Oral Language Skills in Primary Education

Posted on Mar 5, 2025 in Justice

Unit 7: Oral Language

Oral Language. The complexity of global listening comprehension: from hearing to active, selective understanding. Moving into speech: from imitation to free production.

0. Introduction

Learning a language usually has a main practical objective: to communicate in that language. But communicating in a language is a complex activity that implies mastering a set of skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Communicative competence is therefore acquired by being competent in the four linguistic skills. Listening and reading are receptive skills; speaking and writing are productive. On the other hand, listening and speaking concern the oral medium, whereas reading and writing concern the written medium. In this unit, we are going to look at oral skills: listening and speaking. Oral communication is a two-way process between speaker and listener, in which the speaker has to encode the message they wish to convey in an appropriate way, while the listener has to decode or interpret the message. This chapter is very important because the oral ability is of prime importance in Primary Education, especially in the first levels of language learning.

1. Oral Language

1.1. Characteristics

• Expressive possibilities: tone, accent, speed.
• Use of gestures and body language.
• Simple constructions.
• Use of pauses, repetitions, rephrasing, or hesitations.
• More errors; the message often contains a good deal of information that is redundant.

1.2. Pedagogical Reasons

• Oral language is acquired before writing.
• Contextual support should be used.
• Spontaneity leads to errors being considered normal within the teaching-learning process.
• Information is accompanied by repetitions, pauses, and paraphrasing.
• The grammatical structure is simpler.
• Watching TV or listening to the radio is more difficult to understand because you cannot ask for repetition.

1.3. Interdependence of Oral Skills

Oral communication is a two-way process between the speaker and the listener. The skills must be integrated through situations that encourage communication (pair and group work).

2. The Complexity of Global Listening Comprehension: From Hearing to Active, Selective Understanding

2.1. The Skill of Listening

Listening is a complex, active process.

Principles:

• Listening should come before speaking.
• Students must have a reason to listen.
• Learners must be exposed to a wide variety of spoken language.

Listening skills:

• Recognizing sounds.
• Identifying the main idea of what he is listening to (extensive listening).
• Extracting information (intensive listening).
• Understanding in detail.
• Predicting what he is going to listen to.

The mental processes that follow a listening activity are: hearing the sounds, recognizing the meaning of sounds, relating the input to previous knowledge, and storing information in our memory.

2.2. Listening Material (Input)

The material should be varied, comprehensible, graduated in difficulty, and within a context. Examples: stories, instructions, descriptions, conversations, discussions, songs, poems, rhymes, films. The listening material should be a stage further than the students’ competence level.

2.3. From Hearing to Active, Selective Understanding

Tasks must progress from simple hearing-based activities to more complex understanding-based ones. Tasks must be success-oriented. The auditory material should be varied, graduated in difficulty, and within a context. Activities should have a communicative purpose.

A listening lesson follows these stages:

Pre-listening stage: The teacher sets the topic and teaches key words. Activities: predicting from a title, commenting on pictures, giving students’ opinions. Pre-viewing language items.

While-listening stage: The students perform tasks or activities designed by the teacher to develop listening strategies. Extensive listening activities are for global understanding (matching pictures, sequencing a story, answering questions, following instructions). Intensive listening also requires a specific search of sounds, words, or facts within a context. (Ear-training activities, finding differences, labeling, game-like activities (bingo), extracting information, dictations, completion-type activities, identifying).

Post-listening: The students perform tasks connecting what they’ve listened to with their experiences. These activities are usually integrated with other skills. Activities: role-play, creating a dialogue, talking about what they’ve just heard with other students, making a summary, deducing opinions and attitudes.

2.4. Dealing with Listening Difficulties

Problems: Unfamiliar sounds, students wishing to understand every word, understanding the listening the first time it is played. Lack of motivation to listen.

Solutions: Set the situation, raise students’ expectations. Pre-teach key words, set the listening task explaining what they have to do, re-play the listening several times. Use contextual support.

3. Motivating into Speech: From Imitation to Free Production

3.1. The Skill of Speaking

The main aim of oral production is to speak fluently. Speaking is an active process which is usually difficult to dissociate from listening. It is a reciprocal exchange pattern which becomes important for learners to be exposed to, and practice, at various stages of their learning.

Speaking skills:

• Producing sounds.
• Expressing elementary grammatical structures logically and clearly.
• Expressing grammatical forms coherently.
• Using the language in an appropriate way.
• Using extra-linguistic strategies to help transmit the message.

The combination of fluency and appropriateness makes the language learner become competent in that language.

3.2. Materials for Speaking

The type of material must be varied, focused on the learners’ interests, and with a communicative purpose. As the student’s competence develops, the expressions to be learnt get more complicated. Children need to see results; thus, the learning of basic vocabulary and simple structures from the very beginning is vital. Colors, numbers, greetings, instructions, asking for permission, expressing likes and dislikes, asking the price.

3.3. From Imitation to Free Production

Learners must follow three stages. The first and second stages (pre-production stages) are the preparatory ones for the third stage, in which real communication takes place:

• Imitation: After the student has been exposed to comprehensible input, the first step is the imitation of the model, either from the teacher or from recorded material. Chorusing is very useful because it encourages even the shyest students. Other techniques could be: individual repetition, drills.
• Practice: At this stage, activities are controlled by the teacher. The objective is the correct learning of the structure. Until now, the student has practiced pre-communicative activities in which the teacher practically controls the entire communicative process. Pair work and group work are very good methods to practice in a lively way what has already been learnt. Activities: guided dialogues, questions, language games (hide and seek), reciting and singing.
• Free production: This is the most genuine stage, because the student has to put into practice what he has learnt, without the teacher’s control and in a creative way. The risk of making mistakes is greater, but this shouldn’t worry the teacher because the student is developing discursive competence, coherence, and fluency. The teacher can make notes of the mistakes and comment on them after the activity. The activities should raise the necessity of communicating, be interactive, and be appropriate for the students’ level. Activities: information-gap activities, role-play, problem-solving, following instructions, describing personal experiences, communicative games, reaching a consensus activities.

3.4. Dealing with Speaking Difficulties

During the initial stages, grammatical, lexical, and phonetic mistakes must be corrected systematically. However, when students are involved in communicative activities, the main objective is for them to develop fluency. The teacher must be flexible with errors and correct them after the activity. Student’s character might influence their production stage. Shy students will be more limited than extroverts. The teacher must create a friendly and confident atmosphere to reduce these limitations.

4. Conclusion

Learning to speak a foreign language also implies being able to understand it orally. Speaking and listening is a two-way process that interacts in oral communication. Oral communication is absolutely essential in Primary Education, especially in the first levels. The foreign language teacher must provide the students with a solid receptive base before they start to speak the language fluently. Moreover, if the teacher follows the sequence Listening → Speaking from a communicative point of view, they will be developing communicative competence in the student, which is the main aim of the current educational law.