Language Knowledge for Primary Teachers

Angela Wilson, Julie Scanlon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136826283
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching children to develop as language users is one of the most important tasks of a primary school teacher. However, many trainee teachers begin their careers with a low knowledge base.

Language Knowledge for Primary Teachers is the reader friendly guide designed to address this. This book provides a clear explanation of the knowledge and understanding required by teachers to implement the objectives of the National Curriculum for English. It reveals how an explicit knowledge of language can enrich their own and their children's spoken English. It will give teachers confidence in developing children's enjoyment and comprehension of reading and writing so children can use their language skills in the real world.

Updated to include references to the new curriculum, this book explores:

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• The importance of subject knowledge in supporting children in language and literacy;

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• Language knowledge within the context of authentic and meaningful texts, from fiction to 'Facebook';

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• The links between subject knowledge and real teaching situations;

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• New areas on talk and dialogic learning;

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• Increased emphasis on ICT and cross-curricular study.

This book will appeal to all trainee and newly qualified teachers needing to achieve both the demands of subject knowledge for Qualified Teacher Status, and a firm understanding of the expectations of the National Curriculum for English.

PART

1

The Background to Language Knowledge

CHAPTER

1

Why do Primary Teachers need Language Knowledge?

Those who teach children in the Early Years and in Key Stages 1 and 2 are meeting them at a most crucial stage in their language development. It is you, for example, who will help them to make important developments in their speaking and listening. So far, many children might only have participated in groups in which the adults understand the children so well that they know what they want to say almost before they have said anything at all. You can help them to use language to reach out to others and to increase the range of speech tasks they can accomplish. The Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading by Rose makes the following point:

The indications are that far more attention needs to be given, right from the start, to promoting speaking and listening skills to make sure that children build a good stock of words, learn to listen attentively and speak clearly and confidently.

(Rose 2006: 3)

Some fortunate children will come to you already enjoying songs, nursery rhymes and stories. Some will have little or no experience of these. For all of them, you can extend their enjoyment and help them to become independent readers. Crucially, this means helping them not only to learn how to read but also to know what reading has to offer them in all aspects of their lives. Some will already have the confidence to write, even if this means making marks on the paper to share what they want to say. Again, many will depend on you to start them off and to build up the range of purposes for writing that they can confidently tackle.

This is a daunting agenda and to be a creative, exciting and motivating teacher you need to feel confident about your own uses of language. We all acquire language knowledge as part of living our lives: we listen and we talk; we read and we write. Some of us do more of these things than others, and the kinds of speaking, listening, reading and writing we do will vary enormously. But what specific kinds of language knowledge do we need to be successful primary teachers?

Government Requirements

One way of answering this question is to look at the documentation that has been published setting out what the government expects primary teachers to cover. There has been a lot of this over the last three decades. Some of it is still with us, some has been and gone and some may soon be on its way out. So not perhaps an ideal guide! However, a brief overview will introduce you to some of the topics in the documents that will remain important for you to consider, whatever the current legislation. References are given to where these topics receive further coverage throughout the book.

The Early Years Foundation Stage (DCSF 2008)

Extending the Range

One very important concept has already been mentioned in the second paragraph of this chapter: purpose. The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum encourages you to extend children’s reading, writing and speaking for a range of purposes. If you have not thought about what this means before, just consider for a moment the kinds of reading, writing and talking you have done recently. Perhaps you have read a novel or searched for information about your holiday destination. You may have sympathised with a friend or explained to a plumber what has happened to your washing machine. As you move from task to task you quickly adjust your language according to what the situation requires. Sometimes this can be challenging. In speaking, and often in writing too, you take into account what you know about the other people involved: how long you have known them, how old they are, what their needs are etc. It would be a mistake to think that young children’s spoken language is used by them only to meet their physical needs, though that is important. As well as telling us when they are hungry, thirsty, cold etc. they love to join in with what is happening around them, to share family jokes and stories, to remember a shared outing or plan a visit. The EYFS curriculum rightly encourages you to listen carefully to them. You may be very surprised at the ‘meaning young children generate in their language through the creative ways in which they use words’ (DCSF 2008: 42). But these children have a lot to learn. The range of purposes for speaking, let alone writing and reading, that the children encounter will inevitably be limited to the situations that their families or other caregivers introduce them to.

One big challenge for children in the Early Years of schooling is that they are now meeting people, adults and other children, who scarcely know them. So the EYFS curriculum makes clear that they need help with using language for building social relationships. The things they say and write must increasingly stand alone, without an adult there who can offer an interpretation. Increasing confidence in speaking and listening is a crucial starting point. This means taking part in one-to-one conversations and in small groups. As time goes on, it might even mean saying something to the whole class or even the school. Sometimes there will be adults in the group; sometimes the children must negotiate what they want to say without an adult. Children should have opportunities to initiate topics themselves and know that they will be followed up. They should be encouraged to ask questions and expect to be helped to find answers.

Language as System

Another important strand throughout the EYFS curriculum has to do with the way languages are organised. This organisation can be seen at a number of levels. Sounds build into words; words are combined according to the rules of grammar to make utterances or sentences; sentences build into texts. (Of course, this is a drastic oversimplification.) The ‘building rules’ we use will depend very much on the purposes we have in mind when we speak or write. Speakers and writers make different selections from the available ‘language pot’. It would be a mistake to think that encouraging children to become confident talkers will necessarily turn them into fluent writers. But encouraging children to become confident speakers in the Early Years will build their belief in themselves as having something to say that those around them want to share. Alongside building this oral experience you can gradually show them how to use the written language system with its spelling and punctuation rules, which help to make ideas clear when they are written down.

Children who Operate Within more than one System

The EYFS curriculum reminds you that you will meet children who have more than one language or dialect at their disposal and who can switch from one to another sometimes within the same utterance. There are differences within and between cultures and speech communities in the range of spoken and written sounds and symbols they make use of. For example, the sound represented by ‘ll’ in written Welsh (as in ‘Llandudno’) does not exist in English. Some of your children will expect a written text to flow from right to left across the page. Some may nod their heads when they mean ‘no’. The classroom should be a place where all the languages the children have experience of are heard and seen – and maybe some others as well!

The National Curriculum (1999)

The National Curriculum is a statutory document and, at the time of writing, is under review. However aspects of the English curriculum will undoubtedly remain. The current programmes of study for speaking, listening, reading and writing have a lot more to say about extending the range of purposes, which we saw was a crucial part of the EYFS language development. For example, at Key Stage 1 we are told that pupils should be taught to vary their writing to suit the purpose and reader. They should be taught to write in a range of forms, incorporating some of the different characteristics of those forms. The range should include narratives, notes, lists, captions, records, messages and instructions (DfEE/QCA 1999: 48–9).

By the time we reach Key Stage 2, the list includes:

• play scripts;
• reports;
• explanations;
• opinions;
• reviews;
• commentaries.

(DfEE/QCA 1999: 58)

The programmes of study for speaking and listening, and for reading, make it equally clear that children must become skilled practitioners in these modes too. In reading, this includes being able to:

respond to a range of texts, showing understanding of significant ideas, themes, events and characters;

locate ideas and information in reading non-fiction texts.

To achieve level 4 in speaking and listening, pupils should be able to:

talk and listen with confidence in an increasing range of contexts;

adapt their talk according to its purpose;

develop ideas thoughtfully;

describe events;

convey their opinions clearly;

listen carefully;

make contributions and ask questions that are responsive to others’ ideas and views;

use appropriately some of the features of standard English vocabulary and grammar.

Language as Process; Language as Product

An important aspect of the programmes of study for English is that, taken as a whole, they expect teachers to help children develop their language knowledge in two ways. In this chapter we have already touched on what these are. The first is in becoming more confident language users, that is, people who enjoy reading and writing and speaking and listening, and do these things with confidence. Here are some of the specific requirements:

help children to vary their writing to suit the purpose and the reader;

help them to become responsive readers, exploring ideas, themes, events and characters in the texts they encounter;

encourage them to become enthusiastic and confident talkers.

If you can get this right you will have a classroom in which children are using language to understand the world better, including the world of reading and the media, and are finding in language ways to explore their own feelings and attitudes towards what these worlds portray. In response to their thinking and feeling, these children will create a range of texts, both written and spoken, that will bring pleasure and delight to themselves, their teachers, their parents and others. The talking, reading and writing will flow out, across the whole curriculum and beyond it.

But this is not the whole story. Another aspect of the programmes of study makes it clear that at the same time you should gradually be making children more familiar with language as a system, or a series of systems, as we described earlier on page 5. Children are not reinventing the language wheel; they are inheriting ways of doing things with language that have evolved and are evolving constantly within the cultures and social groups that each child is a member of. Here are some of these requirements from the programmes of study:

show children how to organise and present their writing in different ways;

ensure that they incorporate into their writing some characteristics of the various forms;

ensure that children are taught the grammatical constructions that are characteristic of spoken standard English and to apply this knowledge appropriately in a range of contexts.

We think that to bring all these contrasting elements of language work together successfully constitutes a huge challenge for primary teachers and requires teachers who are confident in their grasp of language systems. Most importantly the children need to learn about the systems of the language in such a way that their own uses of language are genuinely enriched and enhanced.

Learning about language and developing language knowledge is not like learning how to make a sponge cake. In that case...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: The background to language knowledge
• Part 2: Texts, sentences and words
• Part 3: Applying language knowledge
• Commentaries
• Bibliography
• Index