At St Clement's and St John's Infant School developing the spoken language is at the core of our curriculum and one of our core drivers: communication.

Intent

Spoken Language and Listening skills are central to our curriculum; these are developed throughout our school. We nurture our children’s Speaking and Listening skills so that they are capable of expressing their own ideas clearly and confidently, in a safe, supportive and stimulating environment.

We recognise that our pupils need lots of opportunities to speak and listen. This is especially true of pupils with special educational needs (SEND) and/or pupils with English as an additional language (EAL). Within every day teaching, we use a range of resources to support communication e.g. visuals supports, word banks, sentence stems, widget images. Some pupils take part in small group activities (Nurture) and some pupils receive additional support e.g. speech and language assistant or therapist.

The National Curriculum and the EYFS 2021 Handbook reflect the importance of Spoken Language in pupils’ development across the whole curriculum – cognitively, socially and linguistically. Spoken Language underpins the development of Reading and Writing. In addition, the EYFS 2021 Handbook sets out Communication and Language ELGs for:

• Listening, Attention and Understanding
• Speaking

The National Curriculum for English specifies content to be taught for:

• Spoken Language

The aim of teaching Spoken Language at our school is:

• To develop pupils’ confidence in their ability to share ideas, thoughts and opinions. 
• To develop the children’s compassion and empathy skills through developing listening strateigies that allow them to understand what someone else has said and how they might be feeling. 
• To inspire pupils’ curiosity to discover more about the world through asking questions and initiating conversations.
• To develop the children’s creativity by building vocabulary, role play and imagining. 

Implementation

We develop our children's Speaking and Listening skills through a wide range of opportunities; story time, drama, role play, class presentations, assemblies, school productions, vocabulary lessons, use of pupil voice and stimulating classroom teaching. We value children's contributions during discussions and encourage all children to listen carefully and actively, valuing and responding to others viewpoints and opinions.  Subject specific vocabulary is embedded across the wider curriculum through teacher modelling, and our pupils are encouraged to use new words in their work. Pupils are regularly given opportunities to orally rehearse ideas for written work and discuss new vocabulary in lessons.  We recognise that the quality and variety of language our pupils hear and share is vital for developing their vocabulary, grammar and comprehension.

Talking trios are used extensively throughout the school, together with allowing thinking time before expecting answers. Staff model expected language use and correct sentence structure and support children to do this when speaking themselves. 

Impact

In a safe, supportive environment, children develop into confident communicators with the world around us. Children are given a range of opportunities to develop their language through development of the four key skills of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing. Speaking and Listening activities permeate throughout the whole curriculum and help the development of children’s ideas, vocabulary and confidence. Exposure to a wide range of language enhances children’s vocabulary and use of speech. At the end of Key Stage 1, our children will be able to speak clearly to a variety of audiences, express their thoughts and views, share their ideas and participate respectfully in and contribute to discussions

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