Components of Oral Language Development

Think about a time recently when you bumped into an acquaintance while shopping. What did your conversation sound like?

You likely exchanged greetings, inquired about each other’s family members, and made small talk about the weather or recent events.

Chances are you then continued on with your shopping, not stopping to analyze the conversation. But in that brief interaction, you and your acquaintance exhibited a variety of oral language skills that allowed you to both share your own thoughts and understand the other’s.

In this video, we will describe five components of oral language development and explain how they work together to facilitate the sharing and comprehension of ideas.

Oral Language

Oral language refers to the expression of thoughts and feelings using spoken words. It includes both speaking and listening.

Speaking and listening are closely related to reading and writing, and all four are important for the development of literacy skills.

Children develop oral language skills in five areas: phonology, syntax, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics.

Let’s look at each area in more detail.

Phonology

Phonology refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in spoken language.

One early phonological awareness skill involves separating a word into the onset, or initial sound, and rime, the rest of the sounds that follow. For example, the word book can be separated into its onset and rime, /b/ and /ook/. Other early phonological skills include rhyming, alliteration, and breaking words into syllables.

A subcomponent of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness, or the ability to recognize and manipulate individual phonemes, or sounds, in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is the most advanced part of phonological awareness.

Phonemic awareness includes identifying the beginning, middle, and ending phonemes in words, and later, adding, deleting, or substituting phonemes.

For example, a teacher may guide her students through the following prompts to practice beginning phoneme identification and substitution.

Say “cat.”
 
What sound do you hear at the beginning of cat?
 
/c/
 
Change the /c/ to /s/. Now what word do you have?
 
sat

This ability to identify and manipulate sounds in spoken language is an important precursor to the development of reading skills.

Syntax

Syntax is another component of oral language. It refers to the ways words and phrases are joined together to form sentences.

Children learn that words are not organized randomly into sentences; there are certain structures of language that must be followed in order for the messages to be understood by others.

Children learn to join words and phrases in more complex ways over time. They initially utter single words, which later become complete sentences. Eventually they join together multiple sentences of various types.

Knowing the predictable ways in which words are joined together also helps listeners with comprehension.

Consider the following sentence that a student may hear aloud.

Jake sharpened the pencil.

In this sentence, pencil is the direct object, the noun that receives the action of the verb, sharpened. Even before children learn the term direct object or can explain its role in the sentence, they understand that the pencil is what Jake sharpened based on how the words in the sentence are ordered.

This understanding of syntax is important for comprehension.

Semantics

Semantics is the third component of oral language. It relates to understanding the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences and using word meanings correctly.

Vocabulary knowledge is an important part of semantics. Children must know the meanings of words in order to use them correctly when speaking and make their meaning clear. Vocabulary knowledge is also vital to comprehending the meaning of what someone else has said.

Semantics involves more than understanding the literal meanings of individual words. It also involves using labels to identify specific things, sorting words into categories, and comprehending figurative language, idioms, and word connotations.

When a young child asks for an eraser by name rather than generally saying, “Can I have it,” he is using semantic skills.

Morphology

Morphology is another component of oral language. It refers to an understanding of the smallest word parts and their meanings. This includes recognizing prefixes, suffixes, roots, and inflectional endings.

Understanding the meanings of individual word parts helps students determine the meanings of entire words, therefore assisting with comprehension.

Consider the word microscopes.

Micro means “small.”
 
Scope means “to see.”

The s at the end of microscopes signifies that the word is plural, meaning there is more than one.

Microscopes, therefore, are tools that allow us to see small things.

Knowledge of word morphology helps speakers choose appropriate words to express their thoughts and understand the meanings of the words used by others.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is another component of oral language. It refers to the social rules of language. This includes norms for conversation, such as taking turns and responding appropriately to questions.

In the example we discussed previously, you were demonstrating pragmatics when you greeted an acquaintance at the store and engaged in turn-taking during your conversation.

Pragmatics also involves the ability to adjust the formality of speech depending on the context. A child learns to say “Good morning” to a teacher but may greet a friend with “What’s up?” instead.

Similarly, students would likely use a more formal tone when delivering a persuasive speech about the benefits of owning a pet to their class than they would if asking their parents for permission to adopt a pet at home.

Review

Let’s review what we learned about oral language development.

Oral language refers to the expression of thoughts and feelings using spoken words. It includes both speaking and listening.

Speaking and listening are closely related to reading and writing, and oral language skills are important for comprehension.

Oral language involves five components:

1. Phonology
Phonology refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in spoken language. Examples include rhyming and identifying the beginning phoneme in a word.
 
2. Syntax
Syntax refers to the ways words and phrases are joined together to form sentences. When children form sentences that follow the structures of the language correctly, they are demonstrating syntactic skills.
 
3. Semantics
Semantics relates to understanding the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences and using word meanings correctly. It also includes labeling objects and categorizing words.
 
4. Morphology
Morphology is the understanding of the smallest word parts and their meanings. This includes recognizing prefixes, suffixes, roots, and inflectional endings.
 
5. Pragmatics
Pragmatics refers to the social rules of language. It includes knowing conversational norms and adapting speaking and listening behaviors to match the situational context.

Questions

Let’s go over a couple of questions before we go:

1. Megan is a third grader attending a career day assembly in her school auditorium. Megan listens attentively to a presentation by a local doctor, and then raises her hand at the end to ask a question. She waits until the doctor calls on her to speak. Later, while walking back to the classroom, Megan and her friend converse freely about their favorite parts of the assembly and what interests them about being a doctor.

What component of oral language is Megan demonstrating in her different approaches to speaking with the doctor and her friend?

2. What is the relationship between oral language skills and comprehension?

That’s all, thanks for watching and happy studying.