VELS Level 1 and 2 – Oral Language and Schooling – Speaking and Listening

Transition from pre-school to the early years of schooling

Oral language is a crucial resource in student learning and literacy development. In this section we examine the theory of Gordon Wells and use two teacher activities to explore these concepts.

‘ Although (children) use language as a means for understanding and reflecting on their experience, they cannot yet make language itself or the meaning that it encodes the subject of deliberate attention and manipulation .’( Gordon Wells, 1999: 44)

Gordon Wells: consciousness about language

Here we return to the research of Gordon Wells as we begin to consider the transitions that young learners of oral language make as they move from pre-school to the early years of schooling. Read through the quotes from Wells and note that one of the great demands on young children as they enter school is the deliberate attention and manipulation of the language that they have been using prior to school to negotiate relationships, and the culture of the classroom and school.

‘In the first years of schooling, an important transformation takes place engendered largely by the experience of learning to read and write and of using this language mode as a tool for the achievement of a wide variety of tasks.’

‘The abstraction of written language draws children’s attention to the medium of language itself and also to the meanings that it encodes … [it raises their consciousness about language].’ (Gordon Wells 1999: 44).

Professional learning

Identify the new demands of speaking and listening that children face when they first start school.

Activities for teachers

Tape a classroom interaction and analyse it
Respond to the key questions listed.

Response to a picture book activity

Response to a picture book (PDF - 21Kb) – use this transcript to carry out this activity.

‘Response to a picture book’ is a transcript of early childhood talk in a classroom. This transcript was produced in response to a picture book that the teacher was showing the class.

Read the transcript. After reading, consider the questions that acco mpany the transcript.

Note that the teacher’s use of thinking processes in her questions (Who do you think is going to catch the bus? What do you think Kim?) together with the use of the word might (might be preschool) suggest there is room for interpretation and that teachers is accepting different interpretations of the picture.
In response to the second question, the teacher is directing students to view, interpret and make inferences about what they see. Interpreting a work such as a piece of literature or a visual image is particularly important in secondary school as students are commonly asked to respond, in writing, to a range of texts or artworks and interpret their meanings. However, as this transcript shows, laying the foundations to do this clearly begins in the first years of schooling. By scaffolding the classroom talk in this way, the teacher is pushing students into a new zone of proximal development.
Note the change in direction in the talk when the topic of wheels enters the discussion. First, that by accepting this new direction it means that the teacher and students are jointly involved in constructing the text. Second, that the introduction of ‘wheels’ leads another child to making a hypothetical observation: ‘If there weren’t any wheels on the bus, it would go bang. Not only is the class engaged in the process of interpreting, they are also involved in making hypotheses about what they have observed.
The final point to make in relation to this transcript is that students are drawing on their own observations and personal experience to interpret the picture. However, as they get older, they will also be able to draw on the educational knowledge and understandings they are learning at school to assist them.

Studying life cycles activity

’Studying life cycles (PDF - 27Kb)’ – use this transcript to carry out this activity. ‘Studying life cycles’ is a transcript of the teacher and Year 1 class studying the life cycles of chickens. In this lesson the teacher will be showing the class a series of pictures about how chicks grow using a factual scientific book. She will not be reading the verbal text to them. She will just be showing them the pictures, in sequence, and talking about the images with the class.

Prior to this activity the teacher had brought an incubator into the classroom so that the students follow the process and observe the chickens as they hatched.

Read this transcript and consider the following questions:

note that the teacher guides the discussion through the questions she uses. She accepts Anthony’s contributions, giving some sense of a jointly constructed text.
in building up their shared understandings of the life cycle of chickens, the teacher and class draw on both personal experience and knowledge they had previously learned. The personal observations come up in the comments: ‘when I eat my egg at home, I seen a yolk in it.’ Knowledge that was previously learned can be seen in the statement: ‘cos the mother’s not in a warm spot; and they’re not keeping warm.’
one important feature of the classroom talk in this transcript involves the teacher and students building lots of shared language for talking about chickens. This includes terms like ‘keeping eggs warm’, ‘the middle part of the egg called the yolk’, ‘that little tube to his tummy’, ‘a chord’, ‘the white part of the egg’. Such joint construction of shared knowledge is important. It means that the teacher and students jointly build up language and understandings and they use these to move forward to another zone of proximal development. This is a crucial part of the process of scaffolding.
even though the teacher has asked most of the questions and directed most of the talk in the transcripts so far, to understand the questions asked by the teacher and respond appropriately has meant that the students have also had to take an active role in listening to the dialogue and the building up of collaborative ‘knowing’. Sooner or later, what the students have heard and actively understood by listening, will also find its way into their speech or behaviour (Wells 1999).