Promoting speaking and listening

Speaking skills enable us to share our experiences, thoughts, feelings and opinions with others. However, effective communication is a two-way process that involves both speaking confidently, clearly and coherently, and listening to, understanding and responding to what other people say.

Speaking and listening skills are crucial to children’s overall development in early years, but they are also crucial to academic and social success in primary school, secondary school and beyond. Therefore, it is very important to support the development of speaking and listening skills across the early years curriculum, especially for bilingual and multilingual children whose home language is different from the school language (see A Multilingual Approach). You have a key role in modelling, promoting and developing children’s speaking and listening skills. Early years settings should be environments where talk is valued, and oral interactions and experimentation with language are encouraged. Children are likely to acquire speaking and listening skills more readily if they are encouraged to become active participants in conversations and discussions, and to question, hypothesise, reason, imagine and wonder aloud. You should provide regular opportunities for children to develop their communication skills by working in groups of different sizes and supporting them in developing the skills to participate constructively in conversations and discussions (e.g. taking turns, building on what others say).

Play is an ideal context for developing speaking and listening skills. By guiding and encouraging child-initiated conversation through narrative and enquiry, you can encourage children to communicate their experiences, thoughts, feelings and opinions. Establishing a role play area within the classroom will encourage communication based on children’s own experiences, for example, a role-play shop where some children take on the role of adults choosing shopping items and others take on the role of shop assistant, welcoming and helping shoppers and initiating conversation at the checkout.

Effective communication relies on children having the range of vocabulary and language they need to understand and make themselves understood. Therefore, you should:

  • model accurate use of vocabulary and language conventions, for example, modelling new vocabulary in a range of different contexts, or repeating a child’s sentence with a mistake corrected rather than pointing out a child’s mistake
  • model use of a variety of vocabulary and language to support children in developing their own range
  • build on children’s own language in your responses to them, using a combination of rephrasing, comments and questions
  • provide constructive feedback on the effectiveness of a child’s communication
  • monitor and support individual children’s language learning, especially when the school language is different from their home language
  • encourage children to explore and test their hypotheses about how language works, without fear of ‘getting it wrong’.

Specific strategies that you can use to scaffold early language development include:

  • repeating and emphasising key words and phrases
  • using simple vocabulary to clarify meaning
  • using short phrases or sentences
  • using the same words and phrases for repeated everyday activities.

Sharing stories, and talking about their events, characters and how the events progress, is a good way of developing a broader vocabulary and more complex language. Children’s language will also benefit from retelling and acting out stories. Through drama, children can experiment with new ways to express themselves using both non-verbal and spoken language, including new language generated by observing and listening to others. Drama activities that explore story characters and events develop children’s understanding of tales they have listened to or read. Characters and narratives that children develop through imaginary play and role-play help to generate new ideas for children’s spoken and written storytelling.

Some essential language for learning is more abstract in nature, for example, mathematical language. It is beneficial to embrace opportunities to model and reinforce abstract language in everyday situations as well as during focused activities. This will reinforce children’s understanding of the language, and the concepts it describes, by making them meaningful and less abstract. You can develop children’s language and thinking by building on their own language. For example, mathematical language could be developed through everyday situations such as:




Although literacy (reading and writing) becomes an important form of communication as children progress through school, secure speaking and listening skills are key to effective literacy. So, when children start their early years education, the key focus should be on applying and developing their speaking and listening skills and just informally beginning to understand the purpose of reading and writing as a means of communication (pre-literacy skills). Even as children begin to read and write, you should ensure the continual development of speaking and listening skills. This creates a firm foundation for building children’s literacy skills as they progress through the early years and into primary school.

Of course, speaking and listening skills are directly related to Language and Communication Development. However, speaking and listening skills are also fundamental to cognitive development and social and emotional development: