A recent outstanding Ofsted report said the following about Oracy:
“ A strong focus on oracy, the ability to talk fluently and accurately and express ideas develops a pupils confidence, self-esteem and communication skills”.
When we think of the word “fluently” in regards to speech, the first thing that springs to many minds is fluid, well-paced uninterrupted speech As well as fluency there are other aspects of expressive language that can affect oracy skills and strategies we can use to support pupils struggling in these areas.
By the time pupils reach Key Stage 2, their spoken grammar should be similar to that of an adult. There are likely to be some minor errors in written language, but the spoken language should be better. However, there are pupils that struggle with spoken grammar too. These difficulties often occur alongside “word-finding difficulties” or problems with syntax.
The grammatical delay is the most common presentation which affects fluent oracy. In Reception and early KS1, it is typical for children to struggle with irregular past tense morphemes, e.g. I fell over, and irregular plurals, e.g. the cat chases the mouses. By KS2, this should be resolved.
Children with grammatical difficulties may use very simple sentence types when they speak avoiding subordinate clauses and adverbial phrases. They may also show omissions of function words such as auxiliary verb, and determiners. Sometimes they have deficits in morphological awareness too, e.g. derivational morphemes, such as prefixes and suffixes.
Prosody is an umbrella term that covers many aspects of expressive speech. When a Speech and Language Therapist talks about prosody they are referring to:
Yes, here we are talking about difficulties with prosody. Children can often struggle with one or more aspects of prosody. This can make oracy tasks difficult. And they can be tricky to understand.
Syntax is the posh term for word order in a sentence. Often children, especially those with speech, language and communication difficulties such as DLD (Developmental Language Disorder) may mix up the order of words, or omit keywords altogether. This can make sentences sound jumbled and difficult for others to figure out what they are trying to say.
We all get the “tip of the tongue” sensation when we know exactly what we want to say but just can’t find the word. However, for many children “word-finding difficulties” is a part of everyday life and can lead to frustration and increased anxiety around communicating. Word finding difficulties are different to a child simply having an impoverished vocabulary. Children with word-finding difficulties have a good understanding of words but have difficulty retrieving them to use in context.
Some pupils may construct sentences full of “fillers” – empty words and phrases – which give the impression of a long sentence e.g “So we went to that thing on errrm, the other day…..and it was, you know….okay”.
When describing events, pupils can often become muddled with the order in which the events occurred and overuse the connective “and”. This lack of structure often leads to one long list which can, therefore, make it difficult to follow exactly what they are saying.
Lots of pupils struggle with their speech sound production. This is easily recognisable and is one of the first things we perceive about other people’s speech. Things like a “lisp” are straightforward to identify. Other more complex speech sound disorders can be trickier to figure out what is going on. It may sound like a pupil has a favourite sound usually /d/ or /g/. It may seem as if they are bunged-up and have a bit of a cold or they may have a totally idiosyncratic way of talking.
If a child is struggling with any of these aspects of language and especially If they continue to struggle with literacy difficulties into KS2, it is highly likely they have an underlying speech and language need. There are too many children starting Y7 with poor literacy difficulties and that is because phonics is not the only step to becoming an accomplished reader.
For an assessment of language skills contact one of our speech and language therapist here. We have no waiting list, over 30 specialist therapists and reports returned within 7 days.