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Supporting Oral Language Development

Oral language is an important skill for children. It helps them to express their ideas, thoughts and needs, and to understand the language and information around them. It’s also an important skill when learning to read and write. Here are some tips to support your child’s oral language at home and in preparation for starting Foundation. 

• The way we respond to our children's talk can encourage conversations and turn-taking. Here are a few strategies that can be used to encourage a child’s continued engagement in conversation:

  • Respond to your child with statements, rather than asking a question. For example, if your child is playing with lego, you might say “your lego building is really tall!”

  • Try asking questions that encourage an explanation or opinion. For example, you might ask “why do you think that may happen?” or “what are your thoughts about going outside when it’s raining?”

  • Paraphrase and extend on what your child says. If a child says “Look, a truck!”, you can respond with “Wow, it’s an enormous, red fire truck! Fire trucks have firemen and women who help to put out fires and rescue people”

• All children benefit from learning vocabulary from a variety of sources. This may include conversation, books or stories. You can support vocabulary development at home by talking with your child about the meaning of words that come up in books you read together or in conversations and providing definitions. You can also reinforce this by providing multiple repetitions of the word and talking about the word in lots of different contexts with your child. 

• Accurate speech sounds, sentence structure and grammar can be modelled incidentally in everyday conversations and interactions with your child. On occasions where your child may produce a sentence with errors, it should be repeated with correct grammar, speech sounds and vocabulary. For example, if your child said: “her wunned there.” You could respond with “yes, she ran to the park quickly.”

• You can also encourage your child to correct any speech errors by asking for a repetition of the word again following a model you have provided.

• If you speak another language at home, talk to your child in the language you are most comfortable with. You can also provide your child many opportunities to speak and hear both languages in different situations and with different people.

If you have any concerns about your child’s speech, language or communication, you can speak with a speech pathologist (https://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au) or your doctor/GP.