How do Young Learners Develop Their Speaking Skills?

What do  I Need to Keep in Mind When Teaching Speaking Skills in Children's English Language Classes (Young Learners)?

Listening Skills Develop Before Speaking Skills

Speaking and listening are very much interrelated. With listening, learners need vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation knowledge to negotiate the meaning of someone’s message. Whereas with speaking skills, learners need to actively produce the language themselves to share their message with others.

Listening develops before speaking. Children have to understand language in order to acquire it and only then will they try to produce it. They call this ‘the primacy of listening’ (Heidegger 1962 p.204). Although, mostly within very yong learners (children up to 4 yrs), the various skills seem to develop in parallel. The younger your learners are, the more similar the process of L1 and L2 are.

For both listening and speaking, meaningfulness is key. It’s all about the meaningful, relatable outcome of the task and the authenticity of the activity.

Looking at L1 development in an English-rich environment, children acquire a wide variety of vocabulary at great speed around the age of two and by the time they are 4 or 5 they have enough language in their L1 to show grammar control and lexis needed for simple, daily conversations. However, L2 teachers have the added challenge that we often teach in non-English environments, so the majority of English language learning might only happen in our classroom. This is an extra impetus to ensure we focus on word-building and pronunciation, as these are two areas that can make a huge difference in learners listening and speaking development!

Adjust Your Expectations About Teaching English Speaking Skills With Children.

When teaching speaking to your young learners, keep in mind that they might not be very able communicators yet in their first language. Also, children experience a very small world, it’s all about them, their family and maybe what they do in class. For example, in their first language, or L1, they might talk about what they like, don’t like, what they usually do.  All their talk is related to real-life and, for them, it’s familiar, and personalised. They rarely initiate conversations with adults unless they want something. Given that children mostly talk about things they are interested in and what relates to their worlds, those are the typical topics they respond to.

As we said earlier, in L1, children acquire a wide variety of vocabulary at great speed around the age of 2 and by the time they are about 5 they have about enough language to show grammar control and lexis needed for basic daily social interaction.

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