Oral Expression of Five and Six Year Olds in Low Socio-economic Schools

Abstract

The quality and quantity of children's capacity to oral expression is shaped and influenced by the social and environmental conditions in which they exist and operate. While genetic factors cannot be ignored, variability in children's language acquisition and expression is to a great extent the result of the quality and quantity of environmental language input and output. The effectiveness of learning conditions in the classroom has the greatest potential, outside of home and family, to provide the quality and quantity of interaction and discourse these children need to exponentially expand their English language expressive capacities. It is the classroom in which five and six year old children find themselves for six hours, five days a week, forty weeks per year, that is the focus of this thesis. Of particular interest is the low socioeconomic school Year 1 and 2 classroom, where the environmental conditions of interaction and discourse play such a vital role in enabling or disabling the children's capacities to acquire and use English. Typically, it appears classroom interactional and discourse patterns and conditions result in reductive rather than expansive discourse and learning engagement, where a child's expressive and participatory opportunities are highly restrictive, and the quality and quantity of students' expression is less than optimal. This research investigates the expressive realities of five and six year old students in four classrooms in four different low socio economic schools as viewed through a series of filters and lenses at two points in time, six months apart. The expressive and participatory behaviours of all students in the four classrooms were assessed; the vocabulary and expressive resources of twelve selected case study students measured; and a number of spontaneously produced oral texts by six of the case study students were micro-analysed via video analyses. Insights were expanded by microanalysing these same students interactional and discourse realities as viewed through two sets of lenses - that of each of the students and that of their teachers. Further, between Time 1 and Time 2, the four teachers in the study participated in an intervention designed to expand their knowledge and practices about optimising interactional and discourse conditions in the classroom, followed by 10 weeks of implementation. Major findings include that the majority of five and six year old students in low socio-economic schools in this study are highly constrained expressively, and that 'typical' interactional and discourse patterns operating in classroom lessons do not provide optimising conditions for students' quality and quantity of expression, and expanding their language and cognitive acquisition potential. The study also shows that by providing teachers with explicit interactional and discourse knowledge and practices, pedagogical shifts can occur quite rapidly, leading to increased optimisation of classroom conditions, with resultant changes to the students' quality and quantity of expression and enhancement of their acquisition and uptake potential.