Oral language and beginning to read

Introduction Oral language has long been regarded as the foundation for beginning reading as children draw on the meaning, syntax and the phonology of spoken language as a bridge to emergent literacy (Saracho & Spodek, 2007; NICHD, 2005; Poe, Burchinal & Roberts, 2004; Menyuk & Chesnick, 1997). Oral language and print knowledge are viewed as the two pillars of learning to read (Mol, Bus & De Jong, 2009). As oral language is related to learning to read many teachers are concerned about the vast diversity in the oral language capabilities of children starting school. In this small study of children in a metropolitan school in Adelaide the teachers commented that some children were beginning school with relatively small vocabularies and some used forms of nonstandard oral language. The teachers thought that children with nonstandard forms of English syntax may have difficulty accessing the syntax of books or book language to aid their beginning reading. Also the school had increasing numbers of children with English as an additional language as well as children who speak languages which have not been recorded in written form. The concern of these teachers led to questions about oral language and reading which are explored further through a review of literature, several case studies of groups of young children who are beginning to read emergent texts and an analysis of oral and written language.Oral language as a predictor of early reading The importance of oral language as a predictor of future literacy achievement is supported by research across a number of oral language domains. Young children need to have control over several aspects of oral language prior to starting the beginning to read process--phonology, vocabulary, syntax, discourse and pragmatics (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998). The National Early Literacy Panel (2008) in the United States in a review of research concluded that some aspects of oral language had substantial correlations with decoding and reading comprehension. There are several characteristics of Rosetta Stone English oral language: word meanings (semantics), sentence structure (syntax), the architecture of words and word parts (morphology) and sounds (phonology) (Richgels, 2004). In this paper the particular characteristics of oral language phonology, syntax and vocabulary will be explored and compared to written language.There has been a wealth of research evidence over the past 20 years demonstrating a strong link between phonological awareness and the ability to learn to read and spell. Measures of preschoolers' level of phonemic awareness strongly predicts their future success in learning to read and 'maybe the most important core and casual factor separating normal and disabled readers' (Adams 1990, pp. 304-305). Children's awareness of phonology, particularly rhyme and alliteration, was found to have a powerful effect in their eventual success in learning to read (Bradley & Bryant, 1983). Phonological skills, particularly rhyming, enable children to make analogies when learning to read and this is important in alphabetic literacy where there is a grapheme-to-phoneme relationship (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Byrne, 1998). In learning to read, phoneme segmentation was also found important for the reading of sight words and the matching of sounds to words. Dixon, Stuart and Masterson (2002) found that children's phoneme segmentation ability was related to not only learning new words quickly but also for building up a detailed representation of words useful for reading, proof reading and eventually spelling.The use of syntax or grammar in oral language has been identified as important for beginning reading comprehension and vocabulary development (Bowyer-Crane et al., 2008).

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