Over the years, oral language as mentioned again and again as an area of gap for the children in our Kahui Ako for a variety of reason such as many children learning English as a second language and hearing less words in the home before beginning school. I can vividly remember Dorothy Burt (Manaiakalani Programme Lead) talking about the million word gap at a Manaiakalani orientation day when I first began teaching back in 2014. I have over the years received professional development from experts in this field such as Dr Yannie Van Hees.
Better Start Literacy Approach: Oral Narrative Assessment
As a part of the BSLA assessment, all of the children complete a task called "Oral Narrative" essentially they are read a story and are asked to retell the story in their own words (while looking at the pictures as a prompt) and then are asked to answer some comprehension questions about they story that they have just heard. Thanks to technology, all of the children's responses are recorded and analysed first by the computer and then checked by a teacher. The analysis of the "oral narrative" gives a run down of, the number of words used, the number of different words, the types of words used (nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs). Here is a link to the academic study of the "Oral narrative assessment" and here is an example of how the task is scored.
Number of words: 61
Number of different words: 35
Number of nouns: 13
Number of verbs: 14
Number of adjectives: 0
Number of adverbs: 6
Percentage of intelligible utterances: 100%
Follow the link here to listen to a few examples of the Oral Narrative Task that were collected from the children in my class at the beginning of the year.
Overall, I found that the qualitative information from this assessment was highly valuable. It is great to have a recorded version of the child's retell available to listen back on and later in the year to be able to see the development of language. I've also found it really handy when writing a referral for a child for a SLT - I was able to attach a recording of this child's speech to the application. It will be interesting to look back on these scores and the audio recording at the end of the year and see what kind of shift is achieved for these learners.
Oral narrative and vocabulary are taught through the BSLA using a quality children's book, this is the first building block of BSLA teaching. As part of my BSLA lesson each day, I focus on one quality story book per week. As the taumata (stages/levels) progress, I will use this book to teach story recall and retell skills, elaborate on interesting words, teach story structure elements and build children’s language in oral narratives using adjectives, adverbs and complex noun phrases. This will carry over into writing instruction in later taumata.
Discussion with our SLT:
Within Glen Innes School, we have many ELL tamariki and a number of children working with our SLT.
I have discussed the language abilities of my learners with our SLT (as she is working with a few children in my classroom this year). In our discussion, we both recognised that many of the children in my class at gaps in their speech sounds (some were typical of a five year old and those that she is working with as a SLT had some gaps). She recorded the gaps she observed and encouraged me to take note of any speech sounds the children were missing or found difficult. We also discussed the best practice when it comes to growing children's language abilities in the classroom. Most of these were not new, but a fresh reminder is always good.
- Providing explicit instruction
- Modelling
- Using visual aids
- Engaging in conversations
- Providing feedback
- Reading books together
- Play-based activities
Professional Development:
I am also interested in completing the webinar by GEM Literacy, "An Introduction to the Explicit Teaching of Vocabulary" and learning some different strategies to explicitly teach vocabulary to my learners.
Until next time!
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