk, they are more able to transfer it to other tasks and contexts.
112
enhancing students’ oral language in classrooms
3 After they have practised saying the action, guide them to say that they will use the action before they begin a task. This helps them to cue themselves in to the task. For example, asking them to say how they will behave as they listen to a story. You want them to say, ‘As I listen to this story I will …’ 4 Have the students practise applying the action or strategy in a range of contexts and again say how it helps them. Remind them to whisper to themselves what they will do. Gradually guide them to say when they will use the action and link it with other strategies. Regularly ask the students to say what they will do in terms of the learning and thinking before they begin a task. Ask the students to say what they get when they do each action, for example, ‘I will make a picture in my mind as I listen to the story. This will give me a DVD of what happens in the story.’ The sequence is illustrated in the figure below. Students learn to do the new action.
Students do and learn to say the new action and how it helps them.
Students tell themselves to do the new action.
Students practise the new action, say what it gives them, when they will use it and link it with other actions.
You need to be clear on the thinking strategies you want your students to use as they engage in language learning activities and be prepared to teach them, using this sequence. You can teach this trend across the various contexts for a particular action. You will know if the strategy teaching is going well if the students are able to say what they are doing and how it is helping them. In other words, each component of the ability to learn language can be developed in each context. You can use a rubric similar to the table below to help you to plan how you do this. action context
picture context
listening context
speech context
Short-term working memory strategies Long- term memory and retrieval strategies Articulation strategies Language perception strategies Using language learning actions
113
C h a p t er 9
Teaching word meanings and conventions An understanding of words for young children comprises knowing how to say the word (that is, its phonological name), its meaning and its grammatical functions. Your teaching needs to target each of these aspects. In this chapter we examine ways of teaching word meanings and the phonological knowledge necessary for word use. The grammatical knowledge associated with words is discussed in Chapter 4. As well, you may need to guide young students to recognise words as units of spoken language in the speech they hear (Flanigan 2007; Tunmer, Bowey & Grieve 1983). They may need to learn how to recognise the words in a spoken sentence, that is, to tell when one stops and another starts. There are five aspects of teaching word meanings or vocabulary. Use activities that: 1 stimulate students’ existing vocabulary knowledge 2 teach new vocabulary; this includes students learning new word meanings and how to infer or speculate about the meanings of unfamiliar words 3 review and consolidate the new meanings, link them with words the students know, store them in their memory and automatise what they have learnt so that they recall rapidly the names of items and what the words mean 4 teach word parts that have meanings 5 teach students how to say words accurately and how to think about and use the sound patterns within words.
9.1 Stimulate existing vocabulary Teaching students to recall the vocabulary they know assists their learning in several ways. It helps them to comprehend the language to which they are exposed, to get their knowledge ready for learning new ideas and to link the new vocabulary they learn with what they know. You can review students’ receptive and expressive vocabulary using the same information. You can ask students to:
114
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
1 name items and to recognise or select named items. These can be the names of objects, actions, events and attributes, such as colours and shapes in action and picture contexts. For example, you can show the students a set of toy animals. Touch an item, such as a frog, and ask them to name it, say what it does, and do the actions that go with it, as shown below. What is this called?
What does a frog eat? Let’s be a frog catching flies. Point to the frog’s feet. Find the part of the frog that helps it to breathe.
Which frog is crouching?
Which of these frogs has …?
2 name items and ask the students to find them. If a student doesn’t select the items you say, see whether they can do the characteristic actions that go with the items or recognise other examples. You may need to see if the student can distinguish them from similar items. 3 link names with verbal descriptions. After reading a page to the students or showing them a sequence of pictures of an event or real-life situation, you can ask: • ‘One of the things mentioned on this page is something that can help people go from place to place. It is called a …’ • ‘I am going to point to items on this page. I want you to tell me what they are called.’ 4 suggest or recognise synonyms for words in each context. After a student responds correctly with a name for (2) above, you can ask: • ‘What is another word for it, a thing that is like it?’ • ‘What is a good action for it? What does it do?’ 5 suggest or recognise the words for a particular context. When students have difficulty recalling the names of items or when they answer incorrectly, you can scaffold their thinking by adding more cues. You can say: • ‘It rhymes with fuss. It starts with “b”.’ • ‘You see them on the road. You travel in them.’ • ‘Coming along the road I saw a big …’
9.2 Teaching new vocabulary The review of the students’ existing vocabulary will indicate the relevant words the students don’t know or don’t recall easily. Suppose the students didn’t know the word ‘van’. You can teach it by having them:
115
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
• link ‘van’ with distinctive actions and act out its meanings • match spoken synonyms with it and suggest other synonyms for ‘van’ • practise saying what it means in their own words • say the new word in a sentence • name pictures that show a ‘van’. Wherever possible, teach the meanings of verbs through actions the students can do, even if they pretend to do the actions or do them in play.
9.2.1 Teaching new vocabulary directly You can teach students the meanings of new words by using the sequence in the table below. The examples used here are the words ‘saucer’, ‘bounce’ and ‘in’. Sequence
Teaching activity
Introduce the word in a familiar • ‘Here are pictures of saucers Pina has at context that clearly shows its home.’ Show the pictures. ‘Mum had her cup meaning. Show four or five pictures on a saucer.’ or concrete examples. Ask, ‘How are • ‘Tom bounces his ball.’ Show the pictures. ‘The these examples like each other? What ball hits the ground and comes back.’ do they all have?’ Have them say the • ‘The cat is in the basket here and here.’ Show word by itself and in sentences about pictures of a cat in different positions in the the context. basket and in different baskets. Show how the examples are linked with a common action.
The students: • make their hands into the shape of a saucer. They trace out a saucer on a larger plate. • do the bouncing action with their arms and bodies. • do in and out actions with their arms and bodies.
Show pictures of things that are similar to the word but that are nonexamples of it. Discuss how and why they are different.
• ‘Pina has some things that that are not saucers.’ Show pictures of bowls, plates, cups and mugs. ‘How are they different from saucers?’ • ‘Tom’s ball does things that are not bouncing.’ Show the pictures. ‘The ball rolls along the ground, falls to the ground, spins on the ground. The ball is not bouncing here.’ • ‘The cat is in the basket here and here.’ Show pictures of the cat in different positions in the basket and outside the basket.
Suggest synonyms for the word. The students link the word with similar words they know.
• ‘A saucer is like a small plate. A cup sits on a saucer.’ • ‘Bouncing is like falling down and jumping back.’ • ‘The cat is lying here in the basket.’
116
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
Sequence
Teaching activity
Show the word in other contexts and have the students say it in a sentence that describes each context.
• ‘The milk the cat drinks is on the saucer.’ • ‘Some saucers are white and some are blue.’ • ‘A cup of tea is often on a saucer.’ • ‘You can see saucers in a dish washer.’
Have the students discriminate The students: between examples and non-examples. • hear sentences and decide whether each could describe a saucer, for example, ‘It is a large They can do this by selecting and categorising items. plate’, ‘People use it for their cornflakes at breakfast’, ‘Our cat drinks its milk from it’. • describe features of the word. • categorise or classify instances and noninstances of the word, for example, saucers, plates, bowls. The students use the word in several sentences that illustrate its meaning.
‘My mum puts a cup on a saucer.’ ‘Saucers are smaller than plates.’ ‘Bowls are deeper than saucers.’
9.2.2 Teaching students how to work out the meanings of new words they hear As well as teaching new vocabulary meanings directly, you can teach students how to work out for themselves possible new meanings they hear. A useful set of teaching procedures is as follows. Suppose the students are listening to the story of The Little Red Hen and are looking at the pictures. They hear you read a sentence that says, ‘The duck is a gossip’. You can pause the story and ask them to: 1 practise saying the unfamiliar word: ‘gossip’ 2 look at what the picture shows the duck doing and say this. They may say, ‘She is talking and talking’ 3 say how they would feel if they were there, what they would see and hear 4 say what they think what a gossip does: ‘A gossip is someone who talks all the time’ 5 say what they think gossip means 6 suggest other words for gossip: ‘The duck is a chatterbox’. Over a period you can have the students practise following this type of sequence to work out what new words might mean and begin to use it spontaneously. Suppose they heard on the next page of the text, ‘The kitten was vain. All day long she washed her head, cleaned her nails and brushed her fur’, and saw the accompanying pictures. Most young students won’t know what ‘vain’ means. You can scaffold their thinking to work out what it might mean. They can:
117
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
1 recognise and say each unfamiliar word; ‘Say the word “vain”â•›’ 2 say and repeat the sentence with the new word; ‘Let’s read the sentence that has this word’ 3 note any pictures that go with new word; ‘What do the pictures show us about the kitten?’ 4 say what the word does in the sentence; ‘What does vain tell us about?’ 5 visualise the context with the new word and imagine what it might mean in that context; ‘What is the kitten trying to do on the page?’ 6 try to use other words or phrases in place of it and see which one/s fit best; ‘What are other ways of saying what the kitten does? She spends all her time making herself look nice’ 7 check their guess by re-reading the sentences with the other words in them and modify their guess if necessary 8 consolidate their guess and perhaps check it with a dictionary definition. The aim here is for students to become aware that they can teach themselves about the new words they hear and that there are thinking actions they can use to do this. A useful teaching activity here is to have the students regularly listen to speech that has one or two unfamiliar words and work out what the words might mean. Over a period of time they can: 1 practise using each of the thinking actions above when scaffolded and instructed 2 work on learning one new thinking action at a time and describe what they do in words; this will help them to transfer it to other situations 3 start to use the thinking actions spontaneously and say how they will work out for themselves the possible meanings of new words.
9.2.3 Teaching students to consolidate and review the new vocabulary Towards the end of a teaching session, guide the students to identify the new words they have learnt and: 1 2 3 4
use them in sentences, for example, ‘The van has a load of timber’ suggest and select synonyms for the new words, ‘The van is a baby truck’ link an image with each key word and select pictures that show each new word link a distinctive action with the new vocabulary. Linking the new meanings in these multiple ways helps the students store them in their memory. It also helps them recall the meaning later.
118
• link action with the new word • link image with the new word • say new words in sentences, link with synonym
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
At this time, use activities in which the students: 1 say the target word when you describe the item in different sentences, for example, ‘I am a little truck. I carry parcels’, ‘I am a …’ Conversely, you can name an item and the students describe in sentences what it does, what it looks, sounds and feels like. 2 suggest and select synonyms for the new words, ‘What is another word for a baby truck?’ 3 name pictures and images of each target word 4 link actions with the each target word.
9.2.4 Is it enough for young students to hear new vocabulary to learn it? Some teachers believe that students will learn new vocabulary relatively automatically when they hear the words being used in prose, for example, listening to a narrative. A number of studies have shown that this is insufficient for learning new vocabulary. Listening to and reading aloud texts, by themselves, have little effect on vocabulary (Biemiller & Boote 2006). Young readers and listeners need to interact with the text in the ways described earlier to benefit from the unfamiliar vocabulary they encounter (Beck & McKeown 2007; Blachowicz, Fisher & Watts-Taffe 2005; Blewitt et al. 2009; Lovelace & Stewart 2009). Many need systematic and explicit guidance to build connections, particularly those who have had less past experience doing this and a more restricted bank of word meanings. They need to work with the new words on multiple occasions, as suggested above, to build the new meanings. Research suggests at least ten encounters with a new word are needed for satisfactory acquisition (Beck & McKeown 2007; Lovelace & Stewart 2009). This allows familiarity first with its sound pattern and a general sense of its meaning, and gradually a more complete meaning. Blewitt and colleagues (2009), for example, describe an approach to shared book reading that focused on a set of unfamiliar words. The young readers initially answered and asked lower-level questions about these words and gradually moved to higher-level questions. Each word was targeted on 12 occasions. Biemiller and Boote (2006) used an alternative approach with read-aloud books. Each book was read on up to four occasions. On the first reading the focus is on the story, with one or two words targeted. On each of the following three readings, seven to ten new words were introduced, each explained briefly as it arose. The study showed that a month later the students showed a 40 per cent retention in the words taught. Which words might be targeted in early vocabulary teaching? Beck and McKeown (2007) suggest those new words that are high frequency in mature
119
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
language use and for which the children already have a partial conceptual understanding, for example, ‘nuisance’. Biemiller (2005), on the other hand, recommends those words that are known by approximately half of Year 2 students.
9.3 A ssisting students to recall rapidly the names of items and what they mean Some students have difficulty recalling automatically the names of items or the meanings of words they have learnt earlier. You may need to teach them to improve how they do this. Useful types of teaching procedures you can use include: 1 You can put pictures of the new vocabulary on cards, mix these with words they already know and use them as picture flash cards. The students practise: • naming rapidly each item • suggest synonyms for them • play matching card games such as snap and bingo An example of the picture and word cards is shown in the figure below. Name each picture
flowers
a happy girl
a man
2 Teach students to categorise the words they are learning based on meaning, for example, fruits, ways of travelling, clothes, ways of walking and running. When they need to recall a specific word they also say the name of its category. This can improve recall. You can teach this by giving them a set of cards that show pictures of items from two or three categories they have been studying, for example, fruit and clothes. They sort the cards into the relevant categories. As they place each card, they say a sentence that links the item with the category, as shown in the figure below.
120
Jeans are clothes.
Pears are fruit.
clothes
fruit
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
3 After they have sorted a set of cards into two groups, say each category name and ask them to recall as many of the items they sorted as they can. 4 Help them make and use word associations, for example, they can learn to link opposites for the same general idea. You might say, ‘A cow moos and a dog …’, or, ‘A dog runs and a … swims’. You can do this in a gradual way, as shown in the figure below. The students: recall a range of words for a target word, for example, ‘Cars are …’ ‘Lions are …’ ‘You can eat …’
learn to recall from a more restricted set, for example, ‘Your father can drive …’ ‘You cut an apple with …’ ‘My favourite dessert is …’
learn to make logical associations, for example, ‘A cow moos and a dog …’ ‘The dog runs and the … swims’ ‘Some juices are sweet and some are …’
5 Involve the students in rapid recall activities, for example, playing games in which they practise naming the same items increasingly faster. This is described for rapidly naming pictures of vocabulary items in 1 above. It is also useful to have students: • recall ideas for a topic, for example, ‘Say as many names of animals / things you wear / games you can think of in one minute’ • playing games in which they practise naming the same sets of items. 6 Teach the students to use visualisation to assist recall. You ask students to visualise a context or an event they have experienced recently—for example, a visit to the supermarket—and use the imagery to see and name items.
9.3.1 When students have difficulty recalling names rapidly When a student has difficulty recalling rapidly the names of items, you can cue or scaffold the recall in various ways. You can: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
say the sound or the first syllable that begins the word, ‘It starts with …’ say a rhyming word, ‘It sounds like …’ move your lips and tongue to simulate making the first few sounds say a synonym or antonym for the target word, ‘Another word for it is …’, ‘An opposite word for it is …’ say an associated word, for example, if the required word is ‘door’, say, ‘The lady is leaving the house. First she opens the …’ ‘The lady opens the … and leaves the house’ say the meaning category to which it belongs, for example, ‘It’s a pet’, or, ‘You can drink it’ mention some of the other names if the name is in a series of names, for example, to have the student say ‘May’, say, ‘January, February, March, April …’ ask the student to complete a sentence, for example, to have the student say ‘garage’, say, ‘We keep the car in a …’
121
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
9.4 Teaching word parts that have meanings We noted earlier a second type of individual meaning; this is the meaning that is carried by a part of a word. An example is ‘-ed’ at the end of a verb, meaning that an action had occurred rather than is occurring. A second is ‘-s’ that we add to a noun to say that we are talking about two or more items. We called these word parts bound morphemes. Both prefixes and suffixes convey meaning. Examples are ‘dis-’, ‘trans-’, ‘un-’, ‘de-’, ‘a-’, ‘mis-’, ‘-ish’, ‘-ness’ and ‘-ly’. We noted earlier that some students have difficulty learning to use these units of meaning. They may say ‘doll’ when they mean ‘dolls’, or ‘stop’ when they mean ‘stopped’. Your teaching needs to take account of the possible reasons for these errors. The student: 1 may not understand the intended meaning; for the ‘-ed’ suffix, for example, the student may not understand the difference between a continuing action and an action that has finished 2 may not be aware that there are two types of action words; those that talk about actions that have finished and those that talk about actions that are occurring, or will or could occur. 3 may not be clear about the different ways in which we talk about actions that have finished; we add ‘-ed’ or ‘-t’ with some, while with others we change the vowel (‘swim’ to ‘swam’, ‘eat’ to ‘ate’, ‘hang’ to ‘hung’, ‘lie’ to ‘lay’, ‘hold’ to ‘held’, ‘think’ to ‘thought’). 4 may not hear the difference in sound patterns between the present and past forms, for example, between ‘stop’ and ‘stopped’ 5 may not have had consistent exposure to the correct use of the bound morpheme in their past. They need the opportunity to imitate correct language use in particular contexts and to see that it works for them.
9.4.1 Teaching the bound morpheme first in the action context As an example of teaching a bound morpheme, we will begin with the example of adding the ‘-t’ or ‘-ed’ sound patterns to some verbs to show that an action occurred in the past. You can use the following teaching sequence: 1 Teach this first in the action context. Suppose a toy horse is kicking a ball. Act out two situations and have the students repeat these. Make the key difference between the two situations stand out. In this case, it is the timing of the speech in relation to the action, as shown in the figure below. While the horse is kicking the ball, say The horse kicks the ball. After the horse has kicked the ball and stopped doing it, say The horse kicked the ball.
122
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
2
3
4
5
6
Make sure the students can show, through their actions with the toys, that they are aware of this distinction. Their sentences with the present tense are said while the action is occurring. Their sentences with the past tense are said after the action has clearly finished. Stress also that they say the two verb forms correctly. It may be necessary for some students to imitate how to say ‘kicked’. Apply the meaning in other action contexts. Have the students do corresponding events with toys or in their actions to show other examples of the distinction such as ‘hop’ versus ‘hopped’, ‘jump’ versus ‘jumped’, ‘climb’ versus ‘climbed’, ‘touch’ versus ‘touched’ and ‘move’ versus ‘moved’. They should distinguish between saying, for example, ‘Anna hops’ and ‘Anna hopped’. Again, stress also that they say the two verb forms correctly. Ensure that they say the ‘-ed’ or ‘-t’ ending whenever it is appropriate. It may be necessary for some students to imitate how to say each past tense form. Act out the meaning when it is heard. Ask the students to act out sentences they hear such as ‘We walk’ versus ‘We walked’, or ‘They sail away’ versus ‘They sailed away’. For the present tense, students say the sentence as they do it, while for the past tense students say it after the action has finished. Encourage the students to use the ‘-ed’ suffix when they talk about the actions in pictures they see and also to listen for it in stories they hear and text that is read to them. Describe the meaning in words. Guide the students to say what they think is the difference between hearing sentences such as ‘We walk’ and ‘We walked’, or ‘They sail away’ and ‘They sailed away’. The goal is that they say that when they hear the ‘-ed’ or ‘-t’ ending added to the action word, this tells them the action has stopped or finished. What sort of words is the ‘-ed’ or ‘-t’ added to? Would you add them to words like ‘car’ or ‘dog’? Would you add them to words like ‘green’ or ‘little’? Give the students various words and have them decide whether ‘-ed’ or ‘-t’ is usually added to each one. Lead them to see that they are added to words that are actions. You can also clarify at this time that ‘-ed’ or ‘-t’ are not added to all action words, and that some action words tell us the action has finished in other ways. How will students use this understanding when they speak and listen? Ask the students to say how they will use this distinction when they are speaking or listening. /t/ or /ed/ added to an action word means the action has stopped.
123
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
9.4.2 Teaching other bound morphemes You can use a similar procedure to teach other bound morphemes, such as ‘-s’ to indicate plural and ‘-s’ to indicate an action being done by another person at present. The procedure involves the following steps: 1 Teach one example of the bound morpheme in the action context. Make the difference between when it is and isn’t used as clear as possible. Try to show what it means by linking it with an action the students can do. The action is intended to teach the meaning of the bound morpheme. Have them do the action and describe it using the bound morpheme in a sentence. 2 Teach other examples of the bound morpheme in action contexts. Have students do the key action in each example and describe the situation including the bound morpheme. Make sure that they clearly say the bound morpheme in their speech. 3 Have the students act out the meaning of sentences containing the bound morpheme when they hear them. Make sure they can show the difference between sentences that do and don’t contain the bound morpheme. Have them use the bound morpheme when they talk about the actions in pictures they see and also to listen for it in speech they hear. 4 Describe the meaning of the words. Guide the students to talk about the difference between sentences they hear that do and don’t have the bound morpheme. What does the bound morpheme tell them about the ideas in the sentence? 5 What sort of words is the bound morpheme added to? You can encourage the students to explore this. Is it added to words that tell us what a thing is, to words that tell us what is done or to words that tell us what things are like? 6 How will students use this understanding when they speak and listen? Ask the students to say how they will use this distinction when they are speaking or listening.
9.4.3 Teaching an awareness of the bound morpheme After they have learnt two or three bound morphemes, lead the students to an awareness of them as a part of the language they use. This awareness includes the students: 1 2 3 4
seeing that there are certain sound patterns that are used in lots of words recalling that a meaning goes with each sound pattern knowing that each sound pattern helps us understand what the word means knowing that each meaning is joined with one type of word.
As they move through primary school, students are expected to learn about other bound morphemes such as those mentioned earlier and sound patterns such as ‘micro-’, ‘-age’, ‘-ive’ and ‘-tion’. The bound morphemes add to their understanding and use of individual word meanings.
124
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
9.5 What the vocabulary network model means for our teaching A key focus of our classroom teaching can be to assist students to build and use their vocabulary networks. You can: • get an estimate of the breadth of the network of meanings students have when they are learning a topic. When you mention a topic, for example, ‘New cars’, you can note the range of words a student or a group of students recall both spontaneously and with prompting. • help your students develop an awareness that their meanings are grouped around a topic. Mention a topic and have the students suggest words that might come up in a text about it. Guide the students to show their meanings on a concept map. • have students: -- listen to part of a message and think ahead to predict what might be said next -- suggest synonyms and antonyms for key words related to a topic they are learning. • assist students to enrich or build up their networks of meanings. • help students see that a particular word or phrase can belong to particular topics and can also be a topic for other groups of words. Give the students a topic and have them suggest words that might be mentioned in the text. Draw a concept map that shows how the words are linked. Select one of the words in the map and make it the topic of the text. Guide the students to see that a word can both be a topic and part of another topic.
9.6 Teaching students how to say words accurately: Building phonological knowledge We noted earlier that phonological knowledge is what you use to work out how to say unfamiliar words and to recall them. It also helps you recognise sound patterns in words and to use stress and intonation in sentences to communicate meanings. To recognise and use bound morphemes, for example, you need to recognise particular sound patterns within words, to extract these patterns and to move them to other words to generate new possibilities. Phonological knowledge should be taught in the following developmental order: 1 rhyming; teach students to recognise and say rhyming words and words that alliterate 2 manipulate onsets and rimes; teach students to segment one-syllable words into onset and rime, for example, segment ‘stamp’ into ‘st’ and ‘amp’ and blend an onset and a rime into a word, for example ‘tr’ and ‘ain’ into ‘train’ 3 strip the first and/or last sounds off one-syllable words
125
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4 manipulate individual sounds or phonemes; teach students to segment one-syllable words into separate sounds, for example, segment ‘stamp’ into ‘s’, ‘t’, ‘a’, ‘m’ and ‘p’ and to blend individual sounds into a word, for example ‘t’, ‘r’, ‘ai’ and ‘n’ into ‘train’ 5 combine segmenting and blending by deleting sounds from words and swapping sounds in words. Students learn to apply these phonological skills to words of two or three sounds initially and gradually extend this to longer one-syllable words. Students’ phonological knowledge can influence how well they say words and recall them. In addition to the phonological activities described above, you can teach students to: • perform and practise the movement patterns needed to produce sounds, for example, they practise mouth and tongue movement exercises • practise imitating words of increasing length and articulatory activities. The teaching activities here are described in developmental order. When you have located a student or group on the developmental order, you can start to teach phonological and phonemic knowledge and skills at the next level.
9.6.1 Teaching rhyming and alliteration patterns You may need to teach students to detect rhymes and alliteration and to say the patterns. 1 Have the student imitate a two-sound rhyming pattern such as ‘in, in, in’ or an alliterative pattern such as ‘dr, dr, dr, dr’. When the student has mastered this, ask the student to repeat words, for example, ‘pin, tin, pin, tin’ or ‘mop, top, mop, top’. Extend to repeating patterns of three words, for example, ‘lot, cot, pot’ and four words ‘men, hen, pen, ten’ and to sequences of longer words such as ‘damp, camp, damp, camp’ and ‘crunch, munch, crunch, munch’. 2 Guide the student to recognise a rhyming or an alliterative pattern. Show pictures of three familiar objects, two of whose names share a rime, for example, a cat, a hat and a pig or two of whose names alliterate, for example, a picture of a cat, a cot and a pig. Name each item and ask the student to repeat each name and then: ‘Pick the pictures that rhyme or sound alike / start with the same sound’. Repeat for sets of four pictures and for longer words. Play matching card games such as snap or memory in which the student detects and matches pictures of names that rhyme. Increase the complexity of the rhyming words. 3 Guide the student to continue a rhyming or alliteration pattern. Show a set of pictures of items that rhyme, for example, pictures of a cub, a pub and a tub and say: ‘Say these words. Now say other words that rhyme with them.’ If this is too difficult, return to point 1 above. Repeat with sequences of longer words such as ‘slip, clip …’ and ‘lunch, crunch …’. Students can continue an alliterative pattern
126
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
such as ‘cramp, crisp …’, ‘spoon, special …’ and ‘broom, bracelet …’ Play games in which students in small groups: • have to take turns to think of rhyming or alliterating words. The winner thinks of most words. • brainstorm words that have a particular rime or alliteration. 4 Teach students to recognise and say rhyming or alliterating words in prose. You can: • show the students pictures of three familiar objects, two of whose names share a rime, for example, a mop, a top and a bag. Ask them to select the pictures that rhyme and to make up a story using the words. • say sentences and read stories that have rhyming or alliterative words and ask them to select the rhyming words, for example, ‘I’m going to tell you a story that has words that rhyme with coal. Every time you hear the “oa” sound I want you to clap (or stamp, etc). “The thief stole the bowl.”â•›’ Gradually increase to three rhyming words, for example, ‘The thief stole the bowl from the mole.’ • teach the students to say rhyming words in the context of prose. Say, ‘We are going to make up some rhyming stories. Listen to what I say. “The black cat chased the bat.”â•›’ As you say it, stress the two words that rhyme. Ask students to finish the sentences in the figure below. ‘Tom rolled off his bed and hurt his …’
‘My friend Paul is very …’
‘My mother can bake a …’
‘The little boy played with his …’
• Say incomplete sentences and have the students finish them by using the alliterative pattern to produce the final word as shown below. ‘Sue softly sang the …’
‘Bill banged the big …’
• The students can work in small groups to see how many possible words they can find that fit a particular alliterative pattern in incomplete sentences. You can ask the students to make up rhyming sentences for pairs of words, as shown below. She put the pin in the tin.
There is a pest in the nest.
1. pin, tin
2. pest, nest
Other useful activities include: 1 Show pairs of pictures of rhyming words and ask students to make up sentences containing the two words. 2 Read a story that has a rhyming pattern such as a Dr Seuss or a Jelly and Bean book. Students take turns to predict the rhyming word/s that fit the context. Ask them to tell you how they decided which words to select.
127
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3 Use this with unfamiliar nursery rhymes. Begin reciting a nursery rhyme or jingle and have students predict the rhyming words. 4 Students make up rhyming sentences that match their characteristics and alliterative sentences based on personal characteristics, for example, rhymes based on their names for the school magazine and alliterative patterns in songs and verse, as shown below. I am called Jack and my hair is …
I am seven and I sing songs slowly …
I am Louise and I like looking for lizards …
5 Students make up verse, for example, rhymes and television jingles. They are given the first line of a verse such as those below and continue it. Tina tries to teach us to trick others.
Sam is a sound speller.
Sam is skipping with Suzie.
Hazel hops past Henry.
9.6.2 Manipulating onsets and rimes Teach students to recognise and use the onset or the rime in one-syllable words. Useful activities include: 1 Segment words into onset and rime. Show a picture of a familiar item such as a bed. Ask the student to name it. Say, ‘Listen to how I say bed. B-ed.’ Say the two parts separately, by about half a second. If necessary, use a puppet to do this. Have the student repeat the segmenting and apply it to other words, gradually to longer one syllable words. 2 Blend onset and rime to make a word. Model the blending: ‘Listen to how I make these sounds into a word. St-op. Stop. You do this with pl-an.’ Repeat this with other examples and ask the student to blend sound groups. Move to five-sound and six-sound words. Discuss with the student how you are ‘running the sounds together’. Students can work in pairs with one student saying an onset, the other a rime and the first student blends them into a word. Say the onset or rime of the name of an object in the room or playground and have the students decide what the object is, for example, ‘What am I thinking of in this room? It starts with sp’. They can play a version of bingo. Each bingo board has the pictures of up to 20 familiar objects. Say one onset or rime at a time and have the students see if they can find items on their bingo boards that have that onset or rime. 3 Finish the word. The students hear a sentence and the onset or rime of a word, suggest the complete word and say how they decided the word for each sentence, as shown in the figure below. ‘The dog chased after the c_____.’
128
‘Ann fell over and hurt her l_____.’
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
4 Pick the odd one out. Show pictures of four familiar objects where only three of the images: • begin with the same onset, for example, ‘spoon’, ‘spin’, ‘sand’ and ‘speck’ • end with the same rime for example, ‘sink’, ‘think’, ‘hand’ and ‘link’. The students name each picture, say the shared sound pattern and select the picture that sounds different from the others. Repeat for sets of four pictures and for longer words. 5 Say words that have the same onset or rime. The students take turns to think of words that begin with the same onset or that end with the same rime. Play a game in which they take turns to say words that begin with the same onset or that end with the same rime. The student who can keep going suggesting matching words is the winner. 6 Recognising the same onset or rime. Play card games such as snap or memory in which students match pictures of words that have either the same onset or rime. 7 Dealing with onset–rime difficulties. Typical errors when saying onsets and rimes include: • difficulty separating the vowel from the onset, for example, ‘milk’ is segmented as ‘mi-ilk, or ‘tent’ as ‘te-ent’. Repeat what the student said and say how to correct it, for example, ‘You said the “i” twice, in each part’. Have the student repeat the segmentation and use your hand to gesture cutting the word before the vowel. • forgetting how to say the rime part. Ask the student to say the complete word two or three times before attempting to segment again.
9.6.3 Identifying the first and last sounds Teach students to identify these sounds in words by (1) recognising each and (2) saying each. Useful activities include: 1 Pick the odd one out. The students see a set of four pictures of familiar objects, for example, a boat, a bird, a dog and a bus. They name each and select the pictures that begin with the same sound as a selected picture, for example, the boat. If necessary, ask, ‘Listen to how you say each name. What is its starting sound? What sound do you hear first in each word?’ Repeat this for several sets of similar pictures and also for the last sound in a set of pictures. 2 Recognise the first or last sound. Play card games such as snap, memory, bingo or dominos in which students match pictures of words that have the same first or last sound. 3 Model stripping away the first or last sound. Say a four-sound word that has a two sound onset, such as ‘span’. ‘Listen to how I say the word span. S-pan. You do what I did with these words: tram, stop, crash, drip’. Discuss how you are cutting the first sound off each word. Repeat for the last sound in words.
129
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4 Say the first or last sound. Ask the students to suggest the first or last sound of words, for example, ‘Say the first sound in these words: flat, ramp, slip, string, clamp, twist’. Begin with four-sound words and work to five-, six- and longersound words. 5 The students suggest words that begin or finish with a particular sound. Give examples first, for example, ‘Grim starts with “guh”. What are some other words that start with g?’ Repeat for other sounds. They can suggest words for a theme that begins or ends with a particular sound, for example, food words that begin with ‘c’ or finish with ‘d’. You can develop this activity in the context of the games 20 questions and hangman, for example, ‘I’m thinking of something that you eat that starts with “m”â•›’, or ‘Find all the things in the classroom that end with “k”â•›’. They can see how many students’ names in the class begin with each sound in the alphabet and how they need to go beyond the alphabet sounds, for example, Anna or Irma. They can discover sounds that are not in the alphabet. 6 The students say the first or last sound in familiar names. Collect a set of objects (small toys, items of clothing, objects used around the house, etc.). The students take turns to select an item, name it and say its first or last sound.
9.6.4 Manipulate the syllable-like units in two-, three- or foursyllable words You can teach students to do this by recognising each syllable and by saying it. Useful activities include: 1 An awareness of syllable-like units. Say a two-syllable word and break it up in two ways: one that has syllable-like parts and one that doesn’t, for example, ‘Listen to how I say the word ‘pretend’. I’ll break up it up in two ways. Pr-etend. Pre-tend. Which way sounds better?’ Repeat this for other words. Lead the students to see that the one that sounds better has a vowel in each part. Introduce the term syllable where each part has a vowel. Have them use ‘Does it sound right?’ for three- and four-syllable words, such as ‘artistic’, ‘camera’ and ‘hospital’. 2 Finish the word. Say one syllable of a word within a meaningful sentence and ask the students to suggest the complete word, for example, The injured man was slid carefully into the __bul____. (ambulance)
The volcano was a dis_____ for the country. (disaster)
Ask the students to suggest how they decided which word to say for each sentence. What helped them to make up their minds?
130
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
3 Pick the odd one out. Say four multi-syllabic words, where all but one have the same syllable, for example, ‘department’, ‘particular’, ‘parallel’ and ‘partition’. Ask, ‘What part do three of the words have?’ Ask the students to explain how they made their decisions. 4 Break words into syllables by an action. Say a two-, three- or four-syllable word and do a gesture for each syllable in it as you say it. You can clap, tap the table, stamp, click your fingers or shake a musical instrument such as a tambourine. Pause between each syllable. Say, ‘I clapped as I said each part of the word. Do the action with me. How did you know when to clap? What do you listen for? How do you know whether to clap twice or three times?’ 5 Teach an awareness of the unstressed vowel. Say two separate syllables with equal stress, for example, ‘hel-met’. Ask, ‘What word am I saying? Put the two parts together. Tell me the word they make’. The students need to take the stress off one syllable to make it into a word that they know. Repeat with other pairs of syllables, for example, ‘frac-ture’, ‘garb-age’. Discuss how you take the stress off one vowel when you combine the syllables. 6 Say the unstressed syllables. Say some two- and three-syllable words and ask the students to say the unstressed syllable, for example, in ‘attract’, ‘flannel’, ‘happen’, ‘kennel’, ‘kitten’, ‘standard’, ‘sever’, ‘customer’ and ‘permanent’. Discuss how you say the vowel in the unstressed syllable; sometimes it is softened, sometimes it is like a short ‘er’ sound, sometimes a short ‘uh’ and sometimes a grunt. Discuss how it can be the first, second or third syllable. 7 Breaking words into syllables. ‘Listen to how I say wander. Wan-der’. Pause between the two syllables. ‘I said each part of the word by itself. You copy how I say it. Wan-der’. If students find the imitation difficult, repeat it and remind them ‘I want you to break wander into parts’. Have the students practise on two-, then three- and finally four-syllable words. 8 Dealing with typical types of errors students make. Typical errors in segmenting multisyllabic words and teaching suggestions include: • a difficulty breaking the word into parts, for example, the student segments ‘sprocket’ as ‘sprock-cket’. Repeat the student’s response and discuss how a particular sound has been repeated. Remind the student to think about cutting the word up and saying each part. • the student has difficulty retaining all of the sounds in each part. Have the student practise saying each part after you. • the student inserts or adds sounds. Repeat the student’s response, put the two segments together and show how the student has added sounds. • the student has difficulty with the unstressed vowel, for example, they leave it out or don’t know how to say it. Use the activities described in points four to six above.
131
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
9.6.5 Segment a word into component sounds Segmenting a spoken word into sounds is a critical foundation for learning to read and spell words. 1 Demonstrate how to segment three-sound words. Say, ‘Listen to how I say dog. I say each sound in the word. D-o-g. I cut the word dog up into its sounds. D-o-g’. The students practise segmenting other three-sound words into the separate sounds. Begin with words that have the same rime unit such as ‘mat’, ‘fat’ and ‘rat’. The students can attend to the segmentation process rather than to coping with different sound patterns. As they segment more automatically, move to words that have different rimes. 2 First one out. Arrange students into groups of four. Give each student in a group 20 (and then later 30) counters. Each student in turn hears a word of three or four sounds and puts in the middle of the group the number of counters equal to the number of sounds in the word. If a student answers incorrectly, they take back their counters. The winner is the first student who has no counters left. Gradually move to longer words. 3 Words that have four sounds. In small groups, students take turns to say words that have four sounds or five sounds, etc. The winning student is the one who can continue to suggest words that have the target number of sounds. 4 Difficulty with sounding out three-sound words. If segmenting three-sound words causes difficulty, you can use the following activities: • Tap or touch an item for each sound in the word and teach the student to do this. Begin with three-sound words. Lay out a line of blocks or counters in front of the student. Say, ‘Look what I do with the word “mat”â•›’. Say ‘m’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ and push up a counter as you say each sound. Say, ‘As I say each sound, I push a counter. Now you do it for the word “hit” with your counters’. Apply this to other short words. Talk about cutting the word up into sounds. Ask the student to, ‘Clap for each sound you hear in “camp”â•›’. • Teach the students to ‘stretch out’ how they say a word. Move your hands to show stretching out the word and then cutting the stretched-out word into sounds. Ask the student to listen for the separate sounds in the stretchedout word. Repeat for other three-sound words and move to longer words. • Count the number of sounds in a word. Ask, ‘How many sounds do you hear in the word “cat”?’ As you say each sound, hold up a finger. ‘There are three sounds in cat.’ Repeat for other three- and four-sound words. If the student counts the number of letters rather than the sounds, say, ‘I don’t want you to count the number of letters in each word. Listen to the sounds’.
9.6.6 Teaching sound blending Joining or blending a sequence of sounds into a spoken word is also important for learning to read and spell words.
132
T ea c hi n g wo r d me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
1 Blend a sequence of three sounds to make a word. Say, ‘Listen to these sounds. They go together to make a word. P-i-g. What is the word they make?’ Guide the students to run the sounds together. Repeat for strings of three-sounds and build up to strings of four, five and six sounds. 2 Say us. Give a sound to each of four students standing in a line, for example, ‘d’, ‘f ’, ‘m’ and ‘u’. Each student says their sound. Other students take turns to blend the sounds into a word (or non-word). Variations of this activity include: • asking the students to change positions and repeat the activity • seeing how many real words they can make out of the sounds • having one sound sit down and the students blend the remaining sounds • swapping some of the sounds (students) for other sounds (students) • extending to sets of five and six sounds (that is, with five or six students). 3 What am I thinking of? A student selects an item in the room and, without naming it, says the first two sounds in its name, for example, ‘s-k’. If it isn’t named correctly after two attempts, a third sound is added, for example, ‘s-k-e’ and again two guesses are allowed to name it. If it isn’t guessed, more sounds are added, one at a time. The student who guesses the word is the winner. 4 Blending bingo. Each bingo board has the pictures of up to 20 familiar items. Say a string of sounds for an item on some of the boards, for example, ‘d-o-g’. The students try to find the item on their board.
9.6.7 Delete a sound from a word and say the word left Deleting sounds from a spoken word is an important skill when learning to read and spell words. Useful teaching activities include: 1 How are the words different? Say two words such as ‘drag’ and ‘rag’ and ask, ‘How are these words different?’ Guide the students to see that the ‘d’ has been removed from ‘drag’. Repeat this for other pairs such as ‘flit’ and ‘fit’, and ‘crop’ and ‘cop’. 2 Word matching activities in which students match two words that differ by one sound. Use pairs of picture cards, where the name of one item has one more sound than the other, for example, a picture of a camp and a cap. The students name each picture. They can play snap, memory or bingo with the cards. A student can match two cards when one name has one more sound than the other, for example, ‘car’ and ‘cart’, ‘snap’ and ‘nap’, and ‘brat’ and ‘bat’. 3 Word pairs where one word is missing a sound. The students suggest word pairs where a word has one sound more than the other, for example, ‘clap’ and ‘cap’, ‘tram’ and ‘ram’, and ‘spit’ and ‘pit’. 4 What sound has been dropped? Say, ‘I’ll say a word and drop a sound from it. You tell me the sound I’ve dropped’. Say the word ‘prim’ and then ‘rim’. Which sound has gone? Repeat for other words, dropping off the first sound, then the last sound and then the medial sounds.
133
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
5 Dropping sounds from words. Students delete sounds from words. Introduce the activity as, ‘I am going to say a word and then a sound in the word. I want you to take the sound out of the word and say the word left. For example, “Trap”, “r”. “Tap”. Tap is left’. Vary the sound to be deleted and its position in the word.
9.6.8 Swap one sound for another Students learn to swap or substitute one sound in a word for another, making a new word. An example of the task is, ‘Swap the “m” in “mate” with “l”. What will the new word be?’ Useful teaching activities include: 1 What sound have I changed? Say, ‘I’m going to say a word. Then I’m going to change one sound in it and say the new word. See if you can tell the sound I’ve changed’. Begin by changing the first sound in words and then the last sound, for example, say the word ‘brag’ and then the word ‘crag’. ‘Can you tell which sound I changed?’ If necessary, have the student repeat the two words after you. Repeat this for several pairs of words, such as ‘trim’ and ‘brim’, ‘sack’ and ‘back’, ‘till’ and ‘pill’, etc. Gradually move to changing medial sounds, such as ‘slim’ and ‘skim’ or ‘bust’ and ‘best’. 2 Changing sounds in words. Encourage the student to change sounds in words three or four sounds long. The student hears a word, a sound in the word and another sound and is told, ‘Put a “d” in place of the “m” in “skim”. What word would you get?’ Repeat this in other words, for example, ‘Put an “r” in place of the “h” in “hat”, a “b” for the “s” in “sent”, a “t” for the “l” in “slink”â•›’. 3 Word matching activities in which students match two words that differ in one sound. Set up pairs of picture cards, where the name of one item has one sound different from the other, for example, a picture of a slide and a picture of slime. The students name each picture and use the cards to play snap, memory and bingo. A student matches two cards when one name differs from the other by one sound, for example, ‘slop’ and ‘stop’, or ‘plant’ and ‘plank’.
9.7 Working towards automaticity In all of the activities to develop phonological knowledge, the aim is for students to learn to do the activities described automatically. Effective communicators can extend their vocabulary through their oral language experiences. The focus of the teaching in this chapter has been to teach students to do this, to learn: • new words, what they mean and how they are said • how to link word meanings and to use these links to predict • how to work out the topic of a message from the words they hear.
134
C h a p t er 1 0
Teaching students to comprehend and say sentence meanings Students need to learn to comprehend and use increasingly complex sentences. There are three key aspects you may need to teach: 1 new and more complex sentence meanings, for example, how to link ideas in a cause–effect relationship to describe the order in which two events occur, how to ask and answer questions, and how to give and follow instructions 2 the actions students can use to comprehend and say sentences 3 how to comprehend and use grammatical forms correctly. In this chapter, we describe activities for teaching students to: 1 use their existing knowledge to comprehend and express sentence meanings 2 learn new sentence meanings, new sentence comprehending actions and new grammar.
10.1 Comprehending and talking about sentence meanings 10.1.1 Students recognise and do sentence meanings Below are various activities in which the students can show they understand sentence meanings. Ask the students to: 1 give and follow spoken instructions, first in action comprehension contexts. They hear and do instructions during games and listening comprehension. You can gradually make the instructions more complex. The students: • do or say instructions that involve two or three steps • move from hearing simple verb phrases such as, ‘Move the toys’ to verbs with modals, for example, ‘Would you move the toys, please’. • follow more complex instructions, for example, ‘Make the yellow van follow the car’. You could play Simon says; for example, ‘Simon says the blue van carries sticks’. Students can take turns to be Simon.
135
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
• contextualise sentences and act out variations to them; for example, say, ‘The blue van stops behind the big van. Now do this but with the red van, not the blue van’. 2 select the picture that matches a sentence they hear. Show two or more pictures that show the same items but different relationships. Say a sentence that matches one of them. The students select this one and say the sentence for the other. An example is, ‘Touch the picture that shows:’ The girl with the hat chases the boy.
10.1.2 Students talk about ideas in sentences Encourage students to describe in sentences what they have experienced or seen in action and pictures contexts or heard in a story. 1 A group of students talking about a picture. They take turns to say a sentence about the picture, for example, The yellow truck is driving on the road.
It is carrying some wood. The driver is wearing a hat.
They can talk in this way about the pictures shown in a big book or in photographs. You can do this in several ways: • students spontaneously talk about items in the picture • you can use incomplete sentence frames to probe items • you can probe items in the picture and ask students to talk about these in a sentence, for example, ‘Say this in a sentence’ • ask them to make a ‘photograph’ of it in their heads, obscure the book or photograph from view and ask them to say in sentences what they see. The man is holding …
The man is sitting on a chair with his legs …
2 Students say in sentences what they have know so far about a story they have heard. For the story Monster and the Little Boy Go on a Bus Trip, they can:
136
T eac hi ng students to c ompr e h e n d a n d s ay s e nt e nce me a n in g s
• talk spontaneously in sentences about events that have happened, using pictures from the text or mental images they have made to guide them, and take turns to say in sentences what they remember happening • answer scaffolded questioning, such as: What was the first thing that Monster and the boy did?
They were waiting for the bus.
Say what they did when the bus came.
If the students can’t do this, have them look at the picture and say each part at a time. You may need to give them sentence frames to finish: ‘Monster and the little boy …’. They can also finish sentences they hear to describe particular sentence meanings. 3 Ask students to give instructions that others follow, initially in action comprehension contexts. The students: • say and then do instructions that involve two or three steps • move from saying simple verb phrases such as, ‘Pick up your books’ to ‘Can you pick up your books, please’. • follow more complex instructions, for example, ‘Make the yellow van follow the car’, or they can play Simon says, for example, ‘Simon says the blue van carries sticks’. • contextualise sentences and act out variations to them, for example, say, ‘The blue van stops behind the big van. Now do this but with the red van, not the blue van’. 4 Have students practise asking and answering questions. Encourage them to link matching questions (in sentences) with answers. They can ask and answer particular who, what, where, when, how and why questions: • about events they have done, experienced or observed in the action comprehension context, for example, ‘Where is the blue van?’ or ‘What is the big van carrying?’ • about items or events in pictures or DVDs they see • while listening to a story. After listening to part of Monster and the Little Boy Go on a Bus Trip, for example, you can guide the students to ask and answer these questions: Who sat near the little boy?
Why did the little boy call out to the driver?
Where did Monster and the little boy get on the bus?
Monster and the Little Boy go on a Bus Trip What did the lady say to Monster?
How did Monster feel when he saw the empty seat?
When did Monster stand up in the bus?
137
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
10.1.3 Teaching students actions they can use to comprehend and say sentence meanings To comprehend a sentence, listeners need to retain it in their short-term memory long enough to identify the individual meanings and note how they are linked. They need to use the actions described in 3.4.3. To say a sentence meaning, they need to link the individual meanings in the appropriate way. Sentence comprehending actions you can teach your students to use include: 1 telling themselves what they heard. Ask the students to repeat aloud one or two sentences you say. They can first say them in unison and then take turns to say parts. You can have them play games like Old MacDonald had a farm, and I went window shopping. You can vary the genre, for example, ‘We went to the zoo and we saw …’ or ‘We went to the beach and we saw …’ If students find this difficult, you can scaffold their thinking by adding more cues. You can say the first part of a sentence and have them finish it. You can read a sentence to them twice and have them say it each time. 2 saying the sentences they hear in other ways. When they hear a sentence or see a picture in a story book, they practise saying what was said or shown in different ways. This helps them store and analyse the sentence they hear in their own words. 3 visualising or making a mind picture of one or two sentences they hear and then saying or doing it. To introduce this action, show students a picture and ask them to make a mind photo of it. Obscure it and ask the students to say what they saw. Have them practise this with other events. Read one or two sentences from a story and ask them to make a mind picture of what they heard. Give them time to do this. They should talk in sentences about their picture. Then ask them to do it. Gradually ask them to visualise longer sentences and two or three sentences at a time. 4 imagining the actions they hear being done.’ ‘I want you to listen to the story and imagine you were there. What would you see / feel / hear / do?’ 5 linking the sentence meaning with the topic. After listening to one or two sentences from a story, the students suggest what is its topic or theme. ‘What other things might be said in the story? Where might you hear someone say these things? Who might say them?’ You can teach these sentence comprehending or listening actions in each of the action, picture, listening and speaking contexts. Some recommendations for teaching each action include: 1 Teach your students one of these actions at a time. 2 Have the students apply each action first in familiar contexts and practise them. 3 As they practise each action, encourage them to say what they do in words
138
T eac hi ng students to c ompr e h e n d a n d s ay s e nt e nce me a n in g s
and also to say how it helps them, for example, ‘Making a picture of a sentence helps me see what it says’. Ask them, ‘Did it help to …?’ 4 Gradually guide them to transfer the actions to other situations. 5 Ask your students to say the listening actions they can use before they start to listen to and say sentences. An example is, ‘What things can you do to help you understand each sentence as you listen?’ When they can say, ‘I will say it to myself ’ or ‘I will make a picture of what I hear’, they are more able to plan how they will understand and say sentences. 6 Saying what they do before they engage in a speaking and listening activity helps them to tune themselves in and to remind themselves of the actions to do. They are more able to comprehend and say sentences when they know the actions.
10.2 Teaching students to comprehend and say new sentence meanings When you have decided the types of sentence meanings a student or a group is ready to learn to comprehend, you can teach them using the sentence comprehending or listening actions. Below are activities procedures to teach students to comprehend sentence meanings that link two events in a time relationship. Suppose you plan to talk about one event occurring while another event occurs, for example, ‘While the bus was moving, Monster stood up’, or talk about one event starting after another event had finished, for example, ‘Before you stand up, shake your head’.
10.2.1 Action comprehension You can teach students to say the new sentence meanings in action comprehension contexts. After the students act out each event separately, you say the sentence slowly, do the two actions using toys and have the students do them with their toys. For the ‘while’ sentence meaning, the goal is for the students to understand the two actions by doing or experiencing them. They learn that: • one action begins before the second action and finishes after it • one action goes on or lasts for a shorter time than the second.
‘While the bus is moving Monster stands up.’ The bus is moving
Monster stands up
The bus is moving
139
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
The students learn that when they hear a sentence that has ‘while’ and two actions, they need to work out which of the actions began first and which finished later. Select two familiar actions that the students can easily do at the same time. They do each action sequence you model and talk about it. You could say, for example, ‘While the cat was running, the dog jumped up’, and act it out. As students do this with their toys, you can repeat the sentence. The students repeat the action and say each part as they do it. What you say
‘While the cat was running,
the dog jumped up.’
What the students do
They make their cats run.
They make their dogs jump.
What the students say
‘While the cat was running,
the dog jumped up.’
They still make their cats run.
To help the students to generalise the sentence meaning, you can make minor changes to the sentence and have the students in small groups act out each one in that context, for example: While the bus is moving, Monster jumps.
While the bus is moving, Monster sings.
While the bus is stopped, Monster stands up.
While the bus is turning, Monster jumps.
Still in the action context you can vary the agent in the two-event sentences and ask the students to do the actions, ‘Do this. While Monster is standing up, the white van passes the bus’. Before they actually do the action sequence, you can have them say what they will do first, plan what it will look like when it is happening and then do it. A student can say, ‘Monster is standing up. The white van passes the bus. Monster is still standing up’. You can show how the two actions in each two-event sentences are linked by ‘while’. You can have them transfer the two-event sentence meaning to other contexts, for example: While the girl is reading, the phone rings.
While the music plays, the light comes on.
While you are touching your nose, you stand up.
While you are standing up, you touch your nose.
Ask the students to give and follow instructions that contain ‘while’ about two events in games and listening comprehension. Gradually make the instructions more complex.
140
T eac hi ng students to c ompr e h e n d a n d s ay s e nt e nce me a n in g s
10.2.2 Picture comprehension After teaching the sentence meaning through actions, the students learn to select pictures that show what was said. The two-picture sequences can show the same context, but with the same actions linked in different ways, for example, the student hears, ‘Which of these sets shows: While the girl runs, Monster stands up’, and sees: The girl is running.
Monster stands up.
The girl is running.
Monster stands up.
The girl runs.
Monster still stands.
Initially in the teaching you may need to have the students actually do the actions shown in each sequence and say what they did to help themselves in order to select the correct sequence. As the students learn to talk about two events in the intended way, they can see a typical two-event sequence and describe what they saw, without necessarily doing it themselves.
10.2.3 Listening comprehension context You can also encourage students to develop these sentences for stories they hear. Part of the way through a story they are listening to, they can describe what has happened in sentences using connectives such as ‘while’, ‘after’, ‘before’, ‘because’ and other terms to link events in ways they have learnt.
10.2.4 Learning to use sentence frames for the new sentence meanings You can teach the students to use sentence frames to help them say the relationship between the two events, for example, you can use ‘while’, ‘fast, quick event’ and ‘longer event that started first’ cards shown below. Having done several action sequences that show the meaning, the students describe the two possible ways of talking about the two events and put together the two matching sentence frames using the three sentence-maker cards: One event happens, while another is going on.
While one event is happening, another happens.
fast, quick event
while
while
longer event that started first
longer event that started first
fast, quick event
These sentence-maker cards can be used in all of the contexts and they help the students to organise or put together how they will say the two events in the sentence.
141
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
10.2.5 Teaching students to ask and answer questions using the new sentence meanings For each context, the students can ask and answer particular who, what, where, when, how and why questions for the new sentence meanings, for example: What happened while the bus was moving?
When did Monster jump?
What did Monster do while the bus was moving?
To teach a new question form: 1 introduce it in a meaningful event or picture. Help the students learn the type of information that will answer the question. 2 help students learn how, when and why to ask questions. They can play a version of Old maid or Have you got …? They see a set of pictures. One student has a picture. The other students try to identify this picture by asking that student questions about it. ‘Have you got a picture of the truck carrying the wood?’ ‘Is the driver eating the pie?’
10.3 Teaching students to say and use more complex sentence meanings Students gradually need to learn to comprehend and say more complex sentences. These are the types of sentences described in section 3.4. You can teach various types of new sentence meanings using the types of tasks described above.
10.3.1 The types of more complex sentence meanings you can teach Examples of the more complex sentence meanings are: • comparative relationships: ‘Winter is colder than …’ and ‘Cats are smaller than …’ • spatial relationships: ‘The truck drove in the middle of …’ • temporal sequential relationships: ‘Dinner is after …’ and ‘Summer comes before …’ • inclusive and exclusive relationships: ‘He eats all of his dinner except …’ • cause–effect relationships: ‘I felt warm because …’ and ‘He stayed in bed because …’ • conditional relationships: ‘I will go home if …’ and ‘They will be happy if …’ The following sequence for teaching students new sentence meanings is recommended (Munro 1995): 1 Introduce the sentence meaning as one or more actions are done by the students, either with or without using toys. Demonstrate the actions for the students,
142
T eac hi ng students to c ompr e h e n d a n d s ay s e nt e nce me a n in g s
2 3
4 5
6
who act out the two events and talk about them in their own language. Use actions that are familiar to the students and for which they know the words. The students hear the sequence of actions described in a sentence. They repeat aloud what they heard and do it. They finish incomplete sentences that describe what they did. The students see two events occur and describe what they saw in the correct sentence-meaning form. You may need to scaffold the students to talk about it in the intended way. This will probably include using sentence frames where you provide the types of word cards described above and where you say part of the sentence and the students complete it. The students hear examples of the sentence meaning and select picture sequences that illustrate examples of them. As well, they say a sentence meaning that describes what is shown in a sequence of pictures. The students hear examples of the sentence meaning in listening comprehension contexts and say the sentence meanings with other words, they: • paraphrase the sentence meanings • describe the images or mental pictures they make hearing an example of the sentence meaning • ask and answer questions about the sentence meaning. Guide the students to say and use the sentence meaning spontaneously as part of their regular communication in as many contexts as possible. Link it with other sentence meanings they use.
10.4 Teaching students to comprehend and use grammar The teaching of the conventions used to comprehend and say sentences has generated interest in recent years. Issues that have been debated include whether grammar needs to be taught and, if so, how. Let us first look at the how. A range of teaching approaches has been proposed. Some teach explicitly the grammatical rules, others teach the grammatical rules through tasks that integrate the grammatical form with its meaning or intention. Some approaches assume these will be learnt incidentally through immersion in language use.
10.4.1 What the research says about teaching grammar There is little research that indicates when any one of these teaching approaches is most appropriate. Nor has their value for later language use been established. The majority of studies have investigated the effectiveness of teaching procedures for second-language learning, usually by adults. For second-language learning, successful teaching of sentence conventions was explicit rather than implicit, and focused on and synthesised meaning and form (Norris & Ortega 2000).
143
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
The value of teaching grammar for writing has been researched more than for oral language use. Reviews of the value—for example, the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre Review (Andrews et al. 2004) of over 4500 studies—conclude that teaching grammar (syntax) in English has little effect on the accuracy and quality of written composition by 5 to 16 year olds. You should keep this information in mind when you are planning to teach the sentence conventions. The ICPALER approach recommends teaching the sentence conventions explicitly, if necessary. Given its focus on the use of language to communicate, it recommends that you teach grammar in ways that are meaningful to students. Students are taught to comprehend and express new grammatical forms and to practise known forms first in the action and pictorial contexts. The ICPALER model does not recommend introducing new grammatical conventions as abstract rules. Rather, the focus is on teaching students to learn a new convention initially in specific contexts and to gradually draw out the explicit rules for using sensible sentences based on that form.
10.4.2 A sequence for teaching sentence conventions The ICPALER model recommends the following teaching sequence for any sentence convention: 1 Begin with teaching the meaning described by the convention and introduce specific instances of the convention in these meaningful contexts. 2 Guide students to see the convention as a language pattern and to use it in their regular communication. This is an elaborated version of the successful ‘focus on form’ intervention used for second language teaching by Norris and Ortega (2000). The following sequence uses teaching the passive voice to illustrate the steps: 1 Act out an event or show the students a picture and have them say it using familiar grammar, for example, ‘The truck carries the wood. The man drives the truck’. 2 Say the new grammatical form while you act it out in the action or picture contexts. Point to each item as you mention it. Ask the students to repeat it. For example, ‘The wood is carried by the truck. Now you say it’. Say a sentence frame and ask the students to complete it, for example, ‘Finish this sentence: “The wood is carried …”↜’. Use events the students can see in the context. 3 Say an event in the new form. The students repeat it and act it out or select a picture that shows it. If they find this difficult, return to steps 1 and 2. After they have acted it out or selected the correct picture, ask them to say it again first in a familiar sentence form and then in the new form.
144
T eac hi ng students to c ompr e h e n d a n d s ay s e nt e nce me a n in g s
4 The students see or do events, for example, in doll or toy play in the action context and practise saying the new form to describe what they said or did. 5 Describe some events in the old way and some in the new way. Mix up the sentence meanings. The students decide whether each example is of the old or the new form. After several correct responses, ask them to say how they can tell which is the old way and which is the new way. The dog was bitten by the cat. Two children ate the cake. Roberto was seen by Anna. Tom was lifted by his mother. A young man was driving the car. The boat was tossed by the waves.
6 The students say how the new way of saying the sentence is different from the old way. For example, ‘Both ways tell you something happens. The old way tells you who did it first. The new way tells you who did it last’. They use this to make a sentence frame for the new way. You say an idea in the old form. The students practise saying it in the new form, as shown below. You can use the sentence frames initially, if necessary, to scaffold the new grammar. Gradually remove these as the students provide more of the sentence themselves. old way
‘do’ word
new way is ‘do’ word by
Teacher says The driver eats a pie. The driver opens the door. A dog passes the truck.
Students say A pie is … The door is … The truck is …
7 The students identify examples of the grammatical form in stories they hear and say them in the old form and then in the new form. They practise moving between the two forms. They say when they could use each form and how they could use the new form. 8 The students use the new grammatical form more frequently in their regular communication with others; they are assisted to transfer and generalise the new forms. You can use this framework to teach any new grammatical form. It is recommended that you teach the forms in the developmental order described in Chapter 4.
10.4.3 Teaching the prerequisites for learning the conventions The teaching sequence assumes that students are aware of the different types of words in a sentence, from a grammatical perspective. It assumes that they know implicitly
145
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
that some words are the names of items, some words refer to actions, some words describe the items and some words describe how the actions are done. To know this you need to think abstractly. Some students have difficulty becoming aware of these types of words and don’t extract or see the grammatical patterns and regularities. One way to teach the simple grammatical categories is to make them more concrete. You can use materials to represent them, for example, symbolic pictures. You can use symbolic pictures of a person or object to stand for nouns and pictures of actions for verbs. Pictures for nouns
Pictures for verbs
The students can use these types of pictures to make up sentences, for example: The boy pushes the car.
Attribute blocks that differ in shape and colour can also be used to do this. For example, verbs can be shown by circles and nouns by squares. Different verbs and nouns are shown by different colours. Students learn to use these materials to make sentences. For example, you could use the following symbols for words: Nouns
I (John)
the girl
the cake
Verbs
eat
run
drink
past tense (-ed)
future (will)
want
can
Temporal morphemes Modal verbs
146
the dog
the juice
T eac hi ng students to c ompr e h e n d a n d s ay s e nt e nce me a n in g s
To say ‘I want to eat the cake’, the student can assemble:
Ebbels (2007) found these materials useful for teaching grammatical patterns to students with specific language impairment. The patterns taught included using the ‘-ed’ morpheme to say past tense, showing direct and indirect objects in sentences and asking comparative questions. You could use these types of materials when students have difficulty learning the simple grammatical patterns. The goal here is that the students learn an implicit awareness of simple grammatical categories. We know that particular words can belong to multiple grammatical categories, for example, ‘run’ or ‘drink’. Once students have learnt a simple awareness, they can elaborate and differentiate it.
10.4.4 Using the new conventions in regular language use Obviously, students need a lot of practice using and transferring a new grammatical form and integrating its use. They need time to plan how they will use the form in particular contexts. As with other aspects of language learning, they need to see how their new knowledge about grammar works for them and increases their capacity to achieve their goals. Throughout the teaching, help students see that it allows them to communicate their message more effectively. You may need to guide them to use their new grammatical knowledge in regular language transactions and to integrate it within their communication framework. One type of task used in second-language teaching is consciousness raising. Instead of teaching the grammatical rule directly, the students learn about its features as they explore and negotiate its use in meaningful communication with others. It is as effective as teacher-led grammar lessons and gives opportunities for language exchange (Fotos 1994). It is one way to integrate formal instruction within the student’s communicative framework. When students make errors in their use of grammar that suggest an immature knowledge, help them see how their spoken message does not convey their message effectively and say the correct form. You may have them practise producing this form. Encourage them to continue to communicate orally.
10.5 Teaching sentence meanings and conventions: Where to now? The ICPALER framework stresses the importance of sentence meanings and conventions to the knowledge individuals have about oral language. All learning requires that students be able to build sentence meanings. Without this capacity,
147
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
they would know only individual, isolated items. As we have seen in this chapter, they build more complex sentence meanings from simpler meanings. Look at your classroom or teaching practice. Where in your classroom do students need to use and comprehend sentence meanings? What opportunities exist for students to improve how well they can do this? Do you expect students to learn the new meanings and grammar incidentally and automatically, or do you have explicit teaching to allow them to learn this? What procedures do you use to evaluate and monitor students’ knowledge of sentence meanings? As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, sentence meanings are frequently overlooked in our teaching. The aim of this chapter is to provide teachers with some tools for improving students’ knowledge and learning capacity in this area.
148
C h a p t er 1 1
Teaching discourse, topic meanings and conventions
This chapter focuses on teaching students to understand and use the meaning of a message that extends across a set of sentences. There are two aspects you may need to teach: 1 how to draw out the emerging meaning of a message by linking sentence meanings in acceptable ways 2 how to work out and use the topic of the spoken message. A simple example of a discourse meaning is the meaning of a sequence of actions or events. Children show an awareness of this at an early age when they learn to do a set of actions for a purpose, for example, before going to bed at night or in toy play. To link separate sentence meanings into a discourse you may need to teach students how to: • use sentence connecting words such as ‘and then’ or ‘later’ to form a time sequence when they are telling a story • use synonyms, pronouns and verb tense correctly to link ideas across sentences: synonyms and pronouns need to match the nouns in earlier sentences; verbs need to agree in tense and person • do the comprehending actions for linking two or more sentence meanings; for example, to visualise a sequence of sentences and to imagine the actions being done. They may also need to learn how to work out the topic of a message they hear and how to link to it what they say. As a message continues, its topic may change. They need to know how to detect, respond to and manage this. In this chapter, we will examine teaching students to use discourse meaning and then topic meaning. We look at teaching that integrates them in Chapter 13.
149
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
11.1 Teaching students to understand and use discourse meaning and conventions You can teach the discourse meaning and conventions in the action, picture and listening comprehension contexts and then, as the students’ skills in this aspect develop, expand this to the extended speech context. Before you begin to teach a particular type of discourse meaning, ensure that your students can use the necessary prerequisite meanings. As well, be clear on the specific discourse meaning you will teach and what the students will be able to say and comprehend when they have learnt it.
11.1.1 Learning to talk about and use discourse meaning in action contexts Act out a story that comprises four to six separate events in a context familiar to the students, using toys. Say its title, for example, Sleepy Tom, and tell the story as you do it. The students act it. They make up and tell a matching story with their toys, for example, The rabbit or The fish escapes the shark. Tom was sleeping. He is happy. He snores as he sleeps.
His puppy comes into his room. It leaps up on Tom’s bed.
Sleepy Tom Tom jumps up. ‘Do you want a biscuit, boy’, he says. ‘I’ll get you one’.
It starts to lick Tom’s face. Its tail brushes against Tom’s legs.
Tom wakes up with a jolt. He is alarmed. Then he sees his pet.
You can teach students to: 1 Link sentence ideas in a time sequence. As they do a sequence of actions, have them say what they do. Initially allow them to use immature sentence connectors. This allows them to become aware of sentence connectors. Teach the acceptable ways of saying the sentences, that is, how to use the conventions as a second step. You can teach them to use linking words such as, ‘after that’, ‘suddenly’ and ‘then’ through actions.
Immature sentence connectors Mature sentence connectors
Tom was sleeping on his bed and his pet doggy came in and licked him and woke him up and Tom gave him a biscuit. Tom was sleeping on his bed. The puppy came in. It started to lick Tom’s face. Then it wagged its tail. Soon Tom woke up.
2 Link sentence ideas using pronouns. You can teach pronouns by using ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ or ‘they’ to refer to the items in the action context. You can touch an
150
Tea c hi ng di sc ourse , to pi c me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
item and say both its name and its pronoun, for example, ‘the rabbit’ and ‘it’. You can also use cards that link each pronoun with an item, for example, ‘he’ with a picture of a boy. You should note that many students who do not use pronouns correctly in discourse can use these words in an immature way to refer to specific items in their world. Tom was sleeping on his bed. A puppy came in. It started to lick Tom’s face. It wagged its tail. Tom woke up. To match pronouns with nouns, teacher directs students to look at who is doing the action in successive sentences. Tom was sleeping on his bed. Then the puppy came in. The puppy started to lick Tom’s face. The puppy wagged its tail. Tom woke up.
3 Link ideas to express a consequence or a cause–effect. The students do the linked actions and talk about them, again using language that is familiar to them first. Tom woke up because his puppy licked his face.
11.1.2 Learning to link sentence ideas in picture contexts Use a similar approach to teach discourse meaning in picture contexts. Show either a picture, a sequence of pictures of an event or real-life situation, or a set of photos from an excursion. The students say in sentences what is shown. Alternatively, you can read a big book to the students and then ask them to take you on a journey through the pictures and retell the story. You can teach this using points 1–3 above. For example, tell the story these pictures show:
The farmer dug the ground.
Then he planted some trees.
Now he has fresh apples.
11.1.3 Learning to link sentence ideas in the speech and storytelling contexts On later occasions, ask the students to use and talk about the events they experienced in the action or picture contexts, but without the pictures or toys
151
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
present. The goal here is for students to learn to use the particular discourse meaning you are teaching without the concrete or pictorial materials present to scaffold them. You can ask students to: 1 imagine they were telling someone else about the experience and to give their presentation, two or three sentences at a time. They can have two or three attempts at saying each two- or three-sentence section. Before they begin, they can say the terms they might use. If they are working on linking the sentences in a time sequence, they can say that they might use ‘first’, ‘then’, ‘after that’ or ‘later’. They could have these key words written on cards and select or turn over each one as they use it in their speech. 2 listen to part of a story, a recount or a discussion in which the sentence links are used. Again work explicitly on the particular aspects of discourse you are teaching. Before students begin, they can say the terms they might hear and use. For pronouns, ask them to suggest the pronouns that might be used in the story, suggest to whom or what they refer, and use pronouns and intonation to refer to people or things. For each section of two or three sentences, students visualise what they hear, imagine they were in the context, say or act out what they heard in their own words, or add to a retelling. They extend the text by saying what they think might happen or what they might do or feel as alternatives to what is said in the text. For example: • If you were the little boy, how would you feel? • What would you tell your friend about your trip on the bus? • What do you think the other people on the bus thought about Monster? What might they tell their friends? If the students find this hard, ask them to look at the pictures and think of how they might change. If there are no pictures, give them time to visualise what they hear, talk about that they see and then have them imagine it changing. 3 listen to a story and retell what they remember about it. Each student retells part of the story so far. One student begins and their peers take turns to add to this. Again, work explicitly on the particular discourse meaning and convention you are teaching. Alternatively, you can have students retell what the picture showed. Each student takes a picture and describes it to the group. If each student can see a set of pictures, they can attempt to select the picture being described at any time. 4 listen to two or three sentences from a story that don’t have connectives, such as ‘also’, ‘then’, ‘after that’ or ‘however’. The students suggest what words might be used to link them and why. You can do similar activities using other discourse links such as pronouns or cause–effect indicators. The picture and word cards of each type of discourse link are useful here.
152
Tea c hi ng di sc ourse , to pi c me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
5 listen to a short spoken discourse that misuses the particular discourse aspect that you are teaching. The students say how and why they would correct the discourse. You can have puppets or other dolls saying the incorrect and correct speech. 6 listen for, use and act out the conventions used to narrate. They learn to act out and to say, in the appropriate sequence, ‘Once upon a time there was … They lived in a … The cow was always … One day it …’ They learn gradually to refer to the components of a story genre, for example, the context, the main characters, when it happened, etc.
11.2 Teaching effective discourse comprehending actions What thinking actions can you teach your students to use to help them learn more about discourse meaning and conventions? The key actions are being able to listen and look strategically to infer the topic, to retain and integrate what they have seen and heard in a sequence of sentences and to link this with the topic. You can teach these comprehending actions or strategies at three phases during a listening and speaking episode (Munro & Munro 1994): 1 Getting ready strategies: students plan how they will listen and look. You can teach them to: • decide what details might be mentioned when they hear the title, topic or details, or see a picture of it • decide the type of text they will hear, for example, a story or how to do something • visualise what they think it could be about and say this in sentences • decide the purpose for listening and the questions it might answer; they can ask the who, what, where, when, why and how questions about the topic. Students can work on these in small group or collaborative activities. 2 While listening and looking strategies: you can teach the students to: • make a mental picture of each sentence they hear • put themselves into the context described and use it • say over to themselves what they heard or saw • try to slow down the speaker so that you can get time to do these things. Help students to see the value of doing these actions. As they listen to an extended prose, such as a story, a description or an explanation, pause after particular sentences and ask them to: • say the picture they have made of what they have heard so far and describe it in words • say what might happen next and what might be said next
153
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
• retell or recount what they heard • answer questions about what they heard • select from either sets of pictures or verbal descriptions those they heard. 3 Review strategies: at end of the listening activity you can teach the students to review and consolidate what they have heard, ‘What who, what, where, when, why and how questions can you answer now?’ This is a useful point in the teaching session to have the students practise various short-term memory actions. These activities help students learn and practise various strategies for retaining spoken ideas briefly. The strategies are essential for comprehending what others say, for retaining spoken and visual information, for staying on track and managing your language use, and for planning how you will contribute to a message. Activities include: • Recalling events and characters in the story they heard. Remind students to replay their mental videotape of the story and put themselves into it, imagining they were there. • Progressive memory activities such as, ‘In the story I met …’, a version of I went window shopping. The first student says, ‘In the story I met Monster’. The second student says, ‘In the story I met Monster and the little boy’. The third student says, ‘In the story I met Monster and the little boy. They got on a bus’. You can add to a list of items formats, for example, ‘Harry has a lot of pets. He has a white dog’ or ‘Gina likes eating cakes. One day she eats a patty cake …’. The students can do characteristic actions for each item mentioned. • Memory recognition activities in which the students select from a larger set of ideas they heard. For example, ‘Which of these vans was carrying wood? Which driver was eating a pie?’ Students with good language learning ability use these strategies spontaneously in order to learn. Those with language difficulties don’t use them as easily and are less likely to improve their oral language knowledge by listening. You can teach each listening and looking strategy by: • teaching students to apply it to two sentences they hear and then to more • giving students time to practise using it on several occasions • asking students to say how they do the action and how it makes listening easier • asking students to say the action before they begin to listen and then do it • linking it with other listening strategies; they can keep a list of the things they do when they listen. To teach visualising and verbalising strategies, for example, students look at a picture, make an image of it in their heads, obscure the picture from view and then talk about it. ‘What colour was the driver’s cap? Was there a lot of wood or a little bit of wood on the truck?’
154
Tea c hi ng di sc ourse , to pi c me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
11.2.1 Is the text too complex for your students? You may need to check the level of difficulty of the listening text you are using. Features you can examine are: • How is the information organised? Is the story line, narrative or instruction likely to be familiar to your students? You need to look at how the events are presented and the information is organised. • How familiar are the students likely to be with the topic? • How clearly differentiated are the key ideas? Key ideas that are similar are more likely to confuse comprehension. • Does the text contain visual support for the ideas?
11.2.2 Helping students who lack the confidence to contribute Engaging in communicating the discourse aspects requires students to engage in exchanges that involve two or more sentences and frequently two or more people conversing. Some students may not feel confident about using language. They may be reluctant to initiate a conversation when they don’t understand another speaker or when they realise that they have not been understood. They may not know that not understanding an issue at one point in time is an accepted part of language exchange and that you continue with the exchange to resolve this. You may need to take steps to build their self-confidence and self-efficacy as language users. This may include helping them see that: 1 they can communicate effectively and they can be understood by others 2 using language can work for them and they can achieve their goals more easily by using it 3 they can learn things to say that will help them communicate better. You can teach them how to seek clarification in language exchanges and the scripts they can use to achieve this.
11.3 Teaching students to say and use the topic of a message This section focuses on teaching students to use the meaning of the topic of an oral presentation. Students need to be aware of how knowing the topic can help you: • link what you hear and say, and understand the meanings of words • anticipate what might be said. The teaching needs to guide the students to say and use the topic of a discourse, how to look for it in the speech of others and to comprehend how to use it.
155
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
11.3.1 Use the topic to decide what the presentation will say To help students to infer what a text might say, you can help them to link particular events with a topic and to work out the possible topic from what they hear. 1 Recognise examples of a topic. Students need to learn how to use the topic or its theme as a coat hanger for the ideas. Suggest a topic, such as playing on the beach and give students a set of pictures that include the topic and others, such as things I do in the park. They should sort the cards into two sets. Things I do at the beach
Things I do in the park
This is similar to the activity teaching students to categorise the words they are learning based on meaning (point 2, section 9.3), used to assist students to categorise word meanings in long-term memory. The focus here is on identifying the category or topic. As students categorise each card, they can say a sentence that links the item with the category name or topic. 2 Work out the topic. Many young students will need to learn and practise how to work out the topic when you are speaking and listening. You can give them a preview or forward glimpse of what they might hear and ask them to anticipate what they might hear. You could tell them, for example, ‘We are going to read about a group of children going to the zoo. What might it tell you? What things might you hear?’ You can have the students work out a topic in each of the contexts: • You can do a series of actions, for example, act out driving a car or putting items in a dishwasher. The students need to guess the topic. This is a version of charades. Groups of students can present a charade. The audience is encouraged to talk about what they say and do to work out the topic. • You can show the students a set of four or five pictures on cards that belong to a particular topic, for example, playing at the beach, and ask them to work out the topic. • You can read out five or six words from the first page of a story and ask the students to guess what it is about. Help them retain what was said. You can give them three or four choices from which they can select. • You can have them listen to part of a conversation or a story and guess its topic or theme. Help students retain what was said and pick out the main ideas. You can draw a concept map of the ideas mentioned in the conversation. This helps the students keep track of what was said. Ask, ‘What did you do to work out the topic of a story?’ You can guide them to use the first one or two sentences to make an informed guess about the
156
Tea c hi ng di sc ourse , to pi c me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
possible topic, then test their guess and modify it if necessary. Guide them to say what they do to work out the topic of a text from what they hear and record it as a set of steps, for example: Students listen to one or two sentences
Students listen to more of the text
Where do these things fit in with my experiences? What do they remind me of? What are they about?
What is the main idea for them? What is the title? What else might they tell me?
First I make a picture in my mind of what I hear and act it out.
Do I need to change what I thought the topic was?
• You can make word or picture cards that specify a topic. Each group of two or three students takes a card and makes up a small speech about the topic. Their peers need to guess the topic. Examples of the topics could be: fast food, pets, watching TV and the park. • You can ask the group that worked out the topic for a speech, ‘How do you work out what it was about? What were the clues?’
11.3.2 How does knowing the topic help you? Mention a topic and ask the students what ideas might be mentioned. You could, for example, show them a big book titled The Farm Concert (Cowley 2006) and ask them to: • make a picture in their minds about what it might tell them and then say in sentences what they picture • think about what might be done in the story, ‘Imagine you were at the animal concert. What would you see or hear? How would you feel?’ • suggest the who, what, when, where, why and how questions it might answer for them • suggest words that might come up in the text • say how it might start and what it might tell them early in the story • say how it might finish. Guide the students to bring together what they know now and to see that knowing or guessing the topic helped them know this, for example: It is about how some farm animals had a concert.
It might tell us the names of the animals and what they sang.
Knowing the topic of a message can also help communicators to stay on the topic and say things that are relevant to the direction of the exchange. A useful activity
157
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
is story completion in which you give the first few sentences in a story and the students take turns to add to it. Sometimes you can tell them the topic and on other occasions not. Record the presentations and have the students listen to them. Ask them to select the ones that seemed to flow better. A second useful activity that encourages students to listen for the topic is a version of the radio station switching activity. Three messages, for example, bathing your baby, changing the oil in your car and planting vegetables, are mixed up. The students listen to the mixture and categorise each sentence as coming from one of the messages. They can make up their own versions of this. Throughout these activities ask the students to say what they did to work out the topic of the actions, pictures or the spoken message.
11.3.3 How the topic influences the ideas in the text When you begin to engage in an oral language exchange, you believe that some words, sentences and discourse ideas are more likely than others. Give the students the topic of a text and then ask them to suggest words and phrases, and sentences that could be in the text. List the students’ suggestions. Then ask them to rate the words and phrases that would be more likely. Say each word and ask them to suggest whether it is more or less likely. Repeat this with the sentences they suggest. Read the text and have them check their predictions. Help the students see that whenever they hear the title or topic of a text, some words or sentences are more likely than others. Ask, ‘How does this affect how you will listen to a text in the future?’
11.4 The conventions for using the topic Speakers of English signal the topic of a message in various ways, for example: • They mention it at the beginning of the message, ‘ Today I am going to tell you about my …’ • They repeat it, often with added emphasis, ‘and so the little red hen did it herself’ • They refer to aspects of it at a time, ‘The first thing the King’s cat did … the second thing the King’s cat did …’
11.4.1 Referring to the topic when you speak You can teach students to use the topic conventions in their speech in a range of ways. It is useful to give each convention a descriptive name: • mentioning the topic at the beginning of the message is the introductory sentence rule • repeating it throughout the message is the saying again rule • referring to aspects of it at a time is the bit at a time rule.
158
Tea c hi ng di sc ourse , to pi c me a n in g s a n d c o n v e nt io n s
One useful activity is based on the topic cards described earlier. Each group of two or three students takes a card and makes up a small speech about the topic. They practise using each topic convention in turn. For the fast foods topic, for example, they can practise using: • the introductory sentence rule, ‘Today we are going to tell you about our favourite fast foods’ • the saying again rule, repeating ‘We love our fast foods’ throughout the message • the bit at a time rule, ‘The first favourite food we love is …’, ‘Our second favourite fast food is …’
11.4.2 Learning to listen for the topic You can teach students to listen for the topic conventions in messages they hear. You can have them listen to a conversation or a story and use the conventions to guess its topic or theme. You can also ask them to name each convention they hear.
159
C h a p t er 1 2
Teaching students how to use language to achieve their purposes and to interact socially The third aspect of the ICPALER model relates to what language users know about how to use language to achieve their purposes. In other words, it is how they make language work for them. Examples of the range of purposes for which we use oral language are discussed in Chapter 5. There are two related areas of learning and teaching where the P component is important. The first is students learning to manage and direct their thinking and behaving appropriately in the classroom and other contexts. A goal of contemporary education is that students learn to be autonomous learners, able to manage and direct their learning activity. This requires the development of selftalk or inner language. Students who do not develop the P aspect of the ICPALER model are less able to develop as independent, self-organising learners. Instead they need to be managed and directed to learn by others, usually the teacher. When the external direction is not present, they are disorganised, impulsive and less likely to attend and remain on task. A second area where the P component is important is students behaving in negative, disruptive ways that require the use of classroom management procedures. Teachers generally communicate the rules of acceptable social interactions in classrooms through speech. Discipline problems arise in a class when the student doesn’t either understand how language is used in social interactions or when the goals of the student clash with those of the teacher. Many students need to be assisted to improve how they use oracy to work for them and to achieve their purposes and goals. A student may want to make friends with peers. To do this they need to use oral language in a range of ways: to initiate and maintain conversations with peers; to speak in ways that their peers understand; to respond and adjust to what others say; to extend a conversation; to judge how much information to give; and to express their goals or motives. If they can’t do these things effectively, they are more likely to be rejected by their peers.
160
using language to achieve students’ purposes and to interact socially
12.1 Teaching to scaffold purpose learning The teaching for this aspect aims to optimise students’ ability to use their knowledge of the meanings and conventions of language in social contexts so that they are empowered to speak and listen most effectively. This includes teaching them to share their thinking and feelings, to use their language selectively according to the context or situation at any time and to express their goals and intentions.
12.1.1 Scaffolding students to recall what they know The P aspect requires students to use what they have learnt about the ideas and conventions aspects of knowledge in an integrated way. They need to recall and use the appropriate word and sentence meanings and conventions, for example, for different purposes. To learn to use language to play with peers or to participate in group learning in their classroom, they need to recall what they know about relevant ideas and conventions. Your teaching may need to help some students to recall this knowledge. Immature or ineffective recall or application of what they have learnt may explain why some students haven’t learnt it so well in their past. Your teaching needs to help them recall the relevant aspects of what they have learnt and guide them to apply it. Put bluntly, you may need to pull or draw out from their memory what they know and guide them to link it with the present situation. You may need to remind students of what they have learnt earlier, and how and where it fits in the present context.
12.1.2 Scaffolding students to retain what they know A second key issue for your teaching is to support the students to retain what they know long enough to use it in the present situation. Having recalled what they know, you need to keep it in their awareness or thinking space long enough for them to link it with items in the current context, such as their goals. This could be playing with peers at recess time or taking part in a classroom discussion. Some of your students may not have learnt this aspect of the ICPALER model effectively in the past because of short-term memory difficulties. Your teaching needs to keep the ideas alive in the students’ minds, that is, to scaffold them to use various short-term memory actions or strategies so that they retain briefly the relevant knowledge and make relevant links. You may need to ask them to repeat sentences they have just heard, link key words they are using with their images or to recall in order the events that had just occurred by visualising them. This teaching will assist students to link what they know with particular situations and goals they have.
161
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
12.1.3 Scaffolding students to attend to the auditory information A third issue for your teaching is assisting the students to deal with the auditory perceptual demands of teaching contexts. The P aspect of the ICPALER framework requires students to learn in a range of real-life contexts that may have multiple distracting sources of information. To learn effectively in these contexts, students need skills for attending and discriminating relevant from irrelevant auditory and visual information. Some of your students may have had difficulty learning the P aspect earlier due to difficulties in this area. Your teaching may need to scaffold them to attend selectively and stay focused on particular information, to attend to a message in the presence of interfering information such as background sounds, to discriminate effectively between information sources, and to perform specific auditory skills such as localising a spoken message.
12.1.4 Teaching purposes from simple to complex For the convenience of teaching, a knowledge of the purposes of language use can be divided into several areas. In each area, the teaching needs to allow this knowledge to be acquired developmentally. For managing and directing language use, for example, students learn these skills initially for short, spoken episodes about concrete, familiar topics that involve one or two others. Over a period of years, they learn to apply this to more complex speech about more sophisticated topics for longer periods and in more complex social interactions. Your teaching needs to take this in account. For any text, the sequence for teaching the four aspects is: Teaching students to manage and direct their language use Teaching students to adjust to context and audience
Teaching students to use language for different goals
Teaching students to listen and speak between lines
12.1.5 Teaching students to link the oral language with their body language The P aspect of the ICPALER model involves students linking their feelings and emotions with what they say and hear. A key part of the teaching is to help them link their speaking and listening with the body language and actions they use. How they move their heads and hands, how they stand or sit, and the expressions on their faces are all as important as what is said. The teaching needs to help the students to link these two ways of sending a meaning. Teaching the components of the P aspect in the action context, having
162
using language to achieve students’ purposes and to interact socially
the students imagine themselves in a scenario and acting out what they say, and linking actions with people’s expressions in the picture comprehension contexts will be important for each component of P.
12.2 Teaching students to manage and direct their language use The four components you need to teach here are how and why to: 1 2 3 4
start, maintain and end a conversation take turns in an exchange stay on a topic use the context to interpret terms such as personal pronouns.
You can teach each of these components at a time and allow the students to gradually automatise how they use each. You can teach each component in the following sequence: Teach in an action or picture context
Teach in a listening comprehension context
Teach in a speaking context
12.2.1 Teaching in an action or picture context You may need to teach students the four main ways in which they manage and direct their use of language. You can teach each way first in action contexts using toys to act out two short scenarios involving a language exchange: one in which the exchange is effective and one in which it isn’t. The students watch each scenario, identify the unacceptable parts, show how these could have been done more effectively and act out acceptable ways of using language with their toys. You can have your students act out effective ways of: 1 starting, maintaining and ending a conversation: act out situations in which an attempt is made to start a conversation by a doll that (1) physically challenges a second doll, (2) begins by shouting ‘Hey you’ to a second doll, and (3) politely approaches a second doll. 2 taking turns in an exchange: act out situations in which turns are and are not taken in exchanges. 3 staying on a topic: act out short exchanges in which two dolls do or don’t stay on a topic and discuss how this helps or doesn’t help the speakers to understand each other. 4 using the context to interpret terms: act out a short exchange that includes personal pronouns such as ‘he’. The students say who or what is being intended by each pronoun.
163
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
12.2.2 Teaching in a listening comprehension context You can also teach students to listen to language exchanges and analyse how communicators use one or more of the four ways of managing and directing their use of language. Useful types of activities include the following: 1 Record short conversations between two or more speakers. Include positive and negative examples of points 1–4 above in each conversation. Students listen to each conversation and decide how it can be improved in points 1–4. They can suggest what particular characters may do or say to improve their communication. 2 Record short segments of a story and ask students to say what or who is intended by particular pronouns. Include segments that: • contain errors, such as misuse of pronouns and errors in verb tense agreement. Ask students to detect and correct these. • use nouns where pronouns could be used. Ask students to detect where pronouns could have been used and to suggest what they could be. 3 To teach students to stay on the topic, have them listen to: • a conversation that is actually two conversations you have run together. The students decide where the topic changes and what might have been said that was on the first topic • an incomplete story and suggest how it might be continued • a topic or a name of a story and take turns to say sentences that allow the story to build. They need to say sentences that retain the topic.
12.2.3 Teaching in a speaking context Students practise initiating, maintaining and ending a short conversation with peers. They begin by imitating particular expressions and then vary these. They apply this in doll play or suggest how a person in a story they are listening to might converse about a topic. Explicit teaching here is necessary for many students. They need to be scaffolded to implement the four components and to use each independently. Some students will learn to implement these in familiar situations and then to transfer them. The students say how they can manage their speaking and listening. Teach them to use self-talk if necessary to tell themselves how to behave effectively while listening and during conversations and language exchanges. When I am talking with other people, I will listen to what they say. I won’t interrupt them. I will let them say what they want to.
164
using language to achieve students’ purposes and to interact socially
12.3 Teaching students to adjust to context and audience Your teaching here needs to help students to: 1 see the world from the perspective of others and be aware of the need to take account of their audience, for example, what the listeners know about the topic, how interested they will be in the topic and how well they can attend, focus and listen 2 take account of the context in which they speak, for example, how long they will have and if the audience can interact and interrupt them as they present 3 select words and conventions that are appropriate to their audience and context 4 understand that when they are listening to an exchange, the speaker has selected the words they are using and how they are speaking, either intentionally or intuitively. To teach students to judge how much information they need to give in a language exchange, such as conversing or discussing, you can use the activities below. 1 Students listen to a three-minute recount about a familiar topic given by a student, for example, my pet. When the recount is finished, they say what else they need to know about the pet. The speaker provides the additional information and says what additional things they might need to say in the future. 2 Students listen to three-minute recorded recounts of familiar topics. The recounts differ in how they take account of what the students know. They range from providing largely redundant information to information that is beyond the comprehension of the students. The students evaluate each in terms of how well it accounts for what they know and how they would improve it. They develop a checklist for evaluating an exchange in this way. 3 While listening to a story, students discuss how different characters see the same event differently. In The Little Red Hen, for example, they can discuss what the cat, the hen, the dog and the goose may have thought about the goose’s gossiping or the hen’s need to work all the time. Introduce sentence frames that focus on this, for example, ‘How does the cat see this event? Put yourself in the shoes of the goose. How does the goose see it?’ As well, encourage the students to discuss topics for which different students have different and often opposing views. Have them recognise the multiple views. The focus here is on students seeing the world through other people’s eyes and understanding that others can think differently. Encourage them to put themselves in the shoes of other people. Being able to understand topics from the perspective of others is important for effective social interactions and for participation in classroom learning.
165
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4 Prior to giving a three-minute recount of a familiar topic to a group of peers, the student says how they could decide what the peers already know and how this could change what they will say. For the topic visiting a dairy farm, for example, the student might say they want to know whether peers have had a similar experience. They might discover this by asking the group initially: • Where do milk, cheese and cream come from? • How do farmers get the milk from the cows? 5 Students listen to or watch short conversations between two students about a familiar topic. As they listen to each, they decide how well each speaker took account of what the listener knew. They note whether the listener lost interest or became bored. They can modify the evaluation criteria they used in point 2 above. ‘How often did the speaker say things that the listener knew? How often did the speaker say things that the listener didn’t know at all?’ The students suggest how they would speak differently. Different pairs of students show how they would have a conversation on the same topic. 6 Students engage in short conversations in which they practise being interested in and responding to topics chosen by others. You can teach them to respond actively to topics initiated by others, for example, to anticipate and to ask themselves ‘I wonder what they will say or what will happen next?’ 7 Teach students to modify the ways in which they talk to take account of the roles of significant others. They can practise, for example, recounting an experience to peers who are acting as parent, teacher, policeman or friend. When they communicate in each context, have them discuss what would be appropriate or inappropriate things to say and how to say them. 8 As well, students listen to short conversations between a child and a significant other. They are told who the significant other is and decide whether the language used is appropriate. Where it is inappropriate, they suggest more acceptable ways of communicating. 9 Students practise modifying how they will talk briefly to a small group about a topic, depending on whether the group knows it well or not well. They can practise planning what they will say and how they will guide the group along with them. They can practise using relevant opening sentences, for example, ‘You all know about … Well I’m going to tell you about something I …’ 10 Students say the actions they will take to make a presentation about a familiar topic fit an audience and a context, as shown below. When I am asked to make a short presentation, I will try to work out how much information I need to give. Would these listeners know about this topic? Would they have had the experience I will talk about? Will they have heard the story?
166
using language to achieve students’ purposes and to interact socially
11 Students say how they can adjust to different audiences and contexts. Before they enter an unfamiliar context or one in which they feel uncomfortable—for example, new play situations, a large space with several sources of distracting information, meeting people they don’t know, learning new knowledge or skills—they say what they could do to be most successful. When people are telling me what to do, I will listen carefully. I will tell myself what they say to do and think of doing it. I will watch what other people do. When I am playing with Ava I will share and wait for my turn. I won’t boss Ava around.
12.4 Teaching students to use language for different goals Your teaching here needs to help students to comprehend the goals of others for speaking and listening, and to use language to achieve their goals. Sometimes the goals will be explicitly stated and the speakers and listeners need to identify them. In other exchanges, they will need to infer the goals for communicating. Most children have goals for communicating long before they begin school. Their goals are usually egocentric. They speak or listen, for example, in order to get something that they want or to do something they would prefer. Around the age they begin school, their goals for communicating become more sophisticated. Their goals can include: 1 to tell you how I feel (scared, happy, sorry, interested, angry) 2 to tell you what I would like to do 3 to avoid appearing to be (wrong, silly, slow, unpopular) 4 to make you feel (scared, happy, sorry, interested, angry) 5 to play with you 6 to be your friend 7 to show you that I know that … 8 to make you believe I am (clever, strong, fast, good, bad) at … 9 to know more about …; or to be able to do …; or to be able to (touch, feel, see) … 10 to change what I am doing. You may need to teach students not only to communicate these types of goals orally but also to recognise and comprehend them in the exchanges of others. To teach students to recognise and comprehend the goals of others in oral exchanges and to communicate their goals, you can use the activities following.
167
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
12.4.1 Teaching in an action context You can teach students to use language to communicate goals in action contexts. Useful activities include: 1 Select one of the goals in the list of 1–10 on page 167, for example, to tell others you feel scared. Act out the conversation of a doll that tells listeners this. Act and speak in a way that stresses or over-emphasises the goal. ‘What does the doll say and how might the doll say it? What words might it use?’ The students act out this and other goals. They suggest why particular actors in videos said what they did say and what their goals or motives might have been. 2 Select one or two of the goals from the list. Tell the group the goals you have selected. Ask the students in groups of two or three to act out—in their speech and their actions—one of the goals in a short conversation. The other students need to decide which goal is being enacted. They say how they made the decision. 3 What are useful ways of getting what you want? Have students practise acting out and saying how they would use speech to achieve goals 1–10 from the list in acceptable ways; for example, to invite someone to play with them or to ask someone to share an object with them. Develop these as self-scripts or as sentence frames that students can use to communicate their goals.
12.4.2 Teaching in a speaking or listening comprehension context You can teach students to use language to communicate goals in speaking– listening contexts. They infer the goals of others and express their goals. Useful activities include: 1 Students listen to part of a big book story, such as The King’s Cat (Tarlton 1974). After the first few pages they are asked: • How they think particular characters felt, for example, how did the King or the cat feel? • Why they think the King or the cat felt like this? • What the King or the cat wanted to happen? • Why did the King or the cat say or do what they did? The aim is for the students to put themselves in the positions of characters in the text, and infer how they felt and their motives for saying and doing what they did. Repeat this activity with several stories. Why do you think the cat climbed up the tree and wouldn’t get down?
How do you think the King felt when he knew the cat was up the tree? What did he want to happen?
Why do you think the King begged the cat to get down from the tree?
Why do you think the Queen ordered the cat to get down from the tree?
Why do you think the cat stayed up the tree?
What did the King want to happen?
168
using language to achieve students’ purposes and to interact socially
2 Students listen to recordings of short conversations (up to three minutes long) between peers or between you and one or more peers. They discuss: • each speaker’s goal, what the speaker wanted to happen and how they showed this • each listener’s goal, what each listener wanted to happen and how they showed this • how they worked out each goal • other ways of speaking and listening, if appropriate, in that situation. 3 Students select a situation in which they engage regularly, for example, eating breakfast, playing with friends, getting ready for bed, or going somewhere in the car. They identify in the situation: • some of their goals and how they try to make them happen by speaking and listening • the goals of others in the situation • how they feel when their goal doesn’t happen • how they could let people know their goal more effectively. 4 Prior to beginning a particular activity or going on an excursion, have the students think ahead to the goals they might have in the context, for example, ‘What sorts of things might you want to do or say?’ Students suggest possible goals and say how they might achieve them and the ways in which they will talk and act. 5 Gradually build up a list of the goals that occur in the lives of students and the ways of speaking, listening and acting that go with each. What would each goal sound like in how a person talks and what they say? Lead them to answer questions about how you can decide the goal of speech. 6 Students say the actions they will take so that what they say will help them to get what they want. When I am listening to what others say, I will try to work out why they are saying it. What do they want to happen? When I am talking and listening, I will think about what I want to happen.
12.5 Teaching students to listen and speak between the lines To teach students to recognise and comprehend language being used in nonliteral ways, you can use the following activities.
169
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
12.5.1 Teaching the students to recognise and respond to nonliteral language In your teaching, you need to give students the opportunity, tools and time to reflect on and to use: 1 humour and to invent and tell jokes for peers 2 sarcastic remarks, where what is said is the opposite of what is intended; for example, ‘That was very clever of you!’ 3 non-literal comments that are relevant to the speaking–listening context, when a student gives an unexpected response and the teacher asks, ‘Where did that come from?’ It is necessary that in your teaching here you help the students: 1 recognise that the person doesn’t mean exactly what they said and that you need to think about why they said it 2 work out what it could mean; for example, did the teacher say it when they meant the opposite, did they say it to be silly or to make you laugh? 3 work out the difference between literal and non-literal language. One way of doing this is to follow the non-literal statement immediately with the literal statement and ask them to work out what the non-literal one means; for example, to follow, ‘That was very clever of you!’ with ‘It was a silly thing to do’.
12.5.2 Teaching the students to talk about ideas in imaginative ways and comprehend imaginative reference to ideas For a story that students have heard, or events that they have seen, ask the students to suggest how the outcomes may have been different: • if the events had occurred in other contexts, for example, what if the animals in The Little Red Hen lived in the city, where you wouldn’t find wheat seeds? • if the key characters were different in particular ways, for example, what if the cat in The Little Red Hen hadn’t been so lazy or if the wheat hadn’t grown? • if key elements of the story were changed, for example, what-if the wheat in The Little Red Hen hadn’t grown and the little red hen couldn’t have made the cake? Ask the students to engage regularly in this type of what-if thinking when they listen to or read a story.
12.5.3 Teaching in the pictorial context Have the students look at pictures that show particular events and have them ‘dig under’ the pictures to infer why the events occurred. Scaffold their thinking and point out options that they could ask themselves. Examples are the goose gossiping to neighbours in The Little Red Hen and the King begging the cat to come down from the tree in The King’s Cat:
170
using language to achieve students’ purposes and to interact socially
• Why do you think the goose gossiped? Could she have been unhappy? Could she have thought she didn’t have many friends? • Did the King think if he shouted at the cat, that it would make it more scared? Teach the students to move from the observable features in a picture to the implied underlying meaning, to infer people’s thinking and intentions, and to make sensible predictions.
12.5.4 Teaching the students to use and comprehend common idioms and metaphors in speech Students hear idioms such as ‘by the skin of your teeth’, ‘he’s pulling your leg’, ‘don’t drag your feet’ or ‘keep your nose to the grindstone’. They are often used by teachers for classroom management and control purposes. Some students need to be taught what these mean. In your teaching you may need to: 1 ask the students to describe the picture they make in their minds of the idiom 2 discuss what each might mean and to point out it doesn’t mean exactly what it says, ‘The image they tell us is not what we are meant to do’ 3 discuss why it is used and when they might expect to hear other people saying it 4 have the students practise using each of the common idioms. You can teach one or two of these each week. Students can draw a picture of what each one says and a picture of what it means. They can practise using it in their dialogue with peers. Other examples you may want to include in your teaching are: 1 can’t make heads or tails of it 2 down in the dumps 3 keep an eye out for me 4 you’ve got your wires crossed 5 be here on the dot 6 keep your chin up 7 it’s raining cats and dogs 8 she knows it backwards and forwards 9 you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill 10 give me a hand.
12.6 Teaching an integrated purposes aspect Learning to comprehend and use the purposes aspect of the ICPALER framework is critical for effective communication. It also provides a critical foundation for
171
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
learning generally. Students need as much practice as possible in learning the components and using them in an integrated way. Some key suggestions for helping the students practise the planning and see how it works for them include: 1 Let students know they have time to plan what they will say about how to achieve their social outcomes. 2 Stop the world for five minutes. Allow students to ‘take back’ what they said, to ‘stop the world’ and to follow an alternative pathway. This allows them to learn how to modify their language to achieve an alternative goal or to follow an alternative pathway to the goal. 3 Ask the students to tell you what they see in their minds about a situation. Sometimes students feel they can use language effectively to deal with a social situation or problem. When they think there are situations in which they can’t communicate effectively, allow them to say what they see in their minds and what they see as a solution or what they would like to achieve as a solution. This often acts as a bridge to them communicating effectively about the situation. We noted at the beginning of this chapter the negative outcomes when this aspect of oral language teaching is neglected. Students are less able to use language effectively to communicate their thoughts and feelings or to manage and direct their learning. They are also more likely to behave in ways that warrant behaviour management. The focus of this chapter is on the explicit teaching of this knowledge and also its explicit learning by students. The ICPALER model recommends teaching each of the components described here in an explicit, systematic program. A weekly teaching plan would specify those parts of the purposes you would teach, the selftalk you would teach to help the students to learn each purpose, and the student behaviours or outcomes you would be targeting.
172
C h a p t er 1 3
Teaching that integrates using the meanings, conventions and purposes So far we have focused on teaching separately each type of meaning, and its conventions and the purposes for communicating. Communicators use these aspects in an integrated way. A listener makes decisions about all of the types of meaning at once; young language users learn to do this. It is part of the AL aspect of the ICPALER model, the ability to learn language. Some students do not show this integration. They may concentrate or draw on some types of meaning more than others. Each type of meaning contributes separately to their overall understanding. Students who use only part of the information do not form an overall meaning. The need to teach students to integrate what they have learnt is often ignored or neglected in language programs. Sometimes teachers assume it will happen automatically. For many students, it doesn’t. Many will need teaching that guides them to synthesise the various aspects and to build a model of the spoken text in which they are participating. In this chapter, we look at how to teach readers to integrate and use the various aspects. They need to be guided to integrate what they have learnt and to learn how to do it for themselves. These types of activities in which students practise using all of the language knowledge they know in real-setting situations are sometimes referred to as communicative output activities. They frequently involve students working together to plan and complete a task or to resolve a problem. They may, for example, tell a story or present a discussion. To foster integration, the teaching strategies need to: 1 guide and direct students to link together or integrate various aspects they have learnt separately; the teaching cues or directs them to link aspects in particular ways. It guides them to see that word meanings are determined by sentence meanings and that the topic helps you interpret sentences.
173
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
2 give the students time to do this and to reflect on what they did 3 scaffold them to recall knowledge from their long-term memory, to retain knowledge in their short-term memory and to use the auditory processing strategies described in Chapter 6 4 encourage them to think about, talk about and use the integrated outcome and the process of integrating. When do you teach integration? It is recommended that you do it regularly, with almost every oral language session having time set aside for integration. This ensures that students are forming a synthesised oral language knowledge in small increments. The integration can be done using a range of oral language genres. The most useful for younger students are the narrative, the recount, the expository and the conversational genres. In this chapter, we examine initially how you can teach students to comprehend and use the narrative genre. Comprehending and expressing narrative text will be used to bring together the meanings, conventions and purposes you have taught as part of the ICPALER framework.
13.1 How the narrative genre contributes to learning The narrative genre is recommended here for several reasons: 1 Thinking in narrative ways is important for living generally. Students learn to look for and to use the context, main characters and plot, and to detect the gradual emergence of a problem or issue, its solution or resolution and its ending. To do these things they need to link ideas in time and location, and to recognise consequential and causal relationships. 2 Some of the language actions they need to use include checking and monitoring how well they understand what they hear and say, and modifying it where necessary. They link the theme with the dialogue, think ahead and back track over what was said earlier. They infer about characters, their goals, characteristics and actions, and link them. 3 Young children meet the narrative genre in a range of contexts: in listening to and telling stories; television viewing; and in structured and unstructured play. Teaching the genre assists them to structure information and to improve their recounting and conversing. 4 It scaffolds early literacy comprehension (van den Broek et al. 2005). A young student who can understand narrative text knows what to look for as they read a text. They can use this knowledge to organise and link the ideas they read. 5 Some children begin school with an immature narrative knowledge of English. They may need more learning opportunities in the action and picture contexts with the additional sources of meaning. Some may need the teaching to proceed in smaller steps, with more feedback.
174
integrating the meanings, conventions and purposes
13.2 Teaching an understanding and use of narrative text Young children’s understanding and use of narrative text can be improved by directed comprehension teaching. Useful teaching activities for students in the early years include story mapping (Baumann & Bergeron 1993), explaining how to use the main story elements (Garner & Bochna 2004), retelling activities (Morrow 1985), and direct-narrative comprehension strategy instruction (Paris & Paris 2007). You can implement the teaching in the action, picture, listening and speaking, and speech and storytelling contexts.
13.2.1 What do you need to teach? The teaching uses the key elements of a narrative text structure as the locations where the integration occurs, as shown in the figure below. The context or setting and the main characters
The initiating event
The issue or problem
How it is resolved
The ending
The goal of teaching is that students learn to use these elements. Initially, you will probably need to scaffold them to do this. You can gradually guide the students to use each element independently by working through the teaching sequence below. Scaffold students to integrate the aspects of the ICPALER model around the element.
Model how to integrate the aspects. The students practise it, saying what they do.
The students say what they will do to integrate the aspects and practise doing it.
The students apply this broadly.
You can teach the scaffolding and the actions the students will tell themselves to do for each element by working through the questions in the figure below. The context or setting and the main characters
The initiating event
Where does the story happen? Who are the main characters?
What causes the problem in the story?
The issue or problem
How it is resolved
The ending
What is the problem?
How is the problem fixed?
How does it finish?
175
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
To teach the students to integrate around the context or setting and main characters, for example, you can: • tell them to answer the questions shown in the diagram below • model asking them and have them repeat the questions and then answer them • guide them to ask and answer the questions • practise asking and answering them. What sort of story is it: scary, funny, happy or sad?
What words could I use to describe where it happens or the main people in it?
The context and the main characters How will I describe the main people in sentences?
How will I say the story to make it (scary …)? What do the listeners know about the topic?
Students can use these questions to draw together what they know about the various aspects of oral language for each element in a narrative. For each element, they can plan what they know for each aspect and then bring them together. You can teach them to integrate their oral language knowledge for speaking and understanding in each of the contexts. For each element of a narrative, you can begin in the action context where you scaffold the students’ activity, and move gradually towards the listening comprehension and extended speaking contexts where they practise using them independently.
13.3 Teaching integration in the action comprehension context In this context, you teach students to tell and listen to narratives presented with accompanying actions that support the meaning. The actions assist the integration process in several ways: 1 They provide a second source of meaning for the listener or observer and for the speaker. 2 They assist the speaker in recalling key words; we discussed in Chapter 9 how doing meaningful actions can assist you to recall the words that are linked with them. 3 They assist the speaker to link individual meanings into sentences and they assist listeners to comprehend them. 4 They help the speaker retain the ideas in their short-term working memory. 5 Doing actions can often slow down the communication so that the speaker has time to plan and consolidate what they will say next and so that listeners have time for processing the language.
176
integrating the meanings, conventions and purposes
Act out a story as you tell it to your students. In addition to this, focus on guiding the students to bring together key aspects of oral language you have been teaching.
13.3.1 The context for the action stories Your action story can take the form of a role play in which you act out what each character does. The action stories the students create can be about a person on TV, a favourite story or a film, a pet, a fireman going to a fire or a lion in the zoo. Students work on each action story in groups of two or three. Each student takes on the role of one or more characters as they retell part of it.
13.3.2 Pre-listening strategies Before you begin, tell the students the story’s title and show them one or two of the toys that you will use to tell the story. Ask them to: 1 predict words that may be in the story 2 say in sentences what the animals suggest and use in sentences some of the words they predicted 3 talk about the events that might happen. You can encourage them to put themselves into the context and imagine they were there. What would they feel, see, hear or do? 4 suggest how it might be read to them; what the story might sound like 5 put all of this into a possible story; different students suggest what the story might say. These actions help the students to draw together what they already know about this topic in an integrated way. They can link and integrate new knowledge into this. It provides a starting point.
13.3.3 While-listening strategies It is also useful for the students to say what they will do as they listen to and watch a story being acted out. Ensure that they mention actions that will help them to integrate the ideas they hear, for example, they will ‘say sentences over to themselves’, ‘watch what is going on when they hear new words’ and ‘make a picture in their minds of what they are hearing’. If they say what they will do, they will be more likely to do it.
13.3.4 Modelling the storytelling Modelling the storytelling is acting it out for the students. Decide the elements of the narrative you will scaffold, the element/s for which you will teach student self-talk and the element/s the students will use independently. As you go through the story:
177
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
1 Remind the students to use their while-listening actions. 2 Review what the students know so far and predict what might happen next to link what they are hearing and seeing with what they know, to link ideas and to attribute feelings, goals and motivations. As the students listen to The King’s Cat, for example, you can cue them to think about ‘How would you feel if you were the King’s cat or the King? What would you want to say? Why do you think the cat climbed up the tree? Why do you think it didn’t want to come down?’
13.3.5 Teaching the students how to ‘do’ an action story The teaching here guides the students to convert a story they hear to a sequence of actions or events. They actually ‘do’ the story. The following are useful teaching recommendations: 1 The first action stories you can work on could be retellings of stories students have heard recently. Over a few sessions, small groups could retell a story, either with the students taking turns to be the narrator and doing the actions simultaneously or with each student being a major character and saying what the character did as they acted it, for example, the student acts out as they say, ‘The cat climbed up the tree and sat on a branch. He wouldn’t come down.’ 2 Set a goal or outcome for the action story. Be clear on: • the element of a narrative you are targeting at any time and have the students work on this • the learning outcomes you want to teach, for example, how to plan an action story, how to take account of what the audience knows or how to say interesting sentences • how you will give feedback during the planning, the implementation and the follow-up. Decide for each student what you will comment on or want to correct. Ensure the students see this as an important gradual learning activity and not one in which they need to get everything right on the first attempt. 3 Use small groups and keep each presentation manageable and short. Following the listening comprehension activity using The King’s Cat, one group could retell the King and Queen trying to get the cat down, while a second group retells how the magician and cook tried. Each could be up to five minutes long. This allows all students to participate during a week. It also allows you to guide the planning and give effective feedback that leads to further learning. 4 Use the students’ preparation time for them to learn how to plan what they will say and how they will say it. You can guide each group to brainstorm the vocabulary, sentences and discourse expressions they might use. 5 Allow students’ personalities and individual ways of doing things to emerge and be valued. If necessary, use cue cards that can help them to remember
178
integrating the meanings, conventions and purposes
what they might say. Some students might prefer to draw pictures showing the actions they will do and talk about. 6 Have procedures for supporting less-confident students, for example, opportunity for additional practice and reduced need to compete with peers for their turn. 7 Decide how you will provide follow-up teaching, either individually, in small groups or for the class. You can embed ‘doing the action story’ in play activities. Suppose the students are playing with small vans. Types of activities could include: 1 Each student makes up a short action story for the group about their van. They tell it to the group and their peers act it out. 2 The group is given a topic, for example, taking care of my van. Each student makes up a story and shares it with the group. 3 Two vans have a conversation. What would each say to the other? One student’s van can interview another student’s van about what its driver is like.
13.4 Teaching integration in the picture comprehension context In this context, students learn to tell and listen to narratives based around one or more pictures. The pictures require the students to respond to a sequence of ideas prepared by someone else. In this way it is easier (in that they don’t need to generate the ideas themselves) and more difficult (because they need to align their language use with the ideas developed by others). You will need to model converting a set of pictures to a story before you ask your students to do it.
13.4.1 The context for the picture stories You can use a picture book about topics you are studying with the class. Wordless picture books are often useful for teaching narrative meaning-making skills because they tell a coherent story without text, using an obvious sequence of events and the main elements of stories. Alternatively, you can use a sequence of three or four pictures that show the character, setting and action information about a story or a single picture showing a familiar event. The picture could be a photograph of a mid-morning street scene in a city. The students create a story that integrates the various individual events shown and imagine how they are related and how they might change over time.
13.4.2 Pre-listening strategies Before you begin to model your story for a set of pictures, you can show students the set and ask them to suggest its title and to:
179
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
1 suggest words you might say in your story 2 say ideas shown in the pictures in sentences and predict other sentences in your story 3 talk about the sequence of events; you can suggest they put themselves into the context and imagine they were there. What would they feel, see, hear or do? 4 suggest how the story might be said 5 practise suggesting their story for the pictures.
13.4.3 While-listening strategies Again, have the students say what they will do as they listen to a story about the pictures. They can mention some of the while-listening strategies they used in 12.3.3. For example, they can say that they would tell themselves what the pictures showed and link it with what they heard. They might also imagine what the next pictures might show or what the story might say next.
13.4.4 Modelling the storytelling Show the picture/s to the group. Model the storytelling as outlined below. 1 Introduce the task, ‘I am going to make these pictures into a story. I will make it sound like a story from a book’. Say what you will tell yourself to do, ‘I will tell myself what the story is about, where it is happening, who the main people are, what is happening in the first picture and I will make up a name for the story’. 2 Ask the students to apply the pre-listening strategies and suggest some whilelistening strategies. 3 Tell your story. Draw attention to features of each picture as you say it in sentences by pointing or indicating aspects.
13.4.5 Teaching the students how to tell a picture story In small groups, students plan how they will tell a picture story, initially for a twoor three-card sequence that builds on the story you told. Guide them to focus on one element of a narrative at a time, for example, its context and main characters, by bringing together the various aspects of the ICPALER framework. Students suggest vocabulary and link information about characters and actions into sentences and discourse. They talk about the main ideas and infer, for example, what might happen next, how it might be said or how the main characters might feel. Spend a few teaching sessions guiding the students to tell picture stories independently. First focus on the context and main characters, then the issue or cause of the problem, and so on. Scaffold the other elements where necessary. You can use the conditions described for telling action stories on page 178. As the students’ competence develops in this context, one useful activity is to have a student tell a story about a picture that no-one else in the group
180
integrating the meanings, conventions and purposes
can see. The other students either talk about or draw their impression of the picture. Alternatively, students can select from a set the picture that matches best the one described. Students can gradually improve their precision in telling a story about a picture.
13.5 Teaching integration in the listening comprehension and extended speaking contexts In these contexts, teach students to tell and listen to narratives without the scaffold provided by an action sequence or a picture sequence, even though these information sources may be included. The teaching assists the students to tell or to retell the narrative. Students often make verbal presentations to their peers, for example, during morning talks or show-and-tell. However, these presentations are not always used to teach students in a systematic way the particular aspects of language or to practise what they have learnt about speaking and listening.
13.5.1 Teaching the students how to integrate their language use These activities should be used to teach explicitly how to integrate the aspects of the ICPALER model. As with the action and picture contexts, the students need to be taught how to: 1 plan how they will listen and what they will say 2 recall and link the ideas, for example, to practise sequencing the ideas 3 present in an interactive way with peers, for example, guiding students to decide how much information to give, how to stay on the topic and follow the path set by other speakers, and how to work out why other people are saying what they say. You can also teach them to listen to and think about the ideas in a story, for example: 1 to tell themselves what they hear in part of the story, possibly in their own words 2 to predict and infer events and what characters might say given the topic or theme 3 to link dialogue, feelings, motivations and ways of thinking to characters in the story 4 to sequence events in a story, to use words that connect events in time and place, for example, how to use conventional expressions such as ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘What does this tell you about the story?’ 5 to recognise and use causal or consequential relationships 6 to link sentence meanings into larger units using linguistic means that are coherent between sentences and with the topic 7 to summarise and review what they heard.
181
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
The ways of thinking that relate to details in the story (points 1–3 above) are often referred to as the local structure of the story; the ways of thinking that relate to the overall ideas, its theme, organisation of ideas and causal or consequential relationships are referred to as its global structure (points 4–7 above).
13.5.2 Modelling the storytelling Introduce integration in the listening and speaking contexts by referring to a big book that you have read recently to the group, for example, The King’s Cat. Show the group the book again and tell them that: 1 you are going to tell the story in your own words 2 you will use the pictures you have made in your mind about it to help you. Describe some of the early mental pictures you have of the story and then structure them into a story. Use each narrative element as a coat-hanger question, for example, ‘First I have to tell you who the main people in the story are and where it happens’. Then describe the element in sentences. Repeat for other elements.
13.5.3 Teaching the students how to tell a story in the listeningspeaking contexts You can use here the teaching ideas used in the action and picture contexts. It is useful to begin with a story familiar to the group. The students in small groups can plan how they could extend the story or create a similar one. Following the planning, each student tells their part. Again, guide students to combine the ICPALER aspects for each element of a narrative. One student can say its context and main characters, a second student can say the issue or problem, and a third can say how the problem gradually evolves. For each element, teach them explicitly to: 1 talk about a set of ideas. Ask them to describe how they will plan what to say, how they will put the ideas in order and how they practise their retelling. Your teaching, for example, may need to guide students to say how they will: • link the ideas, use the appropriate pronouns, verb agreement and intonation • decide how much information they need to give • stay on the topic and follow the path that other speakers start • work out why other people are saying what they say. 2 listen effectively to discourse, and to remember and respond to what others say 3 use body language effectively while they are speaking and listening. You may need to teach students to achieve independence for each element. Scaffold the other elements where necessary for this. You can use the conditions described for telling action stories on page 178.
182
integrating the meanings, conventions and purposes
Facilitate the integration by asking various comprehension questions following each retelling. Ask students to say both the response and how they worked it out, for example: • ‘What is a good topic for the story?’ • ‘What do you think might happen next? Why do you think so?’ • ‘What are the main points in the retelling we heard?’
13.6 Assessing students’ ability to integrate the aspects of language in the narrative genre Monitor how well the students integrate the various aspects of the ICPALER framework in their comprehension and production of narratives. To assess this, you can score narratives they say and comprehend in terms of: • the number and order of story elements they produce, comprehend or recall; for example, their reference to the setting and main characters, the initiating event, the emerging problem and its resolution • how well they include each aspect of ICPALER in their production and comprehension; this includes the range of ideas they mention, their ability to order and link them using the appropriate conventions (for both local and global coherence), their relevance to the topic and the purposes for communicating • their ability to display narrative thinking in the action, picture and listening comprehension and speech contexts • their ability to infer ideas such as how characters feel, what they might say, cause and consequence, the theme or topic and to predict in various ways. When your assessment suggests that the students are generally integrating well the various aspects for narrative genre, you can move on to targeting the integration for other genres. You may also want to know what your students know about how to listen strategically to a narrative. A questionnaire for assessing students’ awareness of metacognitive listening strategies—the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) developed by Vandergrift et al. (2006) and intended for use with second language learners—provides us with options for doing this. These investigators analysed what listeners say they do when they listen and identified five factors in knowing how to listen: 1 planning and evaluation; knowing how to plan how you will use your listening resources before, while and after listening, and how to change your listening activity if you lose track of the meaning 2 mental translation; actions you can use to assist yourself to make sense of what you hear 3 problem solving; knowing how to deal with problems that might arise while listening, for example, how to work out unfamiliar words you hear, how to link
183
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
what is said with what you know, how to adjust or modify your interpretation if you realise it is incorrect, and how to use the topic to assist understanding 4 directed attention; knowing how to re-direct your attention when listening becomes difficult 5 person knowledge; your disposition or attitude to the listening activity.
13.7 Teaching students to transfer and generalise their integrated oral language When you judge your students have mastered the narrative genre, you can teach them to integrate their language use for other genres, such as the recount and the explanation genres. Your teaching for each of these genres can be similar to that of the narrative genre. You can: 1 begin with the action context and move through the picture context to the listening and speaking contexts 2 focus on teaching the students to integrate around the key elements in each genre 3 integrate the aspects of the ICPALER framework by teaching the students to use explicit self-talk for drawing in each aspect 4 build in the planning and while-speaking and while-listening components as explicit teaching phases for drawing together the various aspects 5 have a clear set of procedures for modelling: having the students apply, develop the relevant self-talk, practise and automatise each step in the learning 6 have a clear set of procedures for monitoring student outcomes and for providing feedback. The types of activities you can use include teaching the students to: • recount or describe a recent event or experience, such as an excursion, by using photographs to assist • imagine they were participants in a story they hear or a film they see and practise conversing with peers who are also pseudo-participants • imagine they were someone or something else and talk about what it would be like • gain information from others through directed dialogue. Students complete a task by asking for discourse information: -- in information closure, two or more students have incomplete data about the same topic, for example, a menu or an evening TV program. The information that is missing from each student’s data differs. They can’t see each other’s data. Their goal is to fill in the missing items by asking another student appropriate questions. You can also do this with incomplete pictures. All of the students have the same pictures, but each is missing particular details.
184
integrating the meanings, conventions and purposes
-- in jigsaw activities, each student has a few pieces of a puzzle, and the students co-operate to fit the pieces together. The puzzle can be a picture or photo from a set that make up a story, a sentence from a written narrative or part of a sentence from a conversation, for example: The boy covers him with sand.
Monster lies on the sand.
The students’ task is to suggest the title of the story.
13.8 Helping students who lack the confidence to contribute So far we have assumed that all students are prepared and confident enough to engage in the integrating activities, and to say and interpret the ideas they hear. Some students don’t have this confidence. They may be reluctant to act positively when they don’t understand what was said or when they realise they have not been understood. They need to realise that by continuing the conversation, they will probably understand more. They are often the silent students, who tend to speak less in classroom discussions. You may need to teach them: • how to seek clarification in language exchanges and the self-talk and scripts they can use to do this. You may, for example, need to teach one student to ask: ‘Could you say that another way, please?’ You may need to help them learn how to deal with situations in which they have incomplete knowledge at one point in time. • typical responses they can use in various interactions. These are scripts they can use to convey intentions such as ‘I understand’ or ‘I agree’. They enable the student to attend to what others are saying, without needing to simultaneously think about planning how to answer. • what to expect people may say in everyday situations and scripts they might use for dealing with these.
13.9 Providing time to integrate Some students participating in classroom dialogues will be able to manipulate the various aspects and integrate them relatively automatically. They will respond to what others say coherently and quickly. Others will need time to bring together what they know about an issue that is being discussed. Before answering a question, they may need time to think about what they will say, how they will link the aspects and the conventions they will use. In other words, they need to be given wait time. Some students will also need wait time or think time to absorb or encode what others have said; they will not process the information they heard automatically.
185
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
They need time to convert the information to knowledge, to link it with what they know and to analyse it. The ease with which a student can do this integrating and, therefore, the time they need to do it will depend on what they know about the topic, their knowledge of the conventions used to convey the ideas and their self-efficacy as thinkers in the domain. Some students will need to learn how to use the wait or think time most effectively. They may not have learnt to use getting ready strategies to structure and organise what they want to say. The possibility of negative feedback from others may concern them. They may need to learn how to do the relevant thinking actions and have time to practise each one.
13.10 In summary Building, through explicit teaching, the ability to synthesise the various aspects of the ICPALER model so that they are used in an integrated way is a critical aspect of early language education. The approach described in this chapter does this through teaching students to direct and manage their linking and their use of the various aspects. The focus is on the students learning to be increasingly metacognitive in their use of the various aspects. The approach to explicit teaching does this in a scaffolded way, with the scaffolding gradually removed as the teaching moves from integration in the action context to integration in the listening and speaking contexts. Through the repeated use of the various aspects of oral language in increasingly less scaffolded and more complex ways, students are guided to automatise the use of oral language in global, contextually appropriate ways.
186
C h a p t er 1 4
Implementing a speaking and listening teaching unit Teachers need to integrate the various oral language activities into speaking and listening teaching sessions for a small group or whole class. This chapter describes a speaking and listening unit of five separate sessions based around Year 1 students listening to and speaking about the big book A nice walk in the jungle (Bodsworth 1989). The five sessions show how some of the aspects of the ICPALER model can be taught using the action, pictorial, listening and speech contexts. The sessions assume that you haven’t already read the story to your class in its entirety prior to this language study. During the first session, the focus is on guiding the students to get their knowledge ready for listening to and speaking about the text and for using its pictorial information. You may read only the first few pages, scaffold the students to visualise and talk about the ideas mentioned, and answer questions about them. At the end of the session, they review the new ideas they have learnt. In Sessions 2 to 4, as well as working through more of the text, you teach particular aspects of oral language. The students add their new understanding of the text to what they recall from earlier sessions. They learn new aspects of the ICPALER model and practise aspects they have learnt. This may include new word meanings, new grammatical or genre conventions, how to think about purposes, as well as how to listen strategically. The three sessions differ in the context in which the oral language is taught: 1 Session 2 uses the action context; the students act out the ideas met early in the big book 2 Session 3 uses a largely listening comprehension context; the students respond to spoken information from the big book 3 Session 4 focuses on students expressing their comprehension of the big book. Session 5 is largely an integration session. The students draw together or integrate what they have learnt about the big book and about speaking and listening in Sessions 2–4. Scaffold the students to store this knowledge in their memory. All of the sessions have a similar three-phase format for learning. The teaching scaffolds and guides students to:
187
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
1 get ready or orient what they know for speaking and listening (the getting knowledge ready phase). The teaching guides them to focus and collate what they know about the relevant topic and activity. This helps them to make sense of what they hear and to communicate their intended message. During speaking activities, they collate and organise the relevant topic knowledge or, if necessary, acquire new aspects. They plan how they will speak or listen strategically. 2 learn new speaking and listening knowledge and skills as they engage with others in the learning speaking and listening phase. They listen to the part of the story, practise their oral language skills and learn new aspects of the ICPALER model. They attend to and interpret a message, express their ideas during speaking and learn new speaking and listening genres. 3 consolidate or review their new speaking and listening knowledge, link it with what they already know, automatise aspects of it to achieve fluency in its use and to respond with a positive attitude to it. This is the consolidate, review, automatise phase. At appropriate times during this activity, that is, at natural pauses in the story, guide the students to review and consolidate what they know about the story. This assists the students to stay focused on the developing story and what they are learning about it. Part of this involves the students learning to monitor and reflect on their speaking and listening knowledge and to update what they know. Each phase involves various types of student learning activities. Some of these are shown in the template Designing speaking and listening teaching activities on page 189. You can use this framework to: • plan and organise the teaching and learning activities in your classroom in a systematic, explicit and integrated way. The three phases provide continuity in directing the learning. • help students to learn to organise their speaking and listening knowledge and themselves as learners; for example, how to: -- focus on the activity, collate what they know about the topic and decide a purpose for communicating -- learn the new knowledge -- consolidate or review the new knowledge, link it with what they know, automatise it to achieve fluency in its use and respond with a positive attitude to it. Examples of the teaching and learning activities for the text A Nice Walk in the Jungle are shown in the table on pages 191–211. Each session described here contains much more content than you could cover in a ‘real-time’ session. It is included here to show the range of possibilities and options available to teachers. The actual content, developed with several big books, could be spread over one or two school terms. The five sessions illustrate a weekly organisation schedule.
188
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Designing speaking and listening teaching activities template Getting knowledge ready phase Students:
ICPALER aspect
1. decide the possible topic of the oral presentation and say how they do this.
I – topic AL – work out topic
2. collate what they know. They ask themselves, ‘What ideas might I say or hear? In what directions might the talk, story or debate go?’
I – word, sentences, discourse
3. decide the purpose of the talk. They ask themselves, ‘What are some who, what, where, when, why and how questions it might answer?’
I – sentences P – goals
4. decide how the ideas might be said in different ways in different situations and might be interpreted differently by people from different context and cultures.
I – sentences P – goals
5. decide the words that might be said or heard and consider how I – words different words and language are used according to the context. P – goals 6. decide the actions or strategies they will use as speakers and AL – actions listeners; for example, how to say an idea to make it sound funny, ‘How will I work out the meanings of new words I hear?’ 7. focus on their self-efficacy as a speaker or listener, ‘Am I ready to speak or listen? What more do I need to know before I begin to read?’
AL – self-efficacy
Learning speaking and listening phase Students:
ICPALER aspect
1. learn new speaking and listening skills for sentences, for example, how to: • chunk what they hear or to organise what they want to say in sentences • say new sentence intonation patterns • use more complex sentence meanings, for example, to say two or more events in a sentence, to understand generalisations or to express possibilities or exceptions • use more complex grammatical or morphological forms • use speaking and listening strategies for sentences, for example, visualise what they want to say and paraphrase what they hear • monitor the meaning of sentences while listening, ‘Does it make sense or fit in?’
AL – sentence actions I – sentences C – sentences
2. learn new oral language genres and when and why to use each, for example, to persuade listeners
C – genres
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
189
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
3. learn how ideas are said in different ways in different situations and how to interpret them in multiple ways
I – topics
4. learn how to maintain meaning and grammatical cohesion across sentences (how to use conjunctions, pronouns and verb tense), and how to sequence and prioritise ideas in speech
C – genres
5. learn to use communication conventions and styles for particular contexts and purposes; for example, how voice is used, pausing patterns, communicative sharing, etc.
P – manage and direct language use
6. learn to summarise, infer and evaluate what was heard; for example, for listening, how to: • remember the key ideas mentioned earlier in an oral presentation • review and consolidate, ‘What have I been told so far? What do I know now?’ • record ideas heard or to be said, draw pictures of them and note useful information • infer, ‘Why did that happen?’, and relate to what they expected • think ahead, predict and anticipate, ‘What might happen next?’
I – discourse, topics
7. work out unfamiliar word meanings while listening.
I – words
Consolidation, review, automatise phase Students:
ICPALER aspect
1. link positive feelings or emotion with speaking and listening, build self-confidence and self-efficacy as a communicator and are motivated to learn more effective oral communication skills
AL – build self confidence
2. review their understanding of: what was said and heard; word, sentence and discourse comprehension; the reasons and intentions of both speakers and listeners for engaging in the communication
I – words, sentences, discourse and topic
3. consider the purpose of the text, ‘Why was the text written? How well did it achieve its purpose?’
P – purpose
4. review and evaluate the speaking and listening strategies they used, particularly those strategies learnt at the time
AL – integrate the aspects of language
5. store in memory what has been learnt, ‘What key new ideas have I learnt? How has my knowledge changed? How do they fit with what I know already?’
I – words, sentences, discourse and topic
6. identify the new language knowledge they have learnt, ‘What new ways of saying things have I learnt? What new words were in the text?’
C – phonological, syntax and genre conventions
7. automatise and practise speaking and listening skills to improve their fluency and self-confidence.
I, C, P and AL – all aspects.
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
190
Student speaking and listening activities
Students: • collate what they know about the topic by putting themselves into the context, ‘What ideas might I say or hear? In what directions might the story go?’ • use and comprehend sentences that refer to events and include verbs, adjectives and adverbs • recall the names of familiar, everyday items and identify or locate the named items.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
The ideas that could be said in the text and the conventions for saying them
The snake was yellow and green.
A large snake is watching them.
Ask the students to imagine they were in the context. ‘Imagine you were one of the children. Put yourself into the story. Look around you. What do you see or hear? How would you feel?’ Ask them to describe what they would see and hear. Tell the students to make a mental picture of the cover. Obscure it from their view and ask them to talk about what they see. After they have responded, show them the cover again. The students hear the title, A Nice Walk in the Jungle, and say it in other ways, for example, ‘A happy stroll through the trees’.
The children are walking with their teacher through the forest.
Point to items on the cover and ask students to name them. Point to two and then three items at a time and ask them to say a sentence that links them.
The teacher was wearing jeans through the forest.
Say, ‘You are going to listen to a story. It is about some children going for a walk with their teacher. Some dangerous things happen to them. Look at the front cover. Who or what can we see?’ Point to items in turn. ‘Look at what each person is wearing. What is the colour of this boy’s jumper / this girl’s dress / the snake?’
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Getting knowledge ready for Session 1 This phase provides the foundation for the listening and speaking activities for the subsequent sessions.
Session 1: A stronger focus on the getting knowledge ready phase During this phase, students are guided to get themselves ready for the listening and speaking activity. They collate what they know about the relevant topic and focus their learning and thinking activity. For speaking activities, they may need to acquire new knowledge. They plan how they will speak or listen strategically.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
191
192
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Knowing the Students: topic and • say possible words that vocabulary they might hear in the network to story. say words that • suggest synonyms for might be in the the words they suggest. story and what they mean
The students suggest words for: • how the snake might move, for example, ‘slither’, ‘slide’ or ‘slink’ • what they might do as they walk through a jungle, for example, ‘tip-toe’ or ‘look for dangerous animals’ • saying how they would feel.
Students: The students ask questions the story might answer, for example, ‘What are some who, • guess the purpose for what, where, when, why and how questions it might answer?’ which the story was What happens in the story? written, ‘What questions Who are the main people in When does it take place? the story? What are the children’s might it answer?’ names? • guess how it might be read, ‘How do you think A Nice Walk in the Jungle I will read it? When will Will the snake attack Where do they live? Why was the story written? I say it softly? When them? will I say it loudly? When will I say it fast?’ They suggest possible answers to these questions. The students visualise again the picture on the front cover. ‘Who are the people shown on the cover? What are they doing? How did they get where they are? What might the story tell us?’ Students discuss their answers to these questions.
The purposes for which it was written: • the goal of the author • how to adjust it to suit the audience so that it sounds interesting
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Student speaking and listening activities
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Session 1 (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Students: • say the key actions or strategies they use while speaking and listening • begin to organise themselves as listeners and speakers. We will sit quietly and listen to what you say. I’ll listen to what happens. I’ll try to feel about what the story tells me. It might say that I am scared. We will listen carefully and we won’t talk.
What will you be doing? How will you feel while you are listening? What might your face say as you listen to the story? What might you think as you listen to the story?
Ask the students to say what they might do as they listen to the story; for example: • ‘Make a picture of what I hear’ • ‘Listen carefully to the story’ • ‘Say new words to myself and try to guess what they might mean. Look at what is nearby when I hear the new word and try to see what it fits’ • ‘Wait my turn to talk by waiting for other people to stop talking’ • ‘Listen to how people say things’ • ‘Think of what I will say before I say it. Say it in my mind first’.
Students’ response
Question
Say, ‘You are going to listen to a story. It is about some children walking through a jungle with their teacher. Some dangerous things happen to them. What will you do as you listen to the story?’ They say what they will do while listening, by responding to the following questions:
Learning speaking and listening for Session 1: With the focus in Session 1 on getting knowledge ready, the learning speaking and listening activities are on learning the new ideas in the first few pages by looking and listening.
Ability to learn
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
193
194 Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989) Read aloud the first six pages (up to ‘ “Please, Miss”, cried Tim’.) Before beginning each page, have the students talk literally about the picture, ‘Who can we see in the picture? Where are they?’ They describe the images. Where appropriate, have the students: • review existing vocabulary, ‘What do you call this animal?’ • answer who, what, where, when, why and how questions about items or events shown in the picture • say in sentences what the picture shows, for example, ‘The children are walking in line behind their teacher’ or ‘An owl is watching them’. Ask the students to visualise each paragraph and describe their images. Periodically remind them to add the ideas they have just heard to the sequence of images they have formed. To direct this, ask literal questions, for example, ‘What are the children’s names? Where are they going now? What has happened so far in the story? Why was Tim calling out to his teacher?’ You can teach the meanings of unfamiliar words. In the first six pages, two unfamiliar words may be ‘jungle’ and ‘boa constrictor’. After you have read the sentence that contains each of these words, ask the students to suggest what each might mean. For example, for: • ‘jungle’, have the students look at the picture and ask them, ‘What would it be like in the jungle? What would you see, hear or smell? What are other words for jungle?’ The students might suggest ‘bush’ or ‘forest’. • ‘boa constrictor’, have the students look at the picture, find the animal that Tim said is following them and ask the students to say what sort of animal it is, for example, ‘a big snake’. Have the students repeat saying each new word after you. Guide them to say each word accurately. Show the pictures on the third double page, ‘What can we see in these pictures?’ The students name some of the animals the children are going past. They imagine how they would feel if they were one of the children. What would they do, feel, hear or see? The students pretend to be one of the children walking along the track past the tigers. How would they walk? What actions would they do?
Student speaking and listening activities
Students learn the new ideas by listening and then responding to what they heard. They show their understanding in various ways. They can: • retell events in the story in sentences, say them in order using the pictures or other supports, use pauses and intonation patterns • link the events with personal experiences and topics • use the context of the story, including the pictures, to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words • ask and answer simple questions about ideas mentioned, for example, who, what, where, when, why and how questions • tap into what peers say, link what is said with their experiences and say ideas that are on track • use early speaking strategies, when reminded.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Learning the new ideas and talking about them using the conventions they already know Practising their ability to learn actions Practising their expression skills Practising their knowledge of the purposes for communicating and for using language
Session 1 (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Students discuss how enjoyable or interesting the story is so far, what made it interesting and how it could be made more enjoyable or interesting. They can use the criteria they used earlier (page 166) for judging a story they are listening to and can add to it.
Ask the students, ‘How did talking and listening help you to understand the story, enjoy the story or remember what happened?’ Guide them to talk about how listening to other students: • helped them learn new things • made them feel happy or amused • helped them know what to say.
Students link positive feelings with the speaking and listening activity and build their self-confidence as oral communicators.
Students reflect on how talking with and listening to others helped them to learn new ideas and share enjoyable experiences.
Self-efficacy as oral communicators
Purposes for speaking and listening
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989) Students integrate and show what they know about the story so far. They: • retell what they heard and remember about the children’s nature walk in the jungle. They can answer the questions, ‘What have I been told? What do I know now? What pictures have I made in my mind about the story?’ • act out the events that have happened so far, for example, act out what each animal does • infer and predict, for example, ‘This section of the story finished when Tim saw the snake. His teacher was not listening. What might happen next? Why might that happen?’ The students say what they think might happen to the children.
Student speaking and listening activities
Review the ideas Students review their and conventions understanding of the new ideas and their literal and inferential comprehension. They use their enhanced speaking skills to show their new knowledge.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Consolidation, review, automatise phase for Session 1 This phase scaffolds the students to review and synthesise what they have learnt in the session.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
195
196
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Review the ideas Students store in their and conventions memory the new ideas they have learnt.
Students talk about the new ideas and ask themselves: • ‘What new ideas have I learnt, how has my knowledge changed?’, for example, ‘Ants drag beetles to their nests and eat them’ • ‘How are these like what I already knew? How do they fit with what I know already?’
Students answer the cueing questions: • ‘What did I do that helped me to say what I wanted to say?’ • ‘What did I do that helped me to listen to what others said?’
Students review and evaluate the speaking and listening strategies they used.
Self-efficacy as oral communicators
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989) Students say the new language they have learnt. They can, for example, identify the different ways of talking about an action using the active and passive voices. The students ask themselves: • ‘What new words were in the story?’, for example, ‘I have learnt that the jungle is like a forest and that a boa constrictor is a big snake’. • ‘What new ways of saying things have I learnt?’
Student speaking and listening activities
Review the ideas Students identify the new and conventions language they have learnt.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Session 1 (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Student speaking and listening activities
Students collate what they know from their earlier speaking and listening activity. You can guide them to: • talk about their mental images of the story so far, and recall and use the names of familiar objects and events • recall new words or ways of speaking, what these meant and why they were used • say the questions they can answer now about the text • say what they did in order to listen • predict the next part of the story.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
The ideas, conventions, purposes and ability to learn aspects that have been learnt in earlier sessions
learning about animals and plants snake hairy great things
nature study boa constrictor furry wonderful things
• to talk about what the key characters were like, and recall the key words that describe them and the events in which they engaged. Briefly show the cover of A Nice Walk in the Jungle or some pictures from pages you have already read to them. Ask, ‘What do you remember about it, and who and what is in the story?’
forest
Students’ answer
jungle
New vocabulary
Before the students begin to listen to the next reading, you can select from the following activities. Ask them: • to say in their own words, or paraphrase, the story so far and to say the pictures they have in their mind from the story, ‘Put yourself into the story of A Nice Walk in the Jungle. What has happened so far?’ If they have difficulty recalling the ideas, use the pictures as a set of memory prompts. You can point to each picture and have them say what it is about. They can say, draw or act out what they recall about the pictures they see. • to review the vocabulary so far. For Session 2, for example, you can ask what is another way of saying each of the words in the table below:
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Sessions 2–4: A stronger focus on learning new speaking and listening skills Getting knowledge ready for Sessions 2–4 This phase is shorter and draws together what students have learnt about the text in earlier sessions.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
197
198
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Student speaking and listening activities
Sessions 2–4 (continued)
• questions about their knowledge of the story, ‘What are some who, what, where, when, why and how questions you can answer now about A Nice Walk in the Jungle?’ • to talk about their while-listening strategy— what they have learnt about how to listen and speak effectively, ‘What did you do to help you listen and put together what you heard in our last session? How did these things help you to talk about it?’ • to talk about their recall strategy, ‘What things did you do to help you to remember what we talked about last session?’ • to talk about their planning or pre-listening strategy. This is what they will tell themselves to do while they listen to this session. Over the sessions, encourage them to say aloud what they will tell themselves to do. They can practise using these during the rest of the week, ‘What things will you do to listen well?’ • to predict what they think the next part of the story might tell them. This is often done well in small groups.
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Sentence meanings and sentence conventions
Students practise their sentence comprehension and expression knowledge and skills. They: • practise comprehending and using one-event sentence meanings • say and comprehend grammatically simple sentences, for example, simple active-voice sentences, imperatives and simple question forms • learn more complex grammatical forms, for example, the passive voice • learn to comprehend and say two-event sentences by using conjunctions to link two oneevent sentences • learn to use increasingly complex grammar such as adding ‘-ed’ to verbs.
Read the next few pages (pages 7–13). Discuss the pictures as you go. Then go back over these pages, using the activities below. 1. Make up a concrete or action model of the path through the jungle and use the students or dolls for the people and animals. Enact the story so far. Ask the students to put themselves in the context and say how they would feel, what they see, hear or smell, and what they would do. 2. Describe particular events in the story and have the students act them out. Ask individual students and the group to act out events. 3. You can use the action context to teach new grammar. The students act out an idea or see it acted out, describe it in familiar ways and then learn the new grammatical form. The text uses the sentence form, ‘There’s a …’, to comment on a specific event that is occurring. Have the students repeat Miss Jellaby saying it and have them practise using this form for several of the pictures, for example, the sentences on page 10. 4. You can have the students transfer and apply grammatical forms that you have taught recently in the action context. Suppose you have taught recently the passive voice form. Students can say an event in the active voice as they see or do it and then practise saying it in the passive voice: • A tiger was watching the children. The children were … by a tiger. • A snake was watching the children. The children were … by a snake.
Aspects of Student speaking and listening Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle ICPALER activities (Bodsworth 1989) targeted
Learning speaking and listening for Sessions 2–4 The focus is on the students learning new aspects of ICPALER and applying and practising aspects you have taught recently, as they move through the text. Learning speaking and listening for Session 2 This phase illustrates how you can use an action context in parallel with the text to: teach a new grammatical form; teach a new sentence meaning; teach a morphological convention; or to apply a grammatical form taught recently. It is unlikely that you would teach all four in an actual session. You would usually expect to teach one in a session. Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
199
200 Use gestures to point to each item in the event as you say the passive voice sentence. Act out an event, give them a passive voice frame and ask them to finish it, for example, they see a monkey climbing a tree and complete the spoken sentence, ‘The tree is …’ 5. You can use the action context to teach students to comprehend and say sentences that refer to two events. You or the students act out two events using dolls and other items; or describe the two events, model how to describe each and have the students act and say them, for example, • Before Miss Jellaby pointed to the spider, she waved. • After Tim saw the snake, he pointed at it. Have the students observe pairs of actions being done and ask them to talk about them using ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘when’, ‘while’, ‘first’, ‘last’ and ‘then’. Use gestures to scaffold this. 6. Have the students practise using grammatical rules such as adding ‘-ed’ to verbs. Show them the picture on the third double page and say ‘The snake watched the children. What did the snake do? The snake …’ Guide them to apply ‘-ed’ to other actions they did in the action context.
Aspects of Student speaking and listening Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle ICPALER activities (Bodsworth 1989) targeted
Sessions 2–4 (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Scaffold the students to practise retaining what they hear in their shortterm memory.
Students show literal and inferential comprehension of text they hear. They express their understanding in sentences.
Ability to learn language
Comprehension and short production of sentence, discourse and topic meanings and sentence conventions
Ask students to answer who, what, where, when, why and how literal questions about it to review what they have heard, for example, ‘Who saw the snake?’ or ‘What did Miss Jellaby ask the students to do?’ If the students answer in single words or incomplete sentences, guide them to answer again in sentences. Use incomplete sentence frames to assist. For the question, ‘Who was watching the children?’, you can use the frame, ‘The snake …’ Point to the animals in the pictures. Students say in a sentence what each is doing. They can practise using the grammatical forms you taught in Session 2. If one student says the event in a simple active voice sentence, ask a second student to say it in a passive voice sentence. Say events in both voices and ask students to decide if a picture matches what you said. Cue the students to infer, using the pictures; for example, visualise forwards and backwards in time and talk about it such as, ‘Where might the snake have been a few minutes earlier?’
Read the next few pages (pages 14–21). Cue the students to practise remembering what they heard, for example, to visualise the events and characters in the story. At the end of listening activity, have students play the game I went story listening. This is a version of I went window shopping. The first student recalls the first event in a story, the next student recalls the first two events in the story, the third student recalls the first three events and so on.
Student speaking Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989) and listening activities
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Learning speaking and listening for Session 3 This phase shows how you can use a mainly listening context with the short expression of ideas to: teach the use of pronouns for discourse conventions; work out word meanings; practise phonological conventions; and literal and inferential comprehension. Again, it is unlikely that you would teach all four in one session; you would usually expect to teach one.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
201
202
Students practise using pronouns to refer to items mentioned earlier.
Students • work out what unfamiliar words mean, say them and make analogies • practise relevant phonological knowledge.
Comprehension and short production of discourse conventions
Word meanings in context and word conventions
Teach new vocabulary explicitly by guiding students to link actions with the new vocabulary or to use the context of the events to work out their meanings. They link the new meanings with what they know. Examples of activities include: • ‘The story said lizard snapped up the cricket. How do you snap? How is this different from saying the lizard caught the cricket? Why did the writer use this word?’ Students act out the differences. • ‘The story said you have to be quick to survive in the jungle. What does survive mean?’ • ‘What do you call the thing the ants are pulling? What does a beetle look like? What does it do? What things do we have that are like what a beetle has? Where would you see a beetle?’ Make pictures of the new vocabulary items and have the students name the items rapidly. Use activities that help the students develop their relevant phonological knowledge and combine it with word meanings, for example, ‘What am I? I am an animal in the jungle. My name starts with “k” ’.
Re-read pages 8–9, but replace the pronoun with the noun, that is, say, ‘Watch the ants as the ants drag this beetle away’. Guide them to see that it sounds better if we don’t repeat ‘ants’ but replace it with ‘they’. Repeat replacing the pronouns with nouns for other sentences in the story. Discuss how we can say it better without repeating the nouns. Have the students suggest what could be said instead of the nouns. Make up similar pairs of sentences that have repeated nouns about some of the pictures. Each pair of sentences should not have pronouns. Ask the students to replace the repeated nouns with pronouns.
Student speaking Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989) and listening activities
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Sessions 2–4 (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Student speaking and listening activities
Production of sentence, discourse and topic meanings and sentence conventions
Read the next pages 22–28. Read one or two paragraphs with poor expression and mumble some of the words or say them softly. Pause at inappropriate times. Ask the students, ‘Was this interesting or good to listen to? How could I have said the story better? Note down the students’ suggestions: ‘Say it so we can hear it’, ‘Say it so it is exciting’, ‘Say some parts fast and some slow’ and ‘Stop at the right places’. Read the text again with correct intonation, volume, pace and voice. Repeat some of the key ideas for emphasis. Ask, ‘Is it better or easier to listen now?’ Use their comments to guide their speaking later.
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Students practise Ask the students to suggest who, what, where, when, why and how literal questions that the text talking about the ideas they have just heard answers, for example: ‘What did Miss Jellaby do to the boa?’, ‘Who came in the text. out first?’, ‘What question did Miss Jellaby ask the boa?’ and ‘Why did the boa burp?’. Ask them to answer the questions from their peers. Have them practise talking about the ideas in simple active-voice sentences and then in the passive voice. Show each double page in turn and ask students to review and summarise what is said and to say the main idea. Give them key words from the story, for example, ‘How dare you …’ that they say in a complete sentence. Encourage the students to listen for how the story is being told, for example, ask them to say: • the words that tell us Tim was worried (for example, ‘cried’) • what told them Miss Jellaby wanted the children to learn about the animals.
The Students detect purposes of features of speech communicating that make it more or less interesting and enjoyable to listen to.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Learning speaking and listening for Session 4 In this phase the students plan and practise expressing ideas in oral language. It shows how you can use a mainly extended speaking or production context to teach students to generate and express narratives, to express sentence, discourse and topic meanings, and to achieve purposes for communicating.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
203
204 Show the picture of the anteater. Ask the students, ‘What is happening? The anteater ate the ants, the snake started to smile and the anteater keeps eating ants’. Remind the students, ‘We can say this in another way, using the word while. The snake was smiling while the anteater ate the ants’. Repeat this for events shown in other pictures that show ‘while’. Show a picture of two events and have the students say the two events in a sentence using ‘while’. You may need to use incomplete sentence frames, for example, ‘While Miss Jellaby talked to the snake …?’, or ‘The snake burped while …’ The children say the complete sentence, including the frame. In creating their own story, the students decide: • the questions they would need to answer. Encourage them to use the who, what, where, when, why and how questions to organise what they will say • the key vocabulary and sentences they will use • how they will tell their story (how they will use their voice to make their story more interesting, more scary, etc). Pairs of students develop their own scripts. They: • decide how they say each event, who is in their story, where it takes place, what happens and what each person does • use pronouns to link ideas across sentences • practise telling their story before speaking to the larger group.
Students learn to combine two events using conjunctions such as ‘while’.
Students invent stories that they will share with class peers. In pairs or small groups, for example, they create: • a play or a story about what the children might do if a tiger came close to them • a park story, for example, the class goes for a nature study walk to a nearby park.
Production of sentences using more complex conventions
Production of discourse
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Student speaking and listening activities
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Session 2–4 (continued)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
The The students learn purposes for how to achieve communicating their purposes by using particular communication conventions and styles (for example, how to use their voice and pausing patterns). In small groups, they practise taking turns, sharing what they know and using appropriate speaking procedures. Before they present their story to the group, they rehearse it and decide whether it sounds interesting and engaging. If not, how will they will modify it? Draw attention to their earlier suggestions and remind them of the good things to do when telling a story. They reflect on what they looked for to decide if it was interesting. They plan how they will tell the story to their peers and use the features they have noted already, for example, • say it so that everyone can hear it • look at the people we are talking to • say it so it is exciting • say some parts fast and some slow • stop at the right places. When a pair has told their story, either the story tellers or other student pairs ask the who, what, where, when, why and how questions.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
205
206
Students show their comprehension of what was said.
Students link positive emotional response with the speaking and listening activity.
Ideas and conventions
Ability to learn
Students say how they felt while they were listening to the story, what they know now that they didn’t know earlier and how the story made them feel.
Students retell the story they heard or answer questions about it.
Student speaking and listening activities
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Students say the new ideas they have learnt and how these fit with what they knew already.
Students identify the new language and knowledge they have learnt.
Students review and evaluate the speaking and listening strategies they used, particularly those strategies learnt and practised at the time.
Students store in their memory the new ideas they have learnt.
Ideas and conventions
Ability to learn
Ideas and conventions
Ideas and conventions
Students say what new ideas they have learnt. They say how the ideas are different from what they already knew and practise storing in their minds what they learnt from the story.
Students say what they did to help them to listen better. They say how they thought about the ideas in the story so that they could talk about them.
Students say the new words they have learnt and what they mean.
Students say the new ideas they have learnt, for example, what they know now about the animals that live in the jungle and their colours.
Purposes for Students reflect on how talking about Students talk about their reasons for listening to the story and why they think speaking and their ideas with others and listening the writer wrote it. What did the writer want to tell them? How did the writer want them to feel? listening to what others say helped them.
Student speaking and listening activities
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Consolidation, review, automatise phase: Sessions 2–4 The consolidation, review, automatise phase activities used in Sessions 2–4 are similar to those used in Session 1. These activities review what has been learnt about the story and about speaking and listening in each session.
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Student speaking and listening activities
Students review their understanding of how to speak and listen. They show their comprehension of what was said, for example, their literal and inferential comprehension of what they heard. They use their enhanced speaking knowledge and skills to communicate the new knowledge.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Review the ideas they have learnt from the story
Students draw together what they know about the story so far. They: • retell what they heard and remember about the story by answering the questions, ‘What have I been told? What do I know now? What pictures have I made in my mind about the story’. • record the ideas heard in various ways, for example, in pairs they can draw pictures of ideas said. The students in small groups can be asked to visualise each picture they saw, say what was in it, describe it in sentences, act it out and then draw it. • act out the ideas. In small groups, they plan and perform a play based on the text. The students rehearse their roles and are guided to adapt their character and show in their voice how the character felt at the time. • infer and predict, for example, ‘What might have happened if Miss Jellaby had listened to Tim?’ In small groups, the students can think ahead to the trip to the zoo. What might happen there? The group can prepare a talk describing ‘our trip to the zoo’. • talk about the new ideas the story has told them about, for example, -- walking through the jungle -- the animals you see in the jungle -- big snakes -- having a teacher like Miss Jellaby.
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Session 5: Drawing together or integration session Getting ready or orienting for Session 5 This phase is shorter in these sessions and draws together what students know about the text for the next learning activities.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
207
208
Student speaking and listening activities
Students link positive feelings with the speaking and listening activity. They build their self-confidence and self-efficacy as oral communicators.
Students reflect on how speaking and listening helped them and on the value of engaging in these activities.
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Ability to learn speaking and listening; their attitudes towards it
Ability to learn speaking and listening; the actions for effective speaking and listening
Session 5 (continued)
Students reflect on how engaging in the various activities, sharing their ideas with others and listening to what others think helped them in various ways. They can collate a group list of values of speaking and listening. Speaking and listening helped us to: • know more about each other • make other people feel good • make other people laugh • make other people feel happy • learn new things • feel sad or scared • share enjoyable experiences • know how our friends feel • help people know what to do. Students can gradually add to this list as they identify other ways in which speaking and listening helps them. Teachers can use this list to help students understand how speaking and listening effectively can help them solve problems.
Students answer the questions: • Did I like listening to the story? • Did I like making up a story and telling it to others. Students can be encouraged to reflect on how talking about their ideas with others and listening to what others think can help them to share ideas and enjoyable experiences, can amuse other people and can help them achieve particular goals they want.
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Students reflect on the behaviours that allow effective communication in groups.
Students reflect on the reasons why speakers and listeners speak and listen. They can be asked, ‘Why do you think I told you this story? Why do you think it was written? How well did it do its job?’
Achieving their purpose for speaking and listening; the actions they can use for this
Achieving their purpose for speaking and listening; the goals speakers and listeners have for speaking and listening
Students say why their teacher told them the story of A Nice Walk in the Jungle, ‘You told us the story to: • help us see what it is like walking through the jungle • make us laugh and think about what could happen • tell us we should listen to what other people say’. They can also comment on how well they think the story did its job.
Students in small groups reflect on what helped them learn by listening and speaking and share their ideas. They can make a list with two columns: good communicating behaviours and bad communicating behaviours. Their list of good communicating behaviours could include: • speak loudly and clearly • listen to what others say and wait for them to finish • respond to what others say politely • take turns to speak • pause to allow others to comment and to ask questions • listen to others’ suggestions • take turns when you are talking with others • don’t speak too fast • change your speed to help others understand what you mean • keep people interested in what you are saying. Students can add to this list as they discover other communicating behaviours. You can use this list to help students understand how to communicate effectively.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
209
210
Student speaking and listening activities
Students review and evaluate the speaking and listening strategies they used, particularly those strategies learnt at the time, ‘What did I do that helped me to say what I wanted to say? What did I do that helped me to listen to what others said?’
Students store in their memory what they have learnt. They ask themselves, ‘What key new ideas have I learnt; how has my knowledge changed? How do they fit with what I knew already?’
Aspects of ICPALER targeted
Ability to learn speaking and listening; the actions that worked for them
Ability to learn speaking and listening; their actions for storing new knowledge in long-term memory
Session 5 (continued)
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Students talk about the new ideas the story has told them and the images they have made of the story. They discuss their images of the main characters, what they were like and what they did. Students talk about how these new ideas added to what they already knew, for example, what they already knew about: • the animals in the jungle • big snakes.
Things I do when I speak and listen I think of what I will say before I say it. I tell myself what I will say before I say it.
Students reflect on the speaking and listening strategies they used while listening and responding to the story. They record the actions they used while speaking and listening. They talk about each action and evaluate how well it worked for them. They can collate their speaking and listening strategies on a chart.
Teaching and learning activities for A Nice Walk in the Jungle (Bodsworth 1989)
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
Using the ICPALER model in an integrated way
The conventions
Students automatise and practise speaking and listening skills to improve fluency and self-confidence.
Students identify the new language and literacy knowledge that has been learnt. They ask themselves, ‘What new ways of saying things have I learnt? What new words were in the text?’
Students engage in a systematic transfer program in which they practise applying the new speaking and listening knowledge and skills they have learnt in Sessions 1–4 in a range of contexts. As part of this, they: • say the speaking and listening actions they will use before they begin to apply them • practise recalling key ideas and conventions more rapidly in a range of activities • practise applying each new speaking and listening skill in more complex contexts.
Students review the new words and phrases they have learnt during speaking and listening, and link them with synonyms they know, for example: • nature walk • boa constrictor • being followed • snap up. They review the words they had learnt to describe the main characters, for example, ‘scared’, ‘focused’, ‘care about others’ and ‘knew what to do’. They practise recalling: • how to ask and answer who, what, where, when, why and how questions about the topic and the images they have made of it, for example, ‘Who went on the walk? Where were they going?’ • what things they will say when they are telling a story, for example, ‘where did it happen, who was in it, what happened’ • how they can say an idea in different ways, how they can say two events (using ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘when’, ‘while’, ‘first’, ‘last’ and ‘then’), and how they can refer to a person a second or third time (using pronouns) • what they will remember about the good things to do when telling a story.
Imp lem enti ng a s p e a k in g a n d l ist e n in g t e ach in g un it
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
211
pa r t 3
ICPALER in context
213
C h a p t er 1 5
Language learning, the culture and the brain
Learning and using language are complex activities. The complexity is multifaceted. We have seen one facet in our analysis using the ICPALER model. We identified five major aspects: the I, C, P, AL and ER. Each of I, C, P and AL is itself made up of several components. Further, it is not sufficient to look at each aspect individually. We also need to look at how the aspects work together, in an integrated way. A second facet is that the language being learnt is constantly changing, in both predictable and unpredictable ways. The ways in which we use English today are different from how it was used 200 years ago and even how it was used 50 years ago. Each version of English had the five aspects and their components. However, the contents of each component have changed. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs have come and gone. Others have stayed but have different meanings and are used in different contexts. Words such as ‘awesome’ or ‘terrific’ illustrate this. Their meanings in modern use differ substantially from their earlier use. In recent years, we have seen further changes, for example, in the language we now use to communicate on the internet and in text messages.
15.1 The linguistic culture These are aspects of the linguistic culture of language learners and users at any time. The linguistic culture for any individual is the totality of the language milieu: the synthesis of the ideas that are valued and communicated within it; the conventions that are preferred for this; the purposes for which communication is used; and the opportunities individuals have for learning to use language. An individual’s interactions in the linguistic culture provide the data for the individual’s I–language. Linguistic cultures differ in a range of ways. These differences can be conceptualised in terms of the developmental assets (Weigel, Lowman & Martin
214
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
2007) any culture affords language users. Developmental assets refer to ‘the set of interrelated experiences, relationships, skills and values’ (Weigel, Lowman & Martin 2007, p. 721) associated with enhancing a child’s knowledge and use of language. For young children, the two main contexts in which these linguistic cultures operate are the home and child care situation. The developmental assets include: (1) the quality of the language used and the richness of the ideas linked in dialogue; (2) the extent to which oral language is shown to be valued and that young children are encouraged to use it and to enhance this use; and (3) access to scaffolding and teaching that fosters this learning, the range of early language opportunities and activities in the child’s environment and the provision of a functional two-way feedback network that supports this learning. This book focuses on the linguistic culture in the classroom. Many of the influences noted by Weigel, Lowman and Martin (2007) can be transferred to the classroom.
15.1.1 The linguistic culture constructed by the family Weigel, Lowman & Martin (2007) provide a valuable review of contemporary research examining the developmental assets in the family context for young children. The key assets in the family context they identify that influence early oral language development are reviewed below. Demographic and situational family characteristics influence early language development. One key variable is the parents’ and, particularly, the mother’s level of education. A second is the number of children in the family. This is a complex variable; while the language interactions with a parent may decrease with increase in family size, the interaction with siblings increases. A third factor is the wellresearched socioeconomic status of the family. Linguistic cultures are characterised by the language that is used and the characteristics of the style of the conversations the young child has with significant others. The following influences on early language development are noted by Weigel, Lowman & Martin (2007): 1 Dialogue that focuses largely on entities and ideas present in the immediate situation is less likely to promote language development than dialogue that encourages children to link the entities and ideas with earlier experiences, to think about how the ideas could be used in other contexts and to extend them into their future experiences and thinking. 2 The length and grammatical complexity of sentences used by others facilitates language development. 3 The extent to which young children are encouraged to reflect on and to extend what they have said through comments or questions from others (that is, they are encouraged to engage in metalinguistic activities).
215
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
4 Exposure to multiple narrative and exploratory styles facilitates language development. 5 A supportive conversational style helps children to embed their language in particular situations and to have or make the opportunity to use it. Linguistic cultures are also characterised by the opportunities they provide for young children to engage in specific language activities. They differ in the extent to which they encourage activities, such as singing, reciting rhymes, telling stories, describing their toy play and playing language games. The frequency of these types of activities is linked with higher oral language outcomes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the extent to which a linguistic culture fosters oral language learning depends on the parents’ beliefs about language development and their role in it. Children’s oral language development is influenced by the extent to which their parents believe they can have a significant role to play in it and value this role.
15.1.2 The linguistic culture constructed by the child care environment Although not studied as frequently as the home, Weigel, Lowman & Martin (2007) note that following factors in the child care environment influence young children’s language development: 1 the level of education, experience and language skills of teachers and teacher– child ratios 2 teachers’ conversational style and the type and quality of teacher–child interaction; supportive and verbally stimulating teacher–child interactions (for example, using unfamiliar words); increased opportunities for children to speak and speech that commented on what the children said and did; and extended or questioned this facilitated oral language development 3 language activities such as shared book reading, singing songs, telling stories, listening games, group games, dramatic play, and the opportunity to explore sounds, build vocabulary and ask questions. In summary, it appears that critical assets in the child care setting can enhance the language skills of children before they start formal schooling. These findings parallel those found regarding the home setting. What we don’t know is how these home and child care assets combine to enhance young children’s speaking and listening abilities. The notion of developmental assets in the school context and culture is a relevant consideration for all schools and teachers. Teachers and schools can examine how well they recognise and use their assets and whether they make optimal use of them.
216
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
15.2 The technological culture interacting with the linguistic culture The linguistic cultures in which any of us communicate are influenced by technological cultures that co-exist with them. The recent phenomenon of cyber bullying could be an example of these changes. In recent years, text messaging has replaced spoken exchanges for some people. In spoken messages, you can hear the emotion, work out the speaker’s purpose and respond to it. Whether a spoken message is bullying or intimidating depends in part on the listener’s response to it. Suppose someone says two or three sentences to you that could be potentially threatening. You can immediately make a spoken response that can redirect or defuse the situation and reduce or remove the threat. In written messages, it is harder to hear or read the emotion and, therefore, to change it, if you believe it is threatening. Even though text messages can contain symbols intended to communicate emotions, it is often harder for the reader to integrate these with the written words in the message. Further, it is much harder to make a response during the message that can re-direct the direction of the discourse and allow the purpose of the communicators to be modified. The person receiving the message cannot intervene to change its focus. Once it has been sent, it is often seen as final!
15.3 The ICPALER framework in any culture Whatever the actual contents of the language used at any time, the ICPALER framework directs our attention for any culture. It recommends we look at the I, C, P, AL and ER aspects. It also recommends we look at how the components are used in an integrated way. We have seen how you can compile an ICPALER profile to describe a child’s language knowledge at any time. As the child develops and interacts with a broader range of more spoken texts, the profile elaborates and differentiates. This emerging profile is linked with each child’s brain development and with the linguistic environments in which the child has participated. One issue that has not been examined so far in this text is the three-way link between brain development, the linguistic environments and the emergence of oral language competence. The relationship between these three factors can be conceived in various ways. A common view is that a child’s level of brain development gives the child the means for interpreting the linguistic environments in which they participate. Oral language competence is assumed to be the outcome. The present approach sees the relationship differently. It assumes that the three factors operate interactively and reciprocally. Each is shaped by, and shapes, the other two. Each language interaction by a child in a particular context has the potential to change the child’s neural structure. This change can then affect how
217
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
the child sees the linguistic environment or culture in the future and this leads to new language knowledge. In other words, a child’s brain is shaped by the linguistic cultures or environments in which the child participates. The ways in which each culture uses the aspects of the ICPALER model determine the aspects of language the child learns and the neurological changes that support these. An enriched linguistic environment leads to increased numbers of cell connections (that is, number of synapses per neuron) that a child has available for language learning and use.
15.4 ICPALER and brain processing Why should we bother to look at how our brains process language? Imagine yourself in the context of a recent conversation. You and your fellow conversers were probably in a continuous flow of information, from one person to another. The I, C, P, AL and ER were being used in a synthesised way. They were mixed together like the ingredients in a cake. Your brain performs two critical purposes during the conversation: it allows you to unpack spoken information from another speaker; and to synthesise your message. It tells you the Ideas intended by the speaker and the speaker’s Purpose for communicating. It can also tell you how the speaker used Conventions. In a corresponding way, it allows you to integrate your Ideas, Conventions and Purposes into what you will say. It is possible that your brain finds it easier to unpack some messages more than others, because they are more aligned with how your brain does the unpacking. A corresponding point can be made with packing. We can all remember messages that made our brains work harder, in order to comprehend them. If we have even a basic idea of how our brains do the packing and unpacking, we may be able to say things in ways that make it easier (or harder) for others to comprehend. This is particularly important when we are teaching students oral language. When you engage in an oral language exchange, activity is stimulated across your brain. So complex is this activity that most sections or regions of your brain play at least a partial role. There is also, of course, danger in linking particular brain areas with specific functions in an invariant way because we know that the brain has an element of plasticity and can re-organise after injury so that uninjured regions can take on new functions. As well, individuals differ in how their brains are organised to process language. These differences begin with the hemisphere that is dominant for language; some individuals are left-hemispheric dominant, some right-hemispheric dominant and others fluctuate between both. From this difference there is further variability in how language processes are handled in each hemisphere. However, there are some regions that play a major role. The reference to left or right hemisphere is based on the hemisphere used by right-lateral dominance.
218
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
The evidence for the functions handled by regions has a long history that began with autopsy studies. More recently, neuropsychological evidence has been gathered using neuroimaging, magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. In the following discussion, I have used comparisons between able language users and those who have language difficulties to help understand the brain processes involved. Cortex of the Partial Lobe
Cortex of the Frontal Lobe
Cortex of the Occipital Lobe
FRONT
BACK
BRAIN CORTEX
Hippocampus and Amygdala deep within brain Cortex of the Temporal Lobe
Cerebellum
Spinal Cord
As you read through this review, reflect on what it means for your teaching. If my teaching matches how a student’s brain processes the language information, new links between ideas are more likely and learning is facilitated. However, if my teaching doesn’t match how a student’s brain operates, the individual will need to do more work to unscramble or re-organise the information so that it can be assimilated more easily.
15.4.1 Word processing In order to learn new words, the learner needs first to retain what they heard. You can tell whether a person has retained a spoken word by seeing if they can tell when it is repeated. Average language learners use the left and right superior temporal cortex areas, with the left showing a stronger activation (Helenius et al. 2009) to do this. Learners who have specific language disabilities show lower and shorter activation in both temporal areas. This is consistent with them retaining the spoken or phonological form of the word much more briefly. In other words, they have a much shorter short-term memory for sound or phonological information. This rapid decay of speech-evoked activation is likely to restrict their vocabulary development. The individual also needs to learn how to say the sound pattern. They do this by imitating the actions used by the speaker, for example, how their lips moved. The part of the brain that manages the production of speech has been known, for over a century, as Broca’s area and is located in the left frontal hemisphere. This area allows
219
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
the individual to learn new actions by imitating body movements they observe others doing to make the sounds. It allows us to plan our motor activity. The developing infant learns how to move their lips, their tongue and their mouth through imitation. Our teaching needs to take account of these observations. The shorter retention of the sound patterns may mean that we say them longer and also that we pause between sound patterns so that there is less interference between patterns. We can also encourage the students, as an intermediate self-teaching strategy, to say each pattern after they hear it and we give them time to do this. Learning language requires us to imitate various types of information, including what we see or hear being done. Modern neuropsychology has identified a particular type of neuron that allows us to do this. These are called mirror neurons. They occur in several parts of the brain and allow us to hold what we see or hear being done. Broca’s area has mirror neurons for helping us learn how to imitate the actions for speaking. This is not all that Broca’s area helps us do. Talking is not only useful for letting others know what you want to say. As well, we speak aloud to teach ourselves new language ideas, as discussed in Chapter 3. We use self-talk to manage and direct how we learn and use language, as noted in Chapter 6. Expressing words plays a role in other aspects of language learning. It is not surprising then that Broca’s area has several additional functions, such as grammatical analysis and language comprehension. Also linked with learning how to say new words is a person’s phonological awareness. This is your ability to recognise and use sound patterns within and between words. Again, particular parts of the temporal areas (the superior temporal and occipito-temporal regions) are stimulated during this activity (Frost et al. 2009). We use these areas first to process speech and later to handle written language. You can detect some difficulties here at a young age. Two-month-old children at risk of later language difficulties take much longer neurologically to distinguish between vowels of different durations (Friederich et al. 2004), while four- and five-month-old children show a smaller brainwave response when discriminating between stress patterns in two-syllable words (Weber et al. 2004). These studies point to problems in auditory processing present from the first months of life. These data suggest a reduced capacity to process sound patterns at a young age. Learning new vocabulary involves combined activity between the left temporal region and an area of the brain that deals with storing experiences, the left hippocampus. In a vocabulary learning task, young adults learnt a set of novel concrete nouns through an associative learning procedure (Breitenstein et al. 2005). The vocabulary learning was linked with interactive activity between that part of the temporal lobe where sound and visual information is integrated (the left fusiform gyrus), the left hippocampus and the part of the left parietal cortex that stores phonological associations. Individual difference in the ability to
220
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
learn the new vocabulary was associated with differences in hippocampus activity. Those learners who suppressed hippocampal activity less over the set of learning trials learnt vocabulary more efficiently. Again, the implications for teaching are clear. To help students learn new vocabulary, teach the new meaning initially in particular contexts that show clearly what the word means and encourage students to talk about what the word means.
15.4.2 Linking actions and language to make meaning In earlier chapters I suggested that we can teach students to learn language by linking it with matching action sequences in particular contexts. The modern brain monitoring procedures support this. They show that the meanings of language and actions are processed by the same neural mechanisms (Reid et al. 2009). This shows the close link between meanings in actions and the language used to describe them. Individuals who have severe language disorders also have difficulty encoding correctly actions they have observed (Fazio et al. 2009). They have difficulty, for example, watching a short movie showing an action sequence and then ordering four pictures that show the sequence. They were able to recall the physical events. A key aspect of learning language through actions is being able to link an action sequence and the language that goes with it. We have seen that language learning involves doing this: integrating what we see, hear and do. This is done in the left hemispheric temporo-parieto-premotor areas (Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh & Keysers 2006). In this area, again, we have mirror neurons that copy or imitate what we perceive. These allow us to represent and to synthesise auditory, visual and motor information. The mirror neuron system can be extended to learning language and communication through imitation (Oberman & Ramachandran 2008). This system explains how children can learn actions and language, through observation and imitation. Listening to action-related words and sentences such as ‘to catch’ or ‘she picked up the doll’ stimulate mirror neuron activity in language processing and comprehension (Buccino et al. 2005; Gazzola et al. 2006). Le Bel, Pineda and Sharma (2009) suggest that it may be useful in explaining why some children have oral language difficulties. They note that ‘in general, action-related language may play a useful role in language development because it provides a capacity for children to not only observe, embody, and perform the actions, but to communicate the meaning and intentions behind such actions using a symbolic language’ (p. 301). You can see why the ICPALER approach to oral language teaching recommends teaching new ideas, conventions and purposes in action contexts initially. Doing meaningful actions in context and talking about what was done is a key language-learning strategy. It is consistent with contemporary research in the neuropsychology of language learning.
221
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
15.4.3 Sentence processing As well as processing words, recent studies have investigated how the brain comprehends sentences. One question that has been examined is whether this process is handled more by left- or right-hemispheric processes or bilaterally. This was investigated by comparing the comprehension patterns for children with left- and/or right-hemispheric damage sustained prior to language learning with those of typically developing children (Feldman et al. 2002). The children were asked to work out the agent of the action in sentences that varied in their grammatical form. The study showed that children with either left- or right-hemispheric damage showed similar developmental delays in using syntactic cues to comprehend sentences. Both groups learnt to use the word order strategies also used by typical peers, but at an older age. Comprehending sentences and using syntax are not localised in one area of the cortex, but instead involve multiple cortical regions that are discontinuous and that do not share patterns of connectivity (Caplan et al. 2007). The regions include parts of the perisylvian association cortex (the anterior inferior temporal lobe and the superior and the inferior parietal lobe, Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area) and regions outside the perisylvian cortex. As well, they showed that different brain areas in different individuals supported the same syntactic processes. A sentence can have multiple grammatical relationships, for example, two main clauses and grammatical relationships within each clause. Individuals process these different types of relationships using different parts of the brain (Opitz & Friederici 2007). The hierarchical relationships between main ideas are processed by Broca’s area and the syntax of individual phrases is processed by premotor areas. In other words, the brain’s involvement in processing syntax is determined by the type of grammatical rule used. These distinctions can be taken into account in how we teach students to comprehend sentences. We can guide them to segment a sentence into its main parts (the phrases and clauses) and work on the meaning of each. For single-event sentences, they can break at the verb. Students can then synthesise the meanings of the parts. It is not surprising that the comprehension of sentences draws on several areas of the cortex, more than needed either to detect and recognise sound patterns or to plan how to say words. The language functions needed to comprehend sentences are more abstract operations. Meanings need to be retrieved and linked in particular sequences or orders. They involve more than simply analysing perceptually what is heard or saying it. The simpler functions are localised in specific areas of the primary sensory cortex or the motor cortex. Sentence comprehension, on the other hand, involves the association cortex. How it is done by any individual depends on factors within the individual and in the individual’s environment.
222
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
It is important to note that difficulty manipulating word order in sentences does not necessarily restrict a person’s ability to engage functionally in conversation and in general language use. In these contexts, sentence comprehension can be scaffolded by the redundancy of information and contextual support.
15.4.4 How the brain supports inferring in language The ICPALER model also draws attention to the need for communicators to use context of an exchange to integrate the separate ideas around the topic. We discussed in Chapter 3 how individuals learn to use context to infer the topic of an exchange, how they integrate the ideas into a discourse meaning and how they decide what ideas might be said next. Evidence suggests that this activity is associated with right-hemispheric processing. Individuals with right-hemispheric brain damage are less able to infer during a narrative than peers who do not have this damage (Blake 2009). They can generate inferences and do this better for text that has high predictability. As well, they take longer to do this. They are especially disadvantaged when the text has lower predictability. They are also less likely to integrate the inferences they form. This is obviously important for working out the discourse meaning of a text. Their performance is consistent with verbal semantic networks that are less elaborated and differentiated. This, in turn, influences how they use working memory while engaging in text processing. Right-hemispheric processing while inferring is consistent with teaching students to visualise in order to infer and predict.
15.4.5 How the brain supports using language to achieve social goals The ICPALER model draws attention to how individuals use language for a range of purposes. We noted earlier that in order to do this, communicators need to make various inferences about those they are communicating with. They may infer a speaker’s age or gender, what a speaker knows about the topic and a speaker’s goals for communicating. These inferences are relevant to social interaction in everyday living. Individuals make decisions about other communicators from what they say and how they say it. People who have autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) usually have difficulty doing this. Individuals without ASDs integrate what is said with what they had noted about a speaker using left-hemispheric language processes. They interpret the social aspects of what is said and judge others by using themselves as a reference point. These judgements involve self-talk and are believed to be mediated by activity in the right prefrontal cortex (right ventral medial prefrontal cortex). ASD individuals are more likely to show higher right-hemispheric activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus (Tesink et al. 2009). They have more difficulty
223
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
synthesising speaker characteristics and the content of a spoken sentence. They also are less able to manage the self-referential activity. As noted earlier, this type of language processing is required constantly in classroom interactions. It is not surprising that a large proportion of students who have social, emotional and behavioural problems also have speech and language difficulties (Tommerdahl 2009). An implication of these observations is that the likelihood of autistic behaviours may be reduced by encouraging children who show these behaviours to ‘tell themselves’ about other people in the exchange and what is being said.
15.4.6 How the brain manages the ability to learn language The remaining aspect of ICPALER is the ability to learn language. This refers to the foundational prerequisites for learning language and to the capacity for continuing to learn it. We have already talked about how the brain handles parts of the ability to learn language. These include being able to perceive oral language, to categorise, to use words as symbols for items in experiences and to link ideas—for example, cause–effect—and to begin to store both language and the events to which it refers. Other components of the ability to learn language involve how children reason about verbal information, identify patterns and manage their learning. The area that mediates this activity is the prefrontal cortex. This region manages and directs a range of cognitive activities associated with learning to use language. It mediates how individuals plan how to use language, focus their learning attention, retain knowledge in their working memory, form concepts, solve problems, selfmonitor and evaluate how they are using it, select the most appropriate goals at any time and generally direct their thinking. We referred to this knowledge in Chapter 6 as the cognitive part of metacognition. Children learn to monitor, manage and direct their thinking activity in these ways during the fourth and fifth years of life. This change in ability directly parallels changes that have been observed to occur in the prefrontal cortex (Ramscar & Gitcho 2007); a rapid increase in the number of a particular type of brain cell called the Von Economo neurons (Allman et al. 2005). These cells assist the anterior prefrontal cortex to integrate the outcomes of two or more cognitive processes (or subgoals) and to form more complex relational representations and relationships. They also assist in explaining how we learn linguistic conventions. These changes lead to the child having much greater control of how they learn and use language. We noted that the vehicle for metacognitive thinking is our inner language or self-talk and that this is learnt by interacting with others. In other words, a person’s metacognitive thinking is influenced by the cultures they belong to. Cultures teach their members how to prioritise and organise their experiences, and how to define words and create concepts. These aspects of metacognition
224
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
are handled by a particular part of the prefrontal area: the dorsolateral prefrontal region (Ardila 2008). Knowing how to use the thinking aspect of metacognition is not sufficient for a child to actually use it. The child also needs to be motivated to use it and be committed to wanting the outcome of, for example, solving a given problem. As well, the child needs to know when it is useful, for example, to plan and why planning is most useful at that time. This is the second part of metacognition: the emotional/motivational part. It is also mediated by the prefrontal area, in this case the orbitofrontal and medial frontal areas (Ardila 2008). Solving everyday problems requires both aspects of metacognition and therefore both regions of the prefrontal cortex. The role of prefrontal cortical activity has been shown in various studies of how children use oral language. One study compared differences in activity when young teenagers listened passively to a story as opposed to when they actively responded to a story they heard (Vannest et al. 2009). Both tasks stimulated the temporal gyrus bilaterally (the language processing area, as we saw above) and the left inferior frontal gyrus. The active response task also stimulated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Planning and setting goals exemplify using language in purposeful ways. We have noted in earlier chapters that, while engaging in a conversation, we anticipate where it will go next and this gives us goals for engaging in it. While listening to a story we anticipate what might be said next and so we develop expectations. We make these decisions based on what we already know about the topic and our ability to detect reference to sequence or cause in the language text. Oral communication is not the only domain in which we process information in this sequential way. We may need to think in similar ways when we are engaging in an action context. We see actions being done and, in order to achieve our goals, we plan how we will act next. The actions we decide to do are determined by what we know about the sequence of events. Neuropsychological evidence shows that the processing of sequential event relationships, whether expressed in language or in actions, is mediated by the same areas: the prefrontal cortex and Broca’s area (Carota & Sirigu 2008). In other words, it suggests that planning to be involved in a sequence is mediated by a single neurological process, regardless of whether the sequence is expressed in actions or in language. This notion raises interesting possibilities for identifying oral language difficulties and for teaching. One is that we may be able to assist students to improve their planning and metacognitive ability in part through engaging them in relevant action activity. We have already seen that the capacity for metacognitive thinking develops in the fourth and fifth year, when children have begun to internalise as self-talk
225
Tea chi ng O ra l L anguage
what they have learnt about language. Is there evidence that components of metacognition for oral language develop earlier than this? We are likely to use metacognitive thinking when we are in a situation in which we hear or see things that we didn’t expect. One recent study examined this with the ability to detect rhythm in spoken sentences (that is, prosodic processing) by infants who are not yet able to speak (Homae et al. 2007). Infants aged three months and ten months listened to two types of speech patterns: a normal pattern and one in which the sounds had been flattened. The infants’ cortical activation patterns were monitored as they listened. The unusual flattened speech was associated with stronger activation than normal speech in the right temporal and temporoparietal regions for both ages. However, the older infants also showed bilateral prefrontal activity. This suggests they were more able than their younger peers to detect speech patterns that did not match their native language. Thus, while both infant cohorts could analyse pitch information per se, the older group could also recognise prosodic patterns that did not occur in their language environment.
15.4.7 How the brain helps us remember what we have learnt So far we have looked at how children learn new language and use it. We also need to examine how they store and remember what they have learnt. A key region for this is the hippocampus, which is part of the limbic system and is located inside the temporal lobe, under the parts of the cortex with which it works closely. We remember oral language knowledge in different ways. We store individual experiences we have had, what we know about patterns and rules about regularities in language, how to do actions in generalised ways, and our emotions, attitudes and ways of thinking. The hippocampus plays a key role in forming new memories about events we have experienced. This is our episodic or autobiographical memory. Some researchers believe also that it is part of a larger medial temporal lobe memory system that stores knowledge that can be said explicitly (Squire 1992). This would include, for example, rules, patterns and factual knowledge, as well as our experiences. It is also believed to be involved in converting ideas we are thinking about in short-term memory to a more permanent form. Recent brain imaging studies have shown that as an individual learns more about a grammatical pattern as a stand-alone rule or a relationship, there is a change in how the brain processes the information. While the hippocampus deals with information initially, as learning and remembering continues, the prefrontal cortex becomes more involved. An example of this is adults learning to use an artificial grammar system and to abstract the rules (Opitz & Friederici 2003). As they learnt to use the artificial grammar more proficiently, their left hippocampal activity decreased and activity increased in both the left inferior frontal gyrus
226
L anguage le a r n in g , t h e c u lt ur e a n d t h e b r a in
(Broca’s area, a region that contributes to syntax processing in natural language) and the language-related processing system in the left prefrontal cortex. Again, the implications for teaching are clear. To help students to store in memory what they have learnt about oral language, we can encourage them initially to learn the new ideas in specific contexts. We can use the contexts to help them to recall the ideas they learnt on the earlier occasion. We can allow them to use the earlier context to help them apply or use the idea. Dialogue such as, ‘Think of how we did it last time’, can help here. As they continue to recall the ideas on subsequent occasions, we can encourage them to recall the ideas more as a rule or a pattern. Gradually, we can guide them to apply it as a rule.
15.5 Neuropsychological studies and the ICPALER model In summary, the neuropsychological studies reviewed in this chapter support the ICPALER model. The processes they study match the aspects and components of ICPALER. They also support the recommended approach for teaching oral language. Examples of this include: teaching children to learn language by linking it with matching action sequences in particular contexts; teaching explicitly sentence-comprehension strategies that involve segmenting a sentence first into its main parts and working on the meaning of each; and storing patterns and rules in memory by retaining them first as experiences and gradually extracting the rule. The neuropsychological studies can also fine-tune or increase the effectiveness of our teaching. We can make sure we organise the teaching information in ways that match how the brain processes it. We can avoid providing information that is more likely to impose an additional load on neurological processing. If, for example, we know that those who have specific language disabilities retain the spoken form of words they are learning more briefly or have trouble distinguishing between vowels of different durations, we can teach in ways that take account of this. We can provide tasks that stimulate the use of the mirror neurons for imitating the actions and the sounds for speaking. We can make sure that we teach new language meanings initially in the presence of accompanying meaningful actions. Undoubtedly in the future the study of how the brain processes language will continue to enhance our knowledge of language learning. The input for the brain is interactions in which each child engages with their linguistic environment. We have already seen that the linguistic environment is constantly changing and so are the child’s interactions in it.
227
A final message All living languages change over time. They change in the ideas people communicate, the conventions they use to do this and the purposes for which they speak and listen. Changes in English over the last 50 years illustrate this. People in the 1960s were not likely to be talking about ‘surfing the net’ or ‘buying a new mobile’. You can imagine time-travelling to an English village 500 years ago or perhaps to a community 500 years in the future. Our language competence and performance would be sorely tried. One recent change, which we noted in the last chapter, is in the use of text messages. Texting has replaced a lot of oral communication. However, as a means of communication, texting sits between communicating orally and writing a letter. The visible text message has more of the qualities of spoken language than a formally written letter. We also noted earlier that the accurate communication of emotions can be more problematic in a text message compared to a spoken message. Although the author may use symbols such as :), the reader does not necessarily link the intended feelings or emotion with the other aspects of the message as easily as when speaking and listening. These changes in turn require changes in an individual’s ability to learn language. The language of the super future will be a symbolic system that will require, for its use, the types of learning capacities we have needed to learn English. However, you would expect that each of these types would be quite different from those we used to learn English. The focus of this book has been on educators using the ICPALER model as a way of thinking about language, how it is learnt and used and how it can be taught. Will it be an adequate model for guiding your thinking in the future? Undoubtedly it will. As we have seen above, all languages involve ideas, conventions, purposes and the ability to learn. We can think about any language by reflecting on these aspects. Any language education we provide needs to encourage students to be active, strategic language users and learners. We can enhance their capacity to do this by guiding them to develop an awareness of the aspects of the ICPALER framework. A language learner who is aware of each aspect, what to look for and how to integrate the aspects is more likely to be able to manage and direct their language learning. We can encourage our students to be sensitive to how language is used in the cultures they belong to. We can guide them to reflect on how they use language
228
A FINAL MESSAGE
and how they see it being used by others. They can reflect on how best they learn new words, new ideas and new conventions. They can think about how they see English being used in different contexts or cultures, and compare English with other languages and note similarities and differences. This thinking will be mediated by the self-talk they learn to use about language. Perhaps the most important awareness to foster in this changing context is the child’s self-concept as a language user and the child’s self-efficacy as a language learner. Children who can see their language at any time working for them and who can feel confident about trying out their linguistic competence and taking risks will learn language more effectively. Teachers, parents and peers are the main influences on this. The corrective feedback students receive for their use of language, the encouragement and the supportive modelling to which they are exposed are important factors. Schools need to ensure they have in place the curriculum and pedagogy necessary for students to progress on their developmental language-learning pathway. It is critical that as educators we scaffold students to build their self-confidence and self-efficacy as oral communicators. Our teaching needs to assist them to link positive emotional response with the speaking and listening activity and to build their intrinsic motivation to learn more effective oral communication skills. It needs to help them see how oral communication can empower them and others, and how they can use it to enhance the future, both theirs and others. The trajectory of oral language in the future is both unpredictable and exciting. Are we travelling towards a global world that has one language or will each of us live in a multiplicity of cultures, each with its own language? Whichever outcome eventuates, children who are individual ‘ICPALERers’ should be able to use oral language to optimise their own life options and those of others. The journey continues.
229
App e n d i x 1
Oral language screening profile – brief Name of student:
Date:
From your observations, how often does the student show each language behaviour below? Rate each one on a five-point scale from never (1), not often (2), sometimes (3), often (4) and very often (5). The rating here is comparative; you are comparing the student’s language use with that of their same-year typical peers. Ideas: Vocabulary How often does the student: 1. recall and use the most appropriate words for a particular context or purpose?
1
2
3
4
5
2. recall the meanings of words and phrases effectively?
1
2
3
4
5
3. show a restricted or immature vocabulary, uses baby words?
1
2
3
4
5
1. say and understand most sentences that describe one event?
1
2
3
4
5
2. say and understand sentences that describe two events?
1
2
3
4
5
3. say and understand sentences that link two events using words such as ‘while’ or ‘because’?
1
2
3
4
5
1. act out what they are told and follow correctly two or more spoken instructions in class?
1
2
3
4
5
2. describe accurately the sequence of events in an experience they have had?
1
2
3
4
5
3. recall and keep track of the ideas mentioned in a story they have heard?
1
2
3
4
5
Ideas: Sentence comprehension and production How often does the student:
Ideas: Discourse and topic comprehension and production How often does the student:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
230
Appe n d i c e s
Conventions: Phonological How often does the student:
1
2
3
4
5
1. say most or all sounds accurately?
1
2
3
4
5
2. use and comprehend stress patterns to communicate?
1
2
3
4
5
1. say and understand sentences that are grammatically correct, for example, say words in a correct order?
1
2
3
4
5
2. use various types of words correctly, for example, prepositions, adverbs and pronouns?
1
2
3
4
5
3. respond to and use a range of sentence types, and recognise and use questions, instructions and descriptions?
1
2
3
4
5
1. use and comprehend connectives such as ‘also’, ‘first’ or ‘but’ in speech to connect sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
2. use and comprehend the link between nouns, pronouns and verb agreement across sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
3. sequence the main ideas in a story or a recount in an appropriate order?
1
2
3
4
5
1. use language appropriately in social contexts to achieve their purposes, for example, know how to engage effectively in a conversation or speak politely?
1
2
3
4
5
2. interpret non-literal language correctly rather than literally, for example, ‘Pull up your socks’?
1
2
3
4
5
3. take account of their audience and what listeners know?
1
2
3
4
5
1. learn how to say new words without delay rather than needing excessive teaching and practice?
1
2
3
4
5
2. learn successfully from auditory information and doesn’t need accompanying visual cues to learn?
1
2
3
4
5
3. retain auditory information well and not ask for instructions to be repeated?
1
2
3
4
5
Conventions: Sentence How often does the student:
Conventions: Discourse and topic How often does the student:
Using language to achieve purposes How often does the student:
Ability to learn language How often does the student:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
231
Appendi c es
Articulation How often does the student: 1. speak with natural oral language fluency?
1
2
3
4
5
2. show they can speak across all situations (rather than show selective mutism)?
1
2
3
4
5
3. Work out an average oral language rating for each student as per the table below.
1
2
3
4
5
Total score: Average oral language rating (divide total by 25):
An average rating of 2.5 or above suggests average or above average oral language use. A rating of less than 2.5 may suggest immature oral language development. In this case, you may decide to use the Oral language observational profile – in depth (Appendix 2) to see the actual problem areas.
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
232
App e n d i x 2
Oral language observational profile – in depth Name of student:
Date:
From your observations, how often does the student show each language behaviour below? Rate each one on a five-point scale from never (1), not often (2), sometimes (3), often (4) and very often (5). The rating here is comparative; you are comparing the student’s language use with that of their same-year typical peers. Vocabulary expression How often does the student: 1. show a limited expressive vocabulary and recall comparatively few words?
1
2
3
4
5
2. have difficulty recalling and using synonyms?
1
2
3
4
5
3. take a comparatively long time to recall or say most words?
1
2
3
4
5
4. have difficulty recalling and using the most appropriate word, and use simple generic words, for example, ‘good’, ‘big’, ‘sort of’ or ‘stuff’?
1
2
3
4
5
5. take a long time to learn how to say new words and frequently mispronounce them?
1
2
3
4
5
6. misuse bound morphemes, for example, not refer correctly to the plurals of nouns or the past tense of verbs?
1
2
3
4
5
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
233
Appendi c es
Vocabulary reception How often does the student: 1. have difficulty recognising examples of the words typically known by same-age peers?
1
2
3
4
5
2. show a limited receptive vocabulary and have difficulty matching pictures or items with words?
1
2
3
4
5
3. have difficulty learning to recognise what new words mean and need more teaching to learn them?
1
2
3
4
5
4. misinterpret bound morphemes, for example, not distinguish between reference to present and past tense, or singular versus plural forms of nouns?
1
2
3
4
5
1. articulate sounds or words inaccurately and say sounds in incorrect orders?
1
2
3
4
5
2. have difficulty saying in order the sounds they hear in a spoken word?
1
2
3
4
5
3. have difficulty blending a sequence of sounds into a word?
1
2
3
4
5
4. find it hard to suggest rhyming words?
1
2
3
4
5
1. misinterpret words that have similar sound patterns?
1
2
3
4
5
2. have difficulty recognising a sound pattern that is shared by two or three spoken words?
1
2
3
4
5
3. have difficulty acting out the sounds in a spoken word by tapping once for each sound in the word?
1
2
3
4
5
4. have difficulty recognising words that rhyme?
1
2
3
4
5
Phonological and phonemic expression How often does the student:
Phonological and phonemic reception How often does the student:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
234
Appe n d i c e s
Sentence conventions expression How often does the student: 1. say mainly comparatively short sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
2. misuse prepositions and/or adverbs and substitute incorrect words?
1
2
3
4
5
3. have difficulty using pronouns that peers use, such as ‘it’, ‘that’ and ‘which’ in spoken sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
4. make grammatical errors, for example, say words in an incorrect order?
1
2
3
4
5
5. use speech that has immature grammar?
1
2
3
4
5
6. have difficulty imitating or accurately repeating sentences that were heard?
1
2
3
4
5
7. omit key grammatical categories, for example, ‘I go toilet’?
1
2
3
4
5
8. use tense incorrectly, for example, have difficulty with verb–tense agreement?
1
2
3
4
5
1. understand comparatively short sentences only?
1
2
3
4
5
2. have difficulty comprehending relationships that use pronouns, such as ‘it’, ‘that’ and ‘which’?
1
2
3
4
5
3. miss or fail to recognise sentences that have incorrect grammar?
1
2
3
4
5
4. misunderstand prepositions and/or adverbs?
1
2
3
4
5
1. saying sentences that describe more than one event?
1
2
3
4
5
2. saying variations of one-event sentences, for example, asking a question or instructing?
1
2
3
4
5
3. describing in a sentence two events that occur in sequence or using a linking word such as ‘while’?
1
2
3
4
5
4. saying more complex sentence ideas such as inclusive or exclusive relationships linked by ‘all’, ‘except’ or ‘but’?
1
2
3
4
5
Sentence conventions reception How often does the student:
Sentence meanings expression How often does the student have difficulty:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
235
Appendi c es
Sentence meanings reception How often does the student have difficulty understanding: 1. simple sentences that describe one event?
1
2
3
4
5
2. variations of one-event sentences, for example, recognising a question or an instruction?
1
2
3
4
5
3. sentences that describe two events using a subordinate clause?
1
2
3
4
5
4. the relationship between two events in a sentence that are linked by words such as ‘while’ or ‘before’?
1
2
3
4
5
5. sentences that use inclusive or exclusive relationships such as ‘all’, ‘except’ or ‘but’?
1
2
3
4
5
1. using connectives such as ‘also’, ‘first’ or ‘but’ in speech to connect sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
2. linking nouns, matching pronouns and making verbs agree in their tense across sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
3. sequencing the main ideas in a story or a recount in an appropriate order?
1
2
3
4
5
1. understanding connectives such as ‘as well’ or ‘however’ within sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
2. linking pronouns with their matching nouns across sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
3. using verb tenses to understand how events occurred across sentences?
1
2
3
4
5
1. describing accurately the sequence of events in an experience they have had?
1
2
3
4
5
2. mentioning the context and the main characters in a story early in a presentation?
1
2
3
4
5
Discourse conventions expression How often does the student have difficulty:
Discourse conventions reception How often does the student have difficulty:
Discourse meaning expression How often does the student have difficulty:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
236
Appe n d i c e s
Discourse meaning reception How often does the student have difficulty: 1. acting out what they are told and correctly following two or more spoken instructions in class?
1
2
3
4
5
2. recalling and keeping track of the ideas mentioned in a story they have heard?
1
2
3
4
5
3. knowing how to use the context and the main characters in a story they heard?
1
2
3
4
5
1. when asked to talk about a particular topic, for example, when asked ‘Tell me about your pets?’
1
2
3
4
5
2. staying on an agreed or a specified topic when contributing to a spoken message and is more likely to say ideas that are irrelevant?
1
2
3
4
5
1. saying what a spoken message is about, for example, saying the topic of a story or a conversation?
1
2
3
4
5
2. recognising when an idea they hear does not fit with the topic of a spoken message?
1
2
3
4
5
1. speak hesitantly or without natural oral language fluency?
1
2
3
4
5
2. use stress patterns ineffectively?
1
2
3
4
5
3. speak either excessively slowly or rapidly?
1
2
3
4
5
4. show stutter or stammer patterns?
1
2
3
4
5
5. show an influence on speech of a language background other than English?
1
2
3
4
5
6. have difficulty putting into words what they want to say (show selective mutism)?
1
2
3
4
5
7. prefer to communicate in other ways rather than to talk?
1
2
3
4
5
Topic meanings expression How often does the student have difficulty:
Topic meanings reception How often does the student have difficulty:
Articulation, speech and speaking patterns How often does the student:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
237
Appendi c es
Using language to achieve purposes How often does the student: 1. interpret incorrectly non-literal language such as idioms, for example, ‘Pull up your socks’?
1
2
3
4
5
2. use language in a range of ways, for example, to express feelings, rather than in restricted ways, for example, speak only when they want something?
1
2
3
4
5
3. understand what other people say and mean?
1
2
3
4
5
4. have difficulty using the words most appropriate to a context, for example, to be polite?
1
2
3
4
5
5. have difficulty with the rules of conversation, for example, initiating conversation with peers, taking turns, giving and taking, knowing when to stop, or responding to social cues from the audience?
1
2
3
4
5
6. have difficulty following a conversation, for example, go off the topic or forget what has been said?
1
2
3
4
5
7. have difficulty keeping a conversation going or communicate in grunts?
1
2
3
4
5
8. talk a lot but convey little meaning?
1
2
3
4
5
9. make inappropriate assumptions about what the audience knows or is egocentric?
1
2
3
4
5
1. learning to use new words to label unfamiliar events or items?
1
2
3
4
5
2. having their attention directed through language?
1
2
3
4
5
3. actually doing actions that match what they say they will do?
1
2
3
4
5
4. retaining what they heard and request a repetition?
1
2
3
4
5
5. converting instructions they hear into self-talk for themselves?
1
2
3
4
5
6. internalising oral language and forming sub-vocal patterns?
1
2
3
4
5
7. learning in group situations and learns better in one-on-one situations?
1
2
3
4
5
Use of language to learn How often does the student have difficulty:
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
238
Appe n d i c e s
Perceiving and attending to spoken information How often does the student: 1. become inattentive or easily distracted, especially when background noise is present?
1
2
3
4
5
2. learn better when visual cues accompany auditory information?
1
2
3
4
5
3. have more difficulty learning when two or more speakers participate in the talk?
1
2
3
4
5
4. misunderstand what is said, especially if it was said rapidly?
1
2
3
4
5
5. have more difficulty understanding the teacher when the teacher moves around the room than when remaining stationary?
1
2
3
4
5
6. have difficulty understanding speech when it is said at a normal level?
1
2
3
4
5
7. seem unaware of their language difficulties and not seek clarification?
1
2
3
4
5
To work out the profile for a student, add up the ratings in each category and write this in the second column of the table on page 240. Then divide each total by the number of items in each category, as shown in the third column. Write the average rating score for each category in the fourth column. Any category that has an average rating score of more than three needs further attention. These categories may require further teaching. The entry in the fifth column allows you to locate each score in the ICPALER profile on page 241. The recommended teaching activities are in Chapters 8–13. You can collate these results on the table on page 241.
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
239
240
Phonological and phonemic expression Phonological and phonemic reception Sentence conventions expression Sentence conventions reception Sentence meanings expression Sentence meanings reception Discourse conventions expression Discourse conventions reception Discourse meanings expression Discourse meanings reception Topic meanings expression Topic meanings reception Articulation and speech patterns Using language to achieve purposes Use of language to learn Perceiving and attending to spoken information
Vocabulary expression Vocabulary reception
Category
Total Divide score by 6 4 4 4 8 4 4 5 3 3 2 3 2 2 7 9 7 7
Average Need for ICPALER profile entry rating score teaching Ideas: vocabulary expression Ideas: vocabulary reception Convention: vocabulary expression Convention: vocabulary reception Convention: sentence expression Convention: sentence reception Ideas: sentence expression Ideas: sentence reception Convention: discourse expression Convention: discourse reception Ideas: discourse expression Ideas: discourse reception Ideas: topic expression Ideas: topic reception Articulation and speech patterns Using language to achieve purposes Use of language to learn Perceiving and attending to spoken information
Appendi c es
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
Perceiving and attending to spoken information
Use of language to learn
Using language to achieve purposes
Articulation and speech patterns
Conventions
Ideas
Expression
Expression
Reception
Sentence
Average score for category
Reception
Vocabulary
ICPALER profile
Expression
Reception
Discourse Expression
Reception
Topic
Appe n d i c e s
Teaching Oral Language © John Munro 2011
241
References Allman, JM, Watson, KK, Tetreault, NA & Hakeem, AY 2005, ‘Intuition and autism: A possible role for Von Economo neurons’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 367–73. Andrews, R, Torgerson, C, Beverton, S, Locke, T, Low, G, Robinson, A & Zhu, D 2004, ‘The effect of grammar teaching (syntax) in English on 5 to 16 year olds’ accuracy and quality in written composition’, Research Evidence in Education Library, EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, London. Ardila, A 2008, ‘On the evolutionary origins of executive functions’, Brain and Cognition, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 92–9. Aronoff, M & Fudeman, K 2005, What is morphology?, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. August, D, Carlo, M, Dressler, C & Snow, C 2005, ‘The critical role of vocabulary development for English language learners’, Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 50–7. Baumann, J & Bergeron, BS 1993, ‘Story map instruction using children’s literature: Effects on first graders’ comprehension of central narrative elements’, Journal of Reading Behavior, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 407–37. Beaton, P 1995, ‘The importance of music in the early childhood language curriculum’, International Schools Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 28–38. Beck, IL & McKeown, MG 2007, ‘Increasing young low-income children’s oral vocabulary repertoires through rich and focused instruction’, The Elementary School Journal, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 251–71. Benner, GJ, Nelson, JR & Epstein, MH 2002, ‘The language skills of students with EBD: A literature review’, Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 43–56. Berman, RA & Slobin, DI 1994, Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillside, NJ. Biemiller, A 2005, ‘Size and sequence in vocabulary development: Implications for choosing words for primary grade vocabulary instruction’, in A Hiebert & M Kamil (eds), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ. Biemiller, A & Boote, C 2006, ‘An effective method for building vocabulary in primary grades’, Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 44–62. Blachowicz, C, Fisher, P & Watts-Taffe, S 2005, Integrated vocabulary instruction: Meeting the needs of diverse learners in Grades K–5, Learning Point Associates, Naperville, IL. Blake, ML 2009, ‘Inferencing processes after right hemisphere brain damage: Effects of contextual bias’, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 373–84. Blewitt, PR, Rump, KM, Shealy, SE & Cook, SA 2009, ‘Shared book reading: When and how questions affect young children’s word learning’, Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 101, no. 2, pp. 294–304. Bloom, L & Lahey, M 1978, Language development and language disorders, Wiley, New York. Bock, K & Levelt, W 1994, ‘Language production: Grammatical encoding’, in MA Gernsbacher (ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, Academic Press, San Diego, CA. Bodsworth, N 1989, A nice walk in the jungle, Picture Puffin, Ringwood, Vic.
242
Re f er e n c e s
Bortolini, U, Caselli, MC & Leonard, L 1997, ‘Grammatical deficits in Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment’, Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 809–20. Bowen, C 1998, Developmental phonological disorders: A practical guide for families and teachers, ACER Press, Melbourne. Breitenstein, C, Jansen, A, Deppe, M, Foerster, AF, Sommer, J, Wolbers, T & Knecht, S 2005, ‘Hippocampus activity differentiates good from poor learners of a novel lexicon’, NeuroImage, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 958–68. Buccino, G, Riggio, L, Melli, G, Binkofski, F, Gallese, V & Rizzolatti, G 2005, ‘Listening to action-related sentences modulates the activity of the motor system: A combined TMS and behavioral study’, Cognitive Brain Research, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 355–63. Caplan, D, Waters, G, Kennedy, D, Alpert, N, Makris, N, DeDe, G, Michaud, J & Reddy, A 2007, ‘A study of syntactic processing in aphasia II: Neurological aspects’, Brain and Language, vol. 101, no. 2, pp. 151–77. Cappa, SF & Gorno-Tempini, ML 2009, ‘Clinical phenotypes of progressive aphasia’, Future Neurology, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 153–61. Carota, F & Sirigu, A 2008, ‘Neural Bases of Sequence Processing in Action and Language’, Language Learning, vol. 58, pp. 179–99. Chapman, RS 2000, ‘Children’s language learning: An interactionist perspective’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 33–54. Chomsky, N 1986, Knowledge of language, Praeger, New York. Clahsen, H & Muysken, P 1989, ‘The UG paradox in L2 acquisition’, Second Language Research, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–29. Cowley, J 2006, The farm concert, Mimosa McGraw-Hill, Melbourne. Department of Education, Science and Training 2005, Teaching reading: Report and recommendations—National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Desautel, D 2009, ‘Becoming a thinking thinker: Metacognition, self-reflection, and classroom practice’, Teachers College Record, vol. 111, no. 8, pp. 1997–2020. Doherty, CP, Fitzsimons, M, Asenbauer, B & Staunton, H 1999, ‘Discrimination of prosody and music by normal children’, European Journal of Neurology, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 221–6. Ebbels, S 2007, ‘Teaching grammar to school-aged children with specific language impairment using shape coding’, Child Language Teaching & Therapy, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 67–93. Eilers, LH & Pinkley, C 2006, ‘Metacognitive strategies help students to comprehend all text’, Reading Improvement, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 13–29. Evans, JL & MacWhinney, B 1999, ‘Sentence processing strategies in children with expressive and expressive-receptive specistc language impairments’, International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 117–34. Fazio, P, Cantagallo, A, Craighero, L, D’Ausilio, A, Roy, AC, Pozzo, T, Calzolari, F, Granieri, E & Fadiga, L 2009, ‘Encoding of human action in Broca’s area’, Brain, vol. 132, no. 7, pp. 1980–8. Feldman, HM, MacWhinney, B & Sacco, K 2002, ‘Sentence processing in children with early unilateral brain injury’, Brain and Language, vol. 83, no. 2, pp. 335–52. Flanigan, K 2007, ‘A concept of word in text’, Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 37–70. Folger, JP & Chapman, RS 1978, ‘A pragmatic analysis of spontaneous imitations’, Journal of Child Language, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 25–38. Fotos, SS 1994, ‘Integrating grammar instruction and communicative language use through grammar consciousness-raising tasks’, TESOL Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 323–51.
243
Referenc es
Friedrich, M, Weber, C & Friederici, A 2004, ‘Electrophysiological evidence for delayed mismatch response in infants at-risk for specific language impairment’, Psychophysiology, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 772–82. Frost, SJ; Landi, N, Mencl, WE, Sandak, R, Fulbright, RK, Tejada, ET, Jacobsen, L, Grigorenko, EL, Constable, RT & Pugh, KR 2009, ‘Phonological awareness predicts activation patterns for print and speech’, Annals of Dyslexia, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 78–97. Garner, JK & Bochna, CR 2004, ‘Transfer of a listening comprehension strategy to independent reading in first-grade students’, Early Childhood Education Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 69–74. Gazzola, V, Aziz-Zadeh, L & Keysers, C 2006, ‘Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans’, Current Biology, vol. 16, no. 18, pp. 1824–9. Goh, C & Taib, Y 2006, ‘Metacognitive instruction in listening for young learners’, ELT Journal, vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 222–32. Grela, BG & Leonard, LB 2000, ‘The influence of argument-structure complexity on the use of auxiliary verbs by children with SLI’, Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 1115–25. Grunwell, P 1997, ‘Natural phonology’, in M Ball & R Kent (eds), The new phonologies: Developments in clinical linguistics, Singular Publishing Group, San Diego, CA. Hadley, PA & Rice, ML 1996, ‘Emergent uses of BE and DO: Evidence from children with specific language impairment’, Language Acquisition, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 209–43. Hansson, K 1997, ‘Patterns of verb usage in Swedish children with SLI: An application of recent theories’, First Language, vol. 17, no. 50, pp. 195–217. Haspelmath, M 2002, Understanding morphology, Arnold, London. Helenius, P, Parviainen, T, Paetau, R & Salmelin, R 2009, ‘Neural processing of spoken words in specific language impairment and dyslexia’, Brain, vol. 132, no. 7, pp. 1918–27. Homae, F, Watanabe, H, Nakano, T & Taga, G 2007, ‘Prosodic processing in the developing brain’, Neuroscience Research, vol. 59, no. 1, 29–39. Ingram, JCL 2007, Neurolinguistics: An introduction to spoken language processing and its disorders, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Isac, D & Reiss, C 2008, I-language: An introduction to linguistics as cognitive science, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Jisa, H, Reilly, JS, Verhoeven, L, Baruch, E & Rosado, E 2002, ‘Passive voice construction in written texts: A cross-linguistic study’, Written Language and Literacy, vol. 2, no. 5, 163–82. Joshi, RM 2005, ‘Vocabulary: A critical component of comprehension’, Reading & Writing Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 209–19. Kerbel, D & Grunwell, P 1998, ‘A study of idiom comprehension in children with semanticpragmatic difficulties. Part II: Between-groups results and discussion’, International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 23–44. Kieffer, MJ & Lesaux, NK 2008, ‘The role of derivational morphology in the reading comprehension of Spanish-speaking English language learners’, Reading and Writing, vol. 21, no. 8, pp. 783–804. Langacker, RW 1995, ‘Raising and transparency’, Language, vol. 71, no. 1, pp. 1–62. Le Bel, RM, Pineda, JA & Sharma, A 2009, ‘Motor–auditory–visual integration: The role of the human mirror neuron system in communication and communication disorders’, Journal of Communication Disorders, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 299–304. Leonard, LB, Deevy, P, Wong, AM, Stokes, SF & Fletcher P 2007, ‘Modal verbs with and without tense: A study of English- and Cantonese-speaking children with specific language impairment’, International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 209–28.
244
Re f er e n c e s
Lovelace, S & Stewart, SR 2009, ‘Effects of robust vocabulary instruction and multicultural text on the development of word knowledge among African American children’, American Journal of Speech–Language Pathology, vol. 18, pp. 168–79. Lovett, MW, De Palma, M, Frijters, J, Steinbach, K, Temple, M, Benson, N & Lacerenza, L 2008, ‘Interventions for reading difficulties: A comparison of response to intervention by ELL and EFL struggling readers’, Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 333–52. Lust, BC 2006, Child language: Acquisition and growth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Miller, J & Paul, R 1995, The clinical assessment of language comprehension, Paul Brookes Publishing Company, Baltimore, MD. Morrow, LM 1985, ‘Retelling stories: A strategy for improving young children’s comprehension, concept of story structure, and oral language complexity’, Elementary School Journal, vol. 85, no. 5, pp. 647–61. Munro, J 1995, Information processing and the practice of teaching: Teacher friendly theories of language learning, keynote presentation at Queensland Teachers Association Teacher 95 conference, Townsville, August. Munro, J 1999, Assessing and teaching phonological knowledge, ACER Press, Melbourne. Munro, J 2004, Literacy improvement: It takes a team. The Specialist Schools’ Trust Journal of Innovation in Education: Snapshots Primary Edition, 2(1), 12–15. Munro, J & Munro, K 1994, ‘Reading strategy training: A means of empowering those who find reading difficult’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 7–23. Newcomer, PL & Hammill, DD 2008, Test of language development fourth edition (TOLD-4): Primary and intermediate, PRO-ED, Austin, TX. Nippold, MA 1998, Later language development: The school-age and adolescent years. PRO-ED, Austin, TX. Norris, JM & Ortega, L 2000, ‘Effectiveness of L2 instruction: A research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis’, Language Learning, vol. 50, no. 3, pp. 417–528. Oberman, LM & Ramachandran, VS 2008, ‘How do shared circuits develop?’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 34–35. Opitz, B & Friederici, AD 2003, ‘Interactions of the hippocampal system and the prefrontal cortex in learning language-like rules’, NeuroImage, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1730–7. Opitz, B & Friederici, AD 2007, ‘Neural basis of processing sequential and hierarchical syntactic structures’, Human Brain Mapping, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 585–92. Owens, RE 2001, Language development: An introduction. Allyn & Bacon, Boston. Paradis, J, Crago, M, Genesee, F & Rice, M 2003, ‘French-English bilingual children with SLI: How do they compare with their monolingual peers?’ Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 113–27. Paris, AH & Paris, SG 2007, ‘Teaching narrative comprehension strategies to first graders’, Cognition and Instruction, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 1–44. Pihan, H 2006, ‘Affective and linguistic processing of speech prosody: DC potential studies’, Progress in Brain Research, vol. 156, pp. 269–84. Purves, D, Augustine, GJ, Fitzpatrick, D, Hall, WC, LaMantia, AS, McNamara, JO & White, LE (eds) 2008, Neuroscience (4th ed.), Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA. Ramscar, M & Gitcho, N 2007, ‘Developmental change and the nature of learning in childhood’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 11, no. 7, pp. 274–9. Reid, VM, Hoehl, S, Grigutsch, M, Groendahl, A, Parise, E & Striano, T 2009, ‘The neural correlates of infant and adult goal prediction: Evidence for semantic processing systems’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 620–9. Reilly, J, Bates, E & Marchman, V 1998, ‘Narrative discourse in children with early focal brain injury’, Brain and Language, vol. 61, no. 3, pp. 335–375.
245
Referenc es
Reilly, JS, Zamora, A & McGivern, RF 2005, ‘Developing perspective in English: The acquisition of stance’, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 185–208. Restrepo, MA & Gutierrez-Clellen, VF 2001, ‘Article use in Spanish-speaking children with SLI’, Journal of Child Language, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 433–52. Reynell, JK & Gruber, CP 1990, Reynell developmental language scales, Western Psychological Services, Los Angeles, CA. Rice, M, Wexler, K & Cleave, P 1995, ‘Specific language impairment as a period of extended optional infinitive’, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 850–63. Rymarczyk, K & Grabowska, A 2007, ‘Sex differences in brain control of prosody’, Neuropsychologia, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 921–30. Schön, D, Boyer, M, Moreno, S, Besson, M, Peretz, I & Kolinsky, R 2008, ‘Songs as an aid for language acquisition’, Cognition, vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 975–83. Schunk, HA 1999, ‘The effect of singing paired with signing on receptive vocabulary skills of elementary ESL students’, Journal of Music Therapy, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 110–24. Semel, E, Wiig, E & Secord, W 2006, Clinical evaluation of language fundamentals – Fourth edition (CELF-4 Australia), Pearson, Sydney, NSW. Sharifian, F 2001, ‘Schema-based processing in Australian speakers of Aboriginal English’, Language and Intercultural Communication, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 120–134. Slobin, DI 1995, ‘Converbs in Turkish child languages: The grammaticalization of event coherence’, in M Haspelmath & E König (eds), Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective: Structure and meaning of adverbial verb forms – adverbial participles, gerunds, Mouton de Gruyter, New York. Squire, LR 1992, ‘Memory and the hippocampus: A synthesis from findings with rats, monkeys, and humans’, Psychological Review, vol. 99, no. 2, 195–231. Tarlton, J 1974, The King’s cat, Scholastic, New Zealand. Tesink, CMJY, Buitelaar, JK, Petersson, KM, van der Gaag, RJ, Kan, CC, Tendolkar, I & Hagoort, P 2009, ‘Neural correlates of pragmatic language comprehension in autism spectrum disorders’, Brain, vol. 132, no. 7, pp 1941–52. Tomasello, M 2006, ‘Acquiring linguistic constructions’, in D Kuhn & R Siegler (eds), Handbook of Child Psychology, Wiley, New York. Tommerdahl, J 2009, ‘What teachers of students with SEBD need to know about speech and language difficulties’, Emotional & Behavioural Difficulties, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 19–31. Tunmer, WE, Bowey, JA & Grieve, R 1983, ‘The development of young children’s awareness of the word as a unit of spoken language’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 567–94. van den Broek, P, Kendeou, P, Kremer, K, Lynch, JS, Butler, J, White, MJ & Lorch, EP 2005, ‘Assessment of comprehension abilities in young children’, in S Stahl & S Paris (eds), Children’s Reading Comprehension and Assessment, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ. Vandergrift, L, Goh, CCM, Mareschal, CJ & Tafaghodtari, MH 2006, ‘The Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire: Development and validation’, Language Learning, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 431–62. Vannest, JJ, Karunanayaka, PR, Altaye, M, Schmithorst, VJ, Plante, EM, Eaton, KJ, Rasmussen, JM & Holland, SK 2009, ‘Comparison of fMRI data from passive listening and activeresponse story processing tasks in children’, Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 971–6. Von Berger, E, Wulfeck, B, Bates, E & Fink, N 1996, ‘Developmental changes in real-time sentence processing’, First Language, vol. 16, no. 47, pp. 193–222. Vygotsky, LS 1989, Thought and Language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Weber, C, Hahne, A, Friedrich, M & Friederici, AD 2004, ‘Discrimination of word stress in early infant perception: Electrophysiological evidence’, Cognitive Brain Research, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 149–61.
246
Re f er e n c e s
Wegerif, R, Linares, JP, Rojas-Drummond, S, Mercer, N & Velez, M 2005, ‘Thinking together in the UK and Mexico: Transfer of an educational innovation’, Journal of Classroom Interaction, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 40–8. Weigel, DJ, Lowman, JL & Martin, SS 2007, ‘Language development in the years before school: A comparison of developmental assets in home and child care settings’, Early Child Development and Care, vol. 177, no. 6–7, pp. 719–34. Wells, JC 2008, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Pearson Education, Harlow, Essex. Whitehurst, GJ & Vasta, R 1975, ‘Is language acquired through imitation?’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 37–59. Zhengdong, G 2008, ‘Examining negotiation in peer group oral assessment: What are the implications?’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 1–20.
247
Index A
F
active voice sentences 48, 49, 196, 201, 203 attitudes 3, 78, 208, 226 autism spectrum disorders 223, 242 (ref), 246 (ref)
figurative expressions 62, 71, 103 free morphemes 16 frontal hemisphere 219, 223, 225, 226 function words 19, 96, 98
B
G
bound morphemes 16, 19, 20, 48, 50, 98, 103, 104, 122, 124, 125, 146, 147, 233, 234 Broca’s area 19, 219, 220, 222, 225, 227, 243 (ref)
genre conventions 29, 37, 38, 46, 48, 51–53, 55, 138, 174, 183, 184, 187, 189, 190 grammatical functions 15, 29, 114 grammatical rules 13, 37, 38, 45–53, 55, 64–66, 68–72, 75, 89, 90, 92, 96, 103–4, 108, 114, 135, 143–147, 187, 199, 200– 201, 215, 222, 226, 231, 235
C clause 48, 68, 70, 71, 72, 222, 236 complex sentence 23, 24, 25, 135, 142 compound sentence 24, 25, 26, 67, 70 conditional relationship 25, 75, 142 connectives 52, 71, 141, 152, 231, 236 content word 19, 98 convention vii, viii, 1, 36–39, 45–48, 50–53, 55, 59, 61, 96, 103, 144, 147, 150, 152, 153, 158, 161, 181, 196, 199, 201, 206, 231, 240, 241 cultural effects 33, 34, 82, 245, 246 (ref)
D developmental sequence for ideas, purposes and conventions in oral language 65–72 see also DSIPC table discourse meaning 27–29, 35, 37, 70, 90, 92, 95, 98, 103, 104, 149–153, 155, 190, 236, 240 DSIPC table 87–8, 98 dyslexia 45, 244
H hemisphere – left, right 46, 218, 219 hippocampus 220–1, 226
I I-language 2, 5, 34, 37, 214, 244 (ref) ICPALER 1, 10, 11, 15, 21–22, 55, 73, 83, 85, 87, 97, 99, 101, 102, 144, 160, 162, 175, 181, 183, 187, 189, 214, 217, 218, 223, 227–229, 239 inclusive relationships 25, 72, 142, 235, 236 inner language 4, 80, 160, 224 intonation patterns 45, 59, 60, 111, 125, 152, 182, 189
L linguistic competence 229 linguistic culture 214–218, 227 literacy vii–viii, 3, 6, 26, 45, 174, 211
E
M
E-language 2, 6, 34 egocentric speech 66, 68, 70, 79, 80, 81, 238
metacognitive 4, 80, 81, 183, 186, 224, 225, 226
248
In d e x
mirror neurons 220–221, 227 modal verbs 50, 135, 146 morpheme 16, 19, 20, 48, 50, 98, 103, 104, 122, 124, 125, 146, 147, 233, 234 morphological 47, 50, 66, 96, 189, 199
N noun 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 48, 51, 52, 65, 67, 122, 146, 149, 164, 220, 231, 234, 236 numeracy 3, 6
O Observing oral language behaviours (OOLB) 87–88, 94 occipito-temporal 220 OLSP-B 97–99, 230–232 OLSP-D 97–99, 233–239 onset 43–44, 125–129 OOLB group checklist 87–88, 94–95 Oral language observational profile – in depth 97, 233–239 Oral language screening profile – brief 97, 230–232
P parietal lobe 220, 222, 226 passive voice sentence 48–49, 109, 144, 196, 199–201, 203 phoneme 40, 41, 44, 68, 126 phonemic vii, ix, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 86, 126, 234, 240 phonemic awareness 43, 44 phonological 15, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 53, 64–66, 68, 70, 72, 86, 87, 114, 125, 126, 190, 201, 202, 231, 234, 240, 244 (ref) phonological awareness 3, 43, 65, 70, 111, 125, 220 phonology 10, 38, 244 (ref) pragmatic 10, 56, 63, 243 (ref), 244 (ref), 246 (ref) predicate 21, 22, 25 prefrontal 223–227, 245 (ref) pronoun 24, 37, 40, 42, 48–50, 52, 53, 65– 72, 86, 87, 96, 149–152, 163, 164, 182, 190, 201–204, 211, 231, 233, 235, 236 prosody 45, 46, 60, 243 (ref), 245 (ref), 246 (ref)
R rime 43, 44, 67, 69, 77, 78, 125–129, 132
S schwa 41, 44, 45 self-efficacy 78, 82, 103, 155, 186, 189, 190, 195, 196, 208, 229 self-management 4, 64, 80, 160, 172 self-talk vi, viii, 4, 64, 68, 75, 77, 79–82, 103, 104, 106, 108, 112, 139, 160, 164, 172, 177, 180, 184, 185, 189, 191, 193, 195–197, 208, 210, 220, 223, 224, 229, 238 semantic v, 10, 21, 35, 56, 223, 244 (ref), 245 (ref) sentence meaning 13, 14, 15, 19–29, 32, 34–37, 45–46, 48–49, 59, 65–72, 75, 76, 96, 99, 103, 104, 108, 109, 135–151, 161, 173, 181, 189, 190, 222, 227, 235, 240, 246 (ref) short-term working memory 31, 84, 110, 113, 176 simple sentence 19, 23, 25, 26, 42, 48, 65, 75 specific language impairments 19, 20, 50, 243 (ref) speech disorders 86, 242–244 (ref), 246 (ref) subject 21, 22, 25, 26, 69, 71, 72 suffix 16, 19, 51, 122, 123 syllable 10, 38, 41, 43–45, 67, 68, 121, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 220 syntax 10, 21, 144, 190, 222, 227, 242
T temporal cortex 219–222, 226 topic meanings 13–15, 30–32, 35, 59, 103, 104, 121, 125, 138, 149, 153, 155–159, 173, 177, 181, 183, 189, 190, 201, 203, 230, 237, 240
V verb 3, 16, 19, 20, 21–27, 47–52, 65–69, 71, 72, 74, 116, 122, 123, 135, 137, 146, 149, 164, 182, 190, 191, 199, 200, 216, 222, 231, 233, 236, 244 (ref)
249
Index
vocabulary v–vii, ix, x, 3, 5, 15, 20, 31, 33, 34, 66–69, 74, 83, 89, 91, 93, 94, 103, 104, 106–109, 114–121, 125, 134, 178, 180, 192, 194, 197, 202, 204, 216, 219– 221, 230, 233, 234, 240, 241, 244 (ref), 245 (ref), 246 (ref) voiced sound 42, 43 voiceless sound 42, 43
W Wernicke’s aphasia 19, 222
250
Powerful Learning A strategy for systemic educational improvement Edited by David Hopkins, John Munro, Wayne Craig ACER Press 2011 Powerful Learning: A strategy for systemic educational improvement delivers an evidence-based, results-driven approach to large-scale educational reform in schools. Pre-eminent educationalists David Hopkins, John Munro and Wayne Craig, together with expert contributors, explicate a ‘grand theory’ of system change that leads to measurable outcomes in enhanced student learning and accelerated achievement over time.
This breakthrough book helps identify and, importantly, adapt appropriate teaching strategies, organisational structures and policy options to support improvement plans in any given school. Ultimately, school principals, administrators, policy makers and the teachers themselves will see a discernible reduction in the variance of student performance, an overall rise in school standards, and a narrowing of the educational divide.
Premised upon an intensive program in the Northern Metropolitan Region of Melbourne, Australia, Powerful Learning demonstrates the compelling impact of radical reform in an area of high socioeconomic disadvantage. This in-depth case study approach, bolstered by reference to the broader international experience, provides an ‘inside out’ perspective on school improvement, with the central tenet that every student will reach their potential. While the essential standards of literacy and numeracy are addressed, instilling the desire to learn in students is paramount.
David Hopkins is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Education, University of London, and consults internationally on school reform. Dr John Munro is Head of Studies in Exceptional Learning and Gifted Education in the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. Wayne Craig is Regional Director of the Northern Metropolitan Region, Melbourne.
To order Powerful Learning: A strategy for systemic educational improvement w: http://shop.acer.edu.au e:
[email protected]
Australian Council for Educational Research
Teaching Oral Language
Teaching Oral Language Building a firm foundation using ICPALER in the early primary years
In Teaching Oral Language, Dr John Munro redresses this imbalance through the delivery of his step-by-step model, ICPALER. The Ideas–Conventions–Purposes–Ability to learn–Expression and Reception framework describes the various aspects of oral language from a classroom perspective, and demonstrates how teachers can best guide students to become effective communicators and language users. Designed to facilitate teaching and assessment, and to equip teachers to hear and see students’ speaking and listening skills, ICPALER promotes the use of self-talk and empowers students to become self-teachers of oral language. Representing the culmination of Dr Munro’s research and practice over many years, Teaching Oral Language explicates the ICPALER model for classroom implementation. This breakthrough program has been used to inform several major oral language projects commissioned by state and federal education departments, and is an indispensable resource for teachers and their students in the early primary years.
JOHN MUNRO
Associate Professor John Munro is Head of Studies in Exceptional Learning and Gifted Education in the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. A trained teacher and psychologist, his research interests include literacy learning and learning difficulties, maths learning disabilities, learning internationally, gifted learning, professional learning and school improvement. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders and a Life Member of Learning Difficulties Australia.
Teaching Oral Language
Oral language is widely recognised as an essential foundation for successful school learning. However, until recently, the acquisition of oral language skills has been largely overshadowed by reading, writing, spelling and numeracy, and has not been considered a key component of school curricula.
Building a firm foundation using ICPALER in the early primary years
ISBN 978-0-86431-920-3
9 780864 319203
Australian Council for Educational Research
JOHN MUNRO
