This year the focus in Reading Recovery has been on oral language and its significance in the intervention program. As a result many professional readings were provided to assist teachers foster awareness in students’ oral language development, which can then be addressed through the intervention process. Three articles were used to summarise my take on oral language and its importance in literacy success in the early years. (Oral Language Opportunities- Children’s Talk; Katherine Luongo-Orlando, Talk to Think, Learn and Teach; Bridie Raban, and Put Your Ear a Little Closer-Tuning In to a Child’s Language to Aid Literacy Acquision; Megan Dixon)
“Children do not learn language by imitation. They learn to talk by talking to people who talk to them; people who make efforts to understand what they are trying to say.” Marie Clay
Marie Clay believed that when we provide preschool opportunities for our children, their ‘natural’ environment changes and with this comes some gains but also some losses. Preschool offers increased opportunities to play and socialise but less time to talk with adults than they would have had at home. Studies show however, that in order for language to develop, children require more encounters with more well developed speakers as a language resource. Mature speakers provide appropriate modelling as well as offer an opportunity to converse.
Children come to learn without effort that language is a complex interrelationship of subsystems we know as pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology and phonemic awareness. Children also come to understand that language is multilayered, rule governed, and that it recognises sensitivities as it develops recursively by fitting new with old ideas, turn taking to build meaning together etc. Language development depends on the amount of conversation between child and adult. The foundations of literacy achievement are embedded in early childhood experiences. Oral language experiences rooted in conversation, personal recounts, book talk, story telling, are cornerstones to literacy as it promotes word learning, vocabulary development, grammatical knowledge and narrative skills.
So if children lack this opportunity in their preschool years then more is left to learn at school. Marie Clay comprises that while language is developing, there is an intermingling of learning at many levels. So while children are being taught using a single focus like phonics or letter of the week, or some other feature of language, children are learning about language independently across all levels at once. If a child’s attention is elsewhere they miss the significance of the particular aspect of linguistic complexity. For this reason it is important to keep the focus on language levels within the context of a larger frame of meaning. Language is used with a purpose- to explain, share, and have our needs met. “According to Halliday, it is through learning how to mean that other aspects of language are acquired” (Hall, 1987, p. 12).
The ultimate goal in Reading Recovery intervention is to develop a self-extending system in students in order to become independent readers and writers. Marie Clay describes oral language as the first self-extending system a child develops through the ‘serve and return of an intention sharing conversation’. Self-extending activity consist of searching for and using further information to give meaning and to gain meaning, relating new information to previous learning, noticing new things and actively seeking new learning, repeating and rehearsing to secure learning, self-monitoring leading to self-correcting and integrating and controlling a range of information flexibly. Hence, the development of oral language is essential to reading, writing, and overall literacy and therefore time for conversation in a tightly structured program is justified and a rich oral language classroom is paramount.