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Oral language: At John Hopkins Middle School, 59% of students tested below grade level in English Language Arts.  Focusing on oral language skills, by reading aloud and participating in conversations, allows students with disabilities and others below grade level to access the curriculum and hear and use grade level curriculum.  As a science teacher, I especially see the value in using grade level texts to read aloud in class, and providing students with independent texts at the independent level of a typical student in the class.  Jigsaw activities would give teachers the opportunity to provide students with articles at their reading level and give all students the opportunity to teach their peers, while receiving information from more complex texts through listening to their peers.

Phonological awareness: Language impairment can be a source of difficulty for students who are learning to read.  Phonological awareness is part of a strategy for learning to read which has been successful in helping many students with language impairments to read.  Combining those phonological awareness skills with culturally responsive teaching can further serve to bridge the gap and help students with learning speech and language disorders in leaking to read.

https://www.greatschools.org/florida/st.-petersburg/2512-John-Hopkins-Middle-School/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2050571X.2016.1265738

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Oral language: Teachers are able to support a student in their development of literacy through the use of oral language development.  Since students are typically able to understand through listening at a higher level than they are able to read, teachers can read aloud in order to impart information to the students which might be difficult for the student to read if it they were expected to read the material independently, and additionally, the student practices using more advanced comprehension skills, improving their reading comprehension. This also improves engagement, as independent reading at or above a students’ frustration level may result in the student disengaging.

Phonological Awareness: Before students begin to read, they are able to learn that words are made of collections of sounds.  Students can break words into syllables, and then into onset and rhyme before finally breaking them down to their phonemes.  Once a student can break a word down to phonemes, they can probably read those words.

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Phonemic awareness involves breaking words down into their individual sounds, like /d/o/g/

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Students with phonological awareness can play with words in ways like rhyming, alliteration, and counting syllables.

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Even short regular exposures to a second language during the critical period allow the baby to continue to tune in to the second language like a native, but that exposure had to be in person, not on tv or audio recordings.

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Babies stop listening to all sounds and begin only tuning in to their own language between the ages of 6 and 8 months.

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Young children excel at learning until 7, decline until puberty, and sharply decline after that.

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Exercises for building speaking and listening

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Exercises for building speaking and listening

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-Reading/writing a script based on the content
-Conducting a research project and discussing their finding with their peers
-Listen to a recording of a text read aloud, and answer questions together about the text
-Take turns reading segments of a passage and using comprehension strategies
-Create a digital artifact along with a recording describing it
-Create a video or narrate a video

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The author recommends that 50% of class time be collaborative conversations with peers.

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Students should have regular opportunities to speak and listen

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Common core standards have increased speaking and listening standards, including coming prepared for classroom discussions and interacting with a variety of people.

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Throughout childhood, until at least middle school, listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension.  It is not only early childhood educators who need to be concerned with oral language development.

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Brains have evolved for speaking and listening. Reading and writing have been pinned on after the fact.

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Speaking and listening skills are important for content area learning, and teachers can help students develop these skills through classroom routines.

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1. Definitions and applications of how to support each reading basic for all learners using explicit and multisensory instruction.

2. Reflect on and develop connections to the importance of each reading basics to the work you do in your disciplinary classrooms and contexts

3. Identify the role of reading basics in serving all learners as part of equity and justice in your disciplinary contexts

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Effectively uses the digital tool to demonstrate understanding of ORAL LANGUAGE in developmental reading.

Effectively uses the digital tool to make connections from ORAL LANGUAGE to disciplinary teaching.

Effectively used the digital tool to identify the role of ORAL LANGUAGE in equity and justice for all learners.

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There is no reading gene that is passed from one generation to the next. Each and every brain must be taught to read anew. Unlike hair or eye color, which are coded in DNA, reading is a complex, rule-based system that must be imposed on biological structures that were designed or evolved for other reasons (Wolf, 2007).

Although most children are born with the right structures, these structures don't inherently know how to read. They are hardwired to speak and listen; in other words, we were born to talk (Hulit, Howard, & Fahey, 2010). Reading and writing are optional accessories that are bolted onto a speaking and listening brain.

Listening and reading comprehension

Decades of research, not to mention personal experiences, confirm that listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension from early childhood through at least middle school. Based on their review of research, Stricht and James (1984) analyzed the gap between listening and reading comprehension by age of learner (see Figure 1). What is obvious from this figure is the fact that access to complex ideas, for many years of the learner's life, requires oral rather than written input.

Simply stated, children can listen to and talk about much more complex ideas than they can read (and probably write) about. In addition to the research, anyone who has ever read a bedtime story to a preschooler knows that listening comprehension is more sophisticated than reading comprehension. The proof comes from nights when you're tired and you skip a page while reading a bedtime story. That 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old's eyes pop open. You are accused of skipping some of the story, and the punishment is that now you must start over. Yes, in fact, the child is listening, understanding, and comparing the text with his or her expectations.

What is less obvious from personal experience is the persistence of this gap. According to Stricht and James (1984), the gap extends well into middle school. This gap has implications for high-quality instruction across the learner's elementary and middle school experience, and oral language development should not be considered solely the role and responsibility of early childhood educators.

Figure 1. Listening and Reading Comprehension by Age (Stricht & James,1984)

Speaking and listening and text complexity

In this time of great interest of increasing text complexity, the data represented in Figure 1 raised several question for us. Is it possible that one way to ensure that students read at increasingly sophisticated levels is to focus on increasing students' listening comprehension? In other words, if we pushed listening comprehension higher than identified in the previous research, would reading comprehension follow? If we did so, would it take longer to close the gap, or would the gap size remain, although at a higher level?

If we want to ensure that students read increasingly complex informational texts, it seems logical that students should be talking during their content area learning (e.g., Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). Although there is significant attention to the Common Core reading and writing standards, we believe that teachers should also attend to the increased demands of the Speaking and Listening domain, especially Anchor Standard 1, which states that students should

Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively. (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 22)

There is a lot to focus on in this standard. First, students should come prepared for the discussion and not simply be expected to work collaboratively with no preparation. Second, students are expected to interact effectively with a wide range of people, not just their friends and others they choose to interact with. Third, students are expected to build on each other's ideas, maintaining the conversation and continually building on the ideas of others in the discussion. And finally, they need to be able to do all of this while they express their ideas clearly and persuasively.

Anchor Standard 1 in the Speaking and Listening domain of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represents increased expectations for students, especially students in the primary grades. Figure 2 contains grade-level expectations for this standard. We have bolded words and phrases that did not appear in the previous grade to highlight the instructional components of each grade. For example, students in third grade are expected to "stay on topic," which is not an expectation in second grade. Analyzing the differences by grade level, known as vertical alignment, is critical if teachers are going to develop teaching points aligned with the CCSS. In addition, teachers need to ensure that students have opportunities to engage in speaking and listening regularly, which may require changes to the instructional environment.

Figure 2. CCR Speaking & Listening Anchor Standard 1

8th Grade Students

SL.8.1
Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 8 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.

Kindergarten Students
SL.K.1
Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.

SL.K.1A
Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., listening to others and taking turns speaking about the topics and texts under discussion).

SL.K.1B
Continue a conversation through multiple exchanges.

Instructional ideas for speaking and listening

There are a number of ideas for ensuring that students across the grade span and in different content areas are able to practice their speaking and listening skills. Most importantly, teachers need to dedicate time every day for students to engage in collaborative conversations in which they use academic language with their peers. In fact, we recommend that about 50% of the instructional minutes devoted to content area learning be used for collaborative conversations with peers. This is based on the success that the students in Chula Vista, California, had when their teachers increased the amount of student-to-student interaction using academic language (Frey, Fisher, & Nelson, 2013). In addition to providing students an opportunity to expand their understanding of the content as they engage in peer-mediated instruction (e.g., Sperry, Neitzel, & Engelhardt-Wells, 2010), it provides teachers an excellent opportunity to work with small groups of students who need additional support to achieve their goals.

Some evidence-based speaking and listening instructional routines have been useful for students during content area instruction in the past:

Technology offers teachers new ways to engage students in speaking and listening tasks. Even very young children are learning to follow oral directions while using tablets. Some enhancing speaking and listening tasks can be used in elementary content area instruction:

Listening Gallery Walk in which students create a visual image, record themselves talking about the image, and then code it with a symbol that will allow others to access the digital file. One way to do this is with QR codes that can be printed and included in the image itself. Alternatively, students can use the Aurasma app. This is an augmented-reality application that allows users to create and post video to enhance a viewing experience. For example, some museums use Aurasma for their patrons to view additional content after pointing a smartphone or tablet at a display. In terms of classroom application, students can create their own videos and pair them with displayed work. For example, during their investigation of artists, students in Ms. Bledsoe's third-grade class narrated their original artwork that had been inspired by a specific artist. When a tablet enabled with Aurasma was pointed at one of the art pieces, the video that accompanied the art played. When students' parents visited for open house, they were able to see their children talking about their work and to learn more about the other students in the class.

Photo narratives in which students collect images and then record a narrative to accompany the images. For example, the first graders in Anthony Munoz's classroom planted seeds. Each day, they took a picture of the container in which their seed was planted. Mr. Munoz read aloud the text From Seed to Plant (Gibbons, 1993) several times as the plants grew. Mr. Munoz helped his students create a time lapse video using Quicktime, and the students recorded their narrative about the growth of the plant that accompanied the video.

Digital storytelling to create original narrative and informational pieces. The Storybird app provides access to thousands of illustrations and photographs to illustrate original pieces of writing. These are best when completed collaboratively in order to create lots of opportunities for students to engage in meaningful discussion with one another. The Voicethread website offers two-way communication between writers and readers. Like Storybird, students create a digital story using the Voicethread tools and their own illustrations. In addition, they dictate the text for each page. Subsequent listeners can either listen to the writer's own voice or read the dictated script. Importantly, readers can then pose questions and offer connections that are in turn viewed by other readers.

As part of their social studies curriculum, Davinia Thompson's second-grade students used Voicethread to develop a class digital book on people who make a difference in their community. Ms. Thompson compiled each student's contributions and uploaded them to the Voicethread website. Later in the centers, students viewed the class book and recorded their comments and questions. Ms. Thompson then had the entire class view the completed digital story, with their questions included, so the class could continue the conversation about the topic.

Talking in class

Regardless of the specific approach that a teacher takes, students simply must talk in class. We have to change the climate, expectations, and accountability for student-to-student interaction in classrooms everywhere. A day should not go by in which students silently try to learn content. Instead, there should be a hum of learning, with many voices engaged in discussions about the topics under investigation. Only then will we fully realize the literacy achievements of our students orally, digitally, and in print.

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Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning

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Oral language development facilitates print literacy. In this article, we focus on the ways in which teachers can ensure students' speaking and listening skills are developed. We provide a review of effective classroom routines, including some that can be enhanced with technology.

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Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

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Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds, or phonemes. A child's skill in phonological and phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | TED Talk

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Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies

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Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

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This is actually the first time I've understood the connection and difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. I've taught my child to read, and upon reflection there was a heavy emphasis on phonological awareness until age 4 with the addition of phonemic awareness at that age by using BOB books with a heavy emphasis of CVC words.

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As a special education teacher, I have taught students as old as 10 using the same strategies I used to teach my own child. If a foundational skill needs to be developed, then a foundational skill needs to be developed, and it doesn't matter if the student is 4 or 12, although books which students can clearly identify as being for 'babies' may discourage them. By addressing these needs with sensitivity, students can be given access to books which build a bridge between their phonological and phonemic awareness and allow them to make connections and learn how to read.

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Oral language is developed and honed in a baby's first 6 months and continues to be developed until they are 7 years old and then sharply declines.  Learning to speak and listen is connected to the ability to read and write.

Phonological awareness involves understanding the sounds words make, for instance, words that rhyme, which connects to phonemic awareness, or the sounds that letters or groups of letters make.