| "All adults—parents and teachers and other caregivers—must create opportunities to engage young children in meaningful talk throughout each day." (National Center for Education and the Economy [NCEE], 2001. NCEE is a nonprofit organization that provides states and localities with resources to build their own education and training systems.)
Research on oral language development in children's speaking and listening vocabularies is a key aspect of beginning reading instruction. Young readers have trouble when they encounter words in a text that are not already part of their oral vocabularies (Put Reading First, 2001). When you expose children to academic language orally, they are more likely to understand the words in print.
Research reveals that young children learn new words and their meanings through conversations, from listening to adults read to them, and by reading on their own. As children hear and use new words, their vocabularies grow, as does their concept knowledge about a particular topic or academic subject (NCEE, 2001).
There is a huge gap in linguistic skill between children who have had rich, early language stimulation and those who have not. NCEE points out that children need to be immersed in language-rich environments where they are given plenty of opportunities for "air time," or talking, and "ear time," or listening.
Ways to Develop Oral Language Here are some effective methods for building oral vocabulary:
- Help children develop a habit of talking about personal experiences and of talking aloud to themselves as a way of thinking out loud.
- Have children converse at length about a topic and discuss books they are reading.
- Encourage children to engage in conversations with others, especially adults. Children may hear adults use new and interesting words and hear words repeated. Help children relate unknown words to their prior knowledge and experiences (Put Reading First, 2001).
- Expose children to new words many times and in different contexts. Children need to come across a word about 12 times before they know it well enough to improve their comprehension (McKeown et al., 1985).
- Read aloud both story books and nonfiction Big Books. Discuss the books before, during, and after you read them (Anderson, 1996). During reading, stop to define an unfamiliar word, then continue.
- Use a graphic organizer like a Semantic Map or Web to discuss how a targeted word relates to other words. This technique builds background knowledge and vocabulary and enhances children's understanding of the selected concept or topic.
Special Education Focus: The Importance of Phonological Skill
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Children with reading disabilities have variable difficulties with language in addition to their problems with phonological processing. Vocabulary learning is related to and dependent on phonological skill as well as the ability to learn meanings from context and direct instruction. If children do not hear the sounds in words accurately, then they confuse words that sound alike, such as shark and shock, fill and fail, and snake and stake. As word meanings are explored, be sure that:
- children have pronounced the new words accurately.
- children have thought about the syllables and sounds in the word.
- children have differentiated the word from others with which it could be confused (commotion, emotion).
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