Oral Language
Children need basic oral language skills before they can
begin to read. The more sophisticated their oral language becomes, the more
understanding and vocabulary they will bring to reading and writing.
By achieving competence with language the child will learn to converse
with others, to express emotions and opinions and to verbalise imaginative and
creative ideas. The Primary Curriculum emphasises the need to focus as much on
oral language development as on developing reading and writing skills.
Developing a child’s oral language skills impacts
fundamentally on the personal and academic development of the child.
Everything that happens in school is channelled through the medium of
language. Oral language development is an integral part of the development of
all language skills, and competence in oral language impacts on the development
of other language skills.
The English language programme must integrate oral
language development with the development of literacy skills, and in our school,
it was decided to use the widest possible range of materials to facilitate the
development of this range of skills. The main source will be The Sunny Streets
Language Programme, and this will
provide the foundation for our approach to the teaching of language. Other
suitable resources such as the Magic Emerald posters will also be used.
Content Objectives
Developing receptiveness to oral
language
The child should be enabled to:
- Experience, recognise and observe simple commands such
as look, listen and watch
- Listen to a story and respond to it
- Hear, repeat and elaborate words, phrases and sentences
modelled by the teacher
- Mime and interpret gesture, movement and attitude
conveying emotions
Developing competence and confidence in using oral
language
The child should be enabled to:
- Talk about past and present experiences, and plan,
predict and speculate about future experiences
- Choose appropriate words to name things and events
- Combine simple sentences through the use of connecting
words
- Initiate and sustain a conversation
- Use language to perform social functions such as
introducing oneself and others, greeting others and saying goodbye, giving
and receiving messages, expressing concern and appreciation
Developing cognitive abilities through oral language
The child should be enabled to:
- Provide further information in response to teacher’s
prompting
- Listen to a story and ask questions about it
- Discuss different solutions to simple problems
- Show understanding of text
Developing emotional and imaginative through oral
language
The child should be enabled to:
- Reflect on and talk about a wide range of everyday
experiences and feelings
- Create and tell stories
- Listen to, learn and retell a variety of stories,
rhymes and songs
- Respond through discussion, mime and role-playing to
stories, rhymes and songs
- Listen to, learn and recite rhymes
- Create real and imaginary sound worlds
The posters in the Sunny Streets series will play a key
role in enhancing the children’s linguistic competence. The posters will be
used to stimulate talk on a range of topics and experiences familiar to the
children. The posters are designed to capture the imagination of the children,
to engage them interactively and to act as a catalyst for a wide rang of talking
activities. It is vitally important for language development that the children
would hear a lot of rich, challenging, high-quality language, and it is intended
to use story, poetry, rhyme, song, riddles, riddles, puns and tongue–twisters
as the media which will enable the children to extend their vocabulary.
Through the poster activities, the children will be introduced to talk
through whole class discussion, to work in pairs and in small groups.
The 12 posters for Junior Infants deal with the
following topics:
- Water
- Out and About
- Shopping
- I am Me
- School
The 12 posters for Senior Infants deal with the
following topics:
- Wild animals
- Food
- Play Time
- Cats
- At the Doctor
Reading
Developing concepts of language and print
The child is enabled to:
- Listen to, enjoy and respond to stories, nursery
rhymes, poems and songs
- Become an active listener through a range of listening
activities
- Play with language to develop an awareness of sounds
such phoneme and morpheme relationships
- Develop a sense of rhythm and rhyme using songs,
nursery rhymes, jungles, clapping to syllabic rhythms
- Become familiar with a wide range of environmental
print
- Learn about the basic terminology and conventions of
books – author and title, left to right orientation, top to bottom
orientation, front to back orientation
- Read texts created by himself and by other children in
collaboration with teacher
- Learn to recognise and name the letters of the alphabet
- Develop an awareness of letter sound relationships
(initial consonants in Junior Infants)
Developing reading skills and strategies
The child is enabled to:
- Handle books and browse through them
- Encounter reading through collaborative reading of
large format books and language experience material
- Build up a sight vocabulary from experience of
environmental print and from books read
- Learn to isolate the beginning sound of a word or
syllable
- Learn to isolate beginning and final sound of written
words
- Engage in shared reading activities
Developing interests, attitudes and ability to think
The child is enabled to:
- Re-read, retell and act out familiar stories, poems or
parts of stories
- Recall and talk about significant parts of stories
- Predict future incidents and outcomes in stories
- Understand the functions of text
- Differentiate between text and pictures
Responding to text
The child is enabled to:
- Respond to characters, situations and story details
- Perceive reading as a shared, enjoyable experience
- Pursue and develop individual interests through
engagement with books
Policies on the Teaching of Reading
It is important that the school provides each child with a
reading experience appropriate to his needs and abilities. A structured reading
scheme will be used, but it will be regarded as one of a number of sources
necessary to provide adequate reading experience for the child. The structured
reading scheme provides a source of graded reading material, and it will be
complemented by a wide range of other reading material encompassing a variety of
narrative, expository and representational text.
Core Reading Books for Junior Infants
- Big Books
- Hurry Up Lucy
- Tidy Up, Jack
- Nearly There
- Good Night, Molly
- Happy Birthday, Molly Brown
Story Books
- Happy Birthday, Molly
- Yummy
- Say `Cheese'
Information Book
Core Reading Books for Senior Infants
- The Please and Thank You Stories
- The Tooth and Twinkle Stories
- The Ready, Steady, Go Stories
Information Book
Writing
Creating and fostering the impulse to write
The child is enabled to:
- Experience and enjoy a print-rich environment
- Write and draw frequently – making attempts at
writing, letters and symbols, captions, words and sentences
- Write for different audiences
- See personal writing displayed
- Read personal writing and hear it read
Developing competence, confidence and the ability to
write independently
The child is enabled to:
- Learn to form and name individual letters
- Write and draw shapes, signs, letters and numerals
- Understand the left to right, top to bottom orientation
of writing
- Develop a satisfactory grip of writing implements
- Copy words from signs in the environment
- Write his name
- Use labels to name familiar people and things
- Write letters and words from memory
- Become aware of lower-case and capital letters and the
full stop
- Begin to develop conventional spelling
- Choose subjects for drawing and writing
Clarifying thought through writing
The child is enabled to:
- Draw a picture and write about it
- Draw and write about everyday experience
- Write naming words and add descriptive words
- Rewrite sentences to make the message clearer
Developing emotional and imaginative through writing
The child is enabled to:
- Draw and write about feelings of happiness, sadness,
love and fear
- Draw and write about things he likes / dislikes
- Draw and write about sensory experiences (hot, cold,
bright, dark, sweet)
- Draw and write stories
- Hear a rich variety of stories, rhymes and songs and
draw and write about them
- Use mime and role-play to create imaginary situations,
and then draw and write about them
Suggestions
Pre-Reading
- Sight Vocabulary and Pre-Reading Activities
- Recognise and name words and phrases from signs in the
school: "This is a door".
- Respond to classroom captions of the type: "Sit on
the chair".
- Recognise and name words from Sunny Street
Series.
- Read a selection of Pre-readers, e.g. "First
Words", "Read it yourself" books.
- Match a word to a relevant picture among a group of
six.
- Match a phrase to a relevant picture.
- Match a picture to a relevant word.
- Match a sentence to a relevant picture.
Suggestions for Pre-Reading Environment
- Large pictures with sentences and duplicate sentences,
e.g. Posters from "Child Education" magazine, Magic Emerald
posters 1-5,
- Children's drawings or paintings displayed with
suitable captions written by teachers.
- News Sheets - news items of interest to the class
recorded on newsprint sheets.
- Wall Stories, e.g. pictures of the story of the
"Three Little Pigs" with a short sentence under each picture.
- Nursery Rhyme pictures with detachable sentences and
duplicates.
- Job Chart - with pictorial clues.
- Command cards e.g. "Close your eyes",
"Clap your hands".
- Labels for classroom, e.g. "Our door is
green".
- Captions on the children's work on the display board,
e.g. "We made this pattern".
- Class books - books made by the children, "Long
and Short", "Hot and Cold", etc.
- Children's names.
- Book corner.
Visual Perception
- To match pictures, shapes, patterns, or symbols with
their duplicates.
- To match letters, words, and sentences with their
duplicates.
- To group together sets of words that start with the
same initial letter.
- To identify and match pictures of objects that are
associated or related, e.g. cup/saucer, leaf/tree, dog/bone.
- To identify from a set of 4-5 pictures, symbols or
letters, the item that is the same as or different from a criterion item.
- To name or draw from memory a set of objects,
pictorially represented, after a short exposure to it.
- To name from memory the item removed from a set of five
objects.
- To name an item added to a set of five objects.
- To choose letters, shapes or words similar to criterion
ones after a short exposure to the original letters, shapes or words.
- To sort a group of ten letters into lower-case and
capitals.
- To match a group of four lower-case letters to their
capital equivalents.
- To assemble jig-saws.
- To make outlines of the following shapes by using
plasticine or matchsticks. Then
trace over the shapes made, and later draw them.
Pre-writing and Left Right Orientation
- To colour within lines.
- To colour in relevant sections of a picture where
numbers or letters indicate which colour fits in.
- To draw a line within simple mazes:
Recognition of Letter Names and Shapes
- To name all the letters of the alphabet.
- To select any letter spoken bay the teacher among a
group of four written letters. Teacher
says "d", child has to select it in a line of four letters: a, d,
p, r.
- To trace and copy letters.
- To write a letter spoken by the teacher.
- To sort a group of ten letters into lower-case and
capitals.
- To match a group of four lower-case letters to their
capital equivalents.
- To write on his own some words from the word list.
Auditory Perception
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Comprehension and Memory
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- Remember simple directions and repeat them when asked.
- Repeat numerals or unconnected words in sequence (at
least four.)
- Repeat and say, on his own, jingles and rhymes.
- Select from a number of pictures the picture mentioned
by the teacher.
- Sequence at least six pictures that suit a story told
by the teacher.
- Re-tell a story previously told by the teacher.
- Tap or clap simple rhythms while listening to rhymes or
music.
- Tap or clap simple rhythmical patterns in imitation of
the teacher, e.g. ?
- Differentiate between two sounds played simultaneously
on a tape-recorder.
- Identify and differentiate environmental sounds, e.g.
sounds made by animals.
- Imitate familiar and unfamiliar sounds.
- State whether a sound is the same of different from a
criterion sound.
- Make judgements about the quality of sounds and use
appropriate descriptions (loud/soft, high/low, near/far, faster/slower).
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness
In acquiring the ability to use sound-letter
relationships, the child needs to develop phonological and phonemic awareness.
Activities recommended are:
- Saying and hearing nursery rhymes
- Reproducing rhymes
- Clapping to syllabic rhythms
- Segmenting of words into syllables
Onset and rime
Onset–rime knowledge can help in developing awareness of
spelling patterns by introducing analogy through word families which share the
same spelling and rime (sand / hand).
READING
Suggested Sequence of Instruction
- Introduce the main characters
- Introduce flashcards and posters (oral language
lessons).
- Introduce the eight words with flashcards and
appropriate instructions e.g. Put on your jumper etc.
- Introduce the Big Books and introduce the following
concepts e.g.
- The story comes from words.
- The words are read from left to right.
- The words are read line by line from top to bottom.
- The pages are turned from front to back of book.
- The pages are turned one by one etc.
- Writing Activities
- Samples of exercises in all Activity Books
THE STORY
It is recognised that teachers read or tell stories to
children so that they will enjoy them and absorb language in a receptive
capacity. But the story can also be
used as a means of developing language and cognitive skills.
Objectives:
- To listen while a story is being read.
- To recall some features of the story.
- To re-tell, in his own words and in correct sequence a
story read by the teacher.
- To make predictions about the likely sequence of
events.
- To ask questions requesting further information about a
story.
- To project into the experiences and feelings of the
characters in a story.
- To describe how he would react if placed in a similar
situation to a character in a story.
- To complete a story.
- To show appreciation of stories by:
- requesting them.
- listening to them.
- telling them.
- using them as a base for a play.
- by making illustrations of them.
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