Speaking and listening in the primary classroom

If speaking and listening skills are the foundation of a child’s success, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are measured by the government, teachers should make them a priority, says Jean Gross...

Not long ago I met a teacher who told her class, “I don’t mind if you cooperate, as long as I can’t hear you.” That summed up for me the muddle we’ve got into around the place of spoken language in the curriculum and in the classroom. Some of this is about behaviour management – noise feels a bit risky. Most of it is about the pressures of meeting literacy and maths targets. What gets measured gets done, and measuring children’s speaking and listening capabilities hasn’t ever figured in government agendas.

This is nonsense. Language skills are closely linked to improved life chances and social mobility – key goals for government. Spoken vocabulary at five is one of the best indications of how many GCSEs a child will get at 16. It’s the very best predictor of whether a child brought up in poverty will herself escape poverty in adult life.

Language matters for behaviour and wellbeing too. Did you know that researchers have found two thirds of young offenders, when assessed, were found to have significant but previously unidentified speech, language and communication difficulties? The same finding applies to pupils excluded from school and those with mental health difficulties.

What works in classrooms?

So what can teachers do to improve children’s speaking and listening skills? We need, I think, to focus on giving children a real reason for purposeful talk. For a start, we can surprise them! Surprise makes human beings want to talk, to exclaim, to check out with others what might be happening, to explore ideas about the event and so on. At St Joseph’s Primary School in London, for example, a time machine arrived in the playground overnight. Covered in silver foil and cordoned off, it had a huge clock with backwards numbers, a 0-9 number pad, a Blue Peter-type control console and – best of all – a calendar with the day’s date marked with a cross and the words ‘St Joseph’s School, Earth’ scrawled across the page.

The local community policewoman came down to check for health and safety, while the children came out in class groups to explore and talk about the machine. The oldest children discussed what year they might want to go back (or forward) to. Others speculated about where the machine might have come from. ‘I think it came from the sky’ (and ‘I think the teachers made it’), while the teachers encouraged speculative language and modelled exciting vocabulary.

The power of pretend

Role-play areas provide another real reason to talk. In my two years as Communication Champion, I saw some brilliant, well used role-play areas in Key Stage 1 and 2 as well as Reception – World War II Anderson shelters, an igloo complete with sleeping bag and fishing rods, and a Y6 football manager’s office where maths involved making transfer offers and booking fixtures. Best of all was a brilliant Y4 teacher who asked the caretaker to make a small wooden structure for her classroom. This became in turn a Viking museum, the booking office of the Titanic (with children taking calls from anxious relatives) and a hide covered in Astroturf with slits cut in it plus birdspotting books and binoculars, for a topic on habitats.

Talk frames

Just providing children with a reason to talk is not enough. Left to themselves, they may simply recycle the same limited language, so we need to provide scaffolding. Teachers and TAs need to be in the role-play area to start with, for example, modelling the conversations they want to see.

Talk frames are useful here, giving children starter sentences for particular types of talk. Reception staff might model starters to help children develop the language of comparison: “They are the same because… They are different because… is… and… is…”

In Y6, children might have cards with more complex frames: ‘In some ways… and… are alike. For instance they both… They also differ, however, in that… The similarities/differences seem more important than the similarities/differences because…’

Scaffold vocabulary

Finally, scaffolding vocabulary development is, according to research, the single factor most likely to lead to improved attainment.

Children start school with very different vocabulary size and depth, and starting with poor vocabulary has a cumulative effect. Experts estimate that while the average primary-aged child learns about 1000 new root words a year (words like ‘rock’ from which related meanings - rocking, rocky and so on – can be derived by adding prefixes and suffixes), the 25 per cent of children with the poorest vocabularies acquire roughly 400 fewer root meanings each year than their average peers.

Yet we know from research that vocabulary is not systematically taught. Teachers typically introduce a new word and explain it just once, for example, whereas children need to hear a word around six times in a range of contexts if they are to remember it.

So for every topic (not just maths) teachers should select some really important words – words that will be useful beyond the actual topic and of which the average adult has a reasonable understanding.

For the Victorians, for instance, the teacher might choose to focus systematically on words like ‘petticoat’ and ‘hoop’ but not ‘gruel’ and ‘workhouse’. They would then use a teach/apply/review cycle, teaching the chosen words by helping children build a web of links in their brains - what the word sounds like, what it means, words that go with it, where it fits in a sentence.

The new curriculum

The recently published final draft of the new primary national curriculum appears on the face of it to promote the role of oracy. At the same time, there is a sharp contrast between the pages of detail on what must be taught in reading and writing and the references to speaking and listening.

My fear is that this overspecified curriculum and linked assessment arrangements will continue to squeeze opportunities to develop spoken language out of the classroom. Perhaps, though, teachers will have none of this. My hope is that they will use the evidence that good spoken language is not only vital in its own right, but also essential for attainment in reading and writing. My hope is that they will take control themselves and make time to talk in their classrooms – lots of it.

Some of the activities in this article originally appeared in Jean Gross’ new book, Time To Talk (Routledge, 2013).

Language and literacy

How talk-based interventions boost reading skills…

There is a particularly close connection between children’s language skills and their literacy development. Reading, as James Britton famously said, “floats on a sea of talk”. Now we are beginning to see evidence that this connection between language and literacy is causal – that is, if there is effective intervention to improve a child’s spoken language then there will be knock-on effects on her attainment in reading. One example of this is the A Chance to Talk programme developed by I CAN, the children’s communication charity and The Communication Trust (ican.org.uk/achancetotalk).

This focuses on 4-7 year olds and involves training to develop good quality everyday teaching that supports all children’s language, plus a targeted intervention – Talk Boost (ican.org.uk/talkboost) – for children with delayed language. Evaluation showed that the 8,000 children involved in the initiative made on average 50 per cent more progress in reading at Key Stage 1 than previous cohorts. Children with delayed language made, on average, three times the normal rate of progress in language development after the 10-week, small group Talk Boost intervention. They also accelerated the progress they made academically in reading, writing and numeracy.