The Four Great Skills

Speaking, listening, reading and writing are the four major skills resulting from the interweaving of oral and written codes with expressive and comprehensive abilities. They are what allow us to express experiences, feelings, ideas and emotions, as well as learn and regulate our behaviour.

These language skills are also called skills, communication abilities or macro-skills. But the order in which these skills are acquired is very important: it is essential that students acquire and develop these oral skills before beginning to learn to read and write.

In fact, numerous studies  have shown that one of the essential tools for children to learn to construct meanings through written texts is oral interaction.

Therefore, the primary objective before the age of 6 should be, much more than teaching them the letters, to guarantee a correct evolution and optimal development of the spoken language. Humans do not learn to express themselves “alone”, and that is why it is so important at this stage that we help children and practice with them their ability to communicate with words. Creating a spoken world in the classroom is essential for this.

Understanding: the important thing is to listen

Listening comprehension is an active skill, since in order to understand we have to put into action a series of linguistic and non-linguistic mechanisms; that is why we often say that “hearing” is not the same as “listening”.

To develop the ability to listen and understand what others say, we need to motivate and stimulate: it is essential to awaken their attention.

One option to achieve this is to use sounds, for example the doorbell, the telephone, a baby crying, laughter, etc. Using photos that represent each of the selected sounds, the student will have to listen to the sounds and order them in the same order in which the recordings are heard.

Another option is to organize rhythm games, in which you have to repeat a sequence of sounds. For example: clap, snap; clap, silence; silence; snap, clap, silence, etc. Later, each child can record their rhythmic sequence to identify it.

Speak correctly

Speaking is relating, exchanging information, sharing ideas, feelings, reaching agreements or defining disagreements. It is deciding and acting accordingly, and that implies that, throughout the communication process, we also have to listen. Speaking clearly, coherently and with a minimum of correction is a primary objective in school to ensure the proper development of the child in society.

There is a wide range of activities to work on and achieve objectives related to oral expression in the classroom. Some of the exercises that we can put into practice are:

• Staging of dramas (expression technique to motivate the infant to interact with peers), dramatizations, role-playing games.
• Simple tongue twisters and word transformation games (we change a letter and thus we obtain a totally different word)
• Guided dialogues and story-linking games.
• Ask students to give short, individual oral presentations about an object or other topic that interests them (such as their favourite toy, their favourite item of clothing, or their favourite book, which they can bring from home). This practice, known in English as show and tell , is common in many schools.

Oral interaction: dialogue

Dialogue between two or more people is the place par excellence where all the creative, instrumental and regulatory capacity of language is revealed .

During the Early Childhood Education stage, the teacher can evaluate oral interaction by assessing aspects such as whether the child participates in simple conversations, whether he or she asks and answers easy and not very elaborate questions, whether he or she communicates during everyday tasks that require a simple and direct linguistic exchange or whether he or she spontaneously participates in conversations of various kinds: family, school, daily habits… Therefore, activities that encourage debate and dialogue are the most appropriate for working on oral interaction in the classroom.

We should not leave the ability to communicate with maximum oral effectiveness to chance or individual ability, taking into account that it is the first skill we acquire and to which we dedicate 75% of our time.

Author Bios: Maria Santamarina Sancho is Assistant Professor, PhD – Department of Language and Literature Teaching and Maria del Pilar Nunez Delgado is Professor at the Department of Language and Literature Teaching both at the University of Granada