How important are speaking and listening for your child’s learning journey?
What role do speaking and listening play in your life? It seems a strange question because, for most people, the answer is pretty obvious. Speaking and listening play a huge role. They are central to most of our experiences. They are the foundation upon which most of life is lived. And if a person can’t talk or hear, for whatever reason, they will usually rely on one or more alternative means of communication. For example, sign language or lip-reading.
That word communication is key. Speaking and listening allow us to communicate with one another. Through this communication we bridge the gap between minds, going from our private experience of ourselves and the world to a shared experience. Speaking and listening allow us to interact with one another. Through interaction, bonds develop, relationships grow and ideas come into being.
So, how important are speaking and listening for your child’s learning journey? They are essential. The development of speaking and listening allow your child to access the speech and language of others – including yourself – as well as to communicate with you and other people about their thoughts, feelings and ideas.
Consider how frustrated a young child can become when they are at the stage of development that comes just before the first steps into coherent speech. Where does the frustration stem from? It comes, at least in part, from the fact that the child knows communication is possible, but that they are not yet in a position to be able to communicate what they want. They recognise, intuitively, that there remains a gap between their goal (to speak and, through speaking, to effect a change or response of some sort) and their ability to reach that goal.
As you child grows up and goes through the education system, speaking and listening will continue to dominate how they learn. As your child gets older, writing and reading will play an increasingly large part as well. But, whether your child is three or eighteen, speaking and listening will remain central to how they learn, how they experience education, and how they interact with their teachers as well as their peers.
The development of speaking is, on one level, the development of an ability to define and express your own thoughts about the world. For example, over many years, a child might go from pointing at the rain when it is raining, to saying that it is raining, to saying that they don’t like the rain, to telling you that it is raining cats and dogs, to saying that the rain looks like it is of biblical proportions.
As children grow, they learn more about the world and more about language – both how it works and the vocabulary that goes to make it up. In our example, this is illustrated by the increasingly specific and refined use of speech that the child uses when talking about the rain. While it is an idealised example, it serves to demonstrate how the development of speech is synonymous with the development of knowledge and understanding about language.
Thinking from a parent’s perspective, there are a few points that follow. The first is that speaking and listening with your child will always be a central element of how you can help them to learn. This fact is reflected in the Third Golden Rule of Help Your Child to Learn with Mike Gershon. That rule states: Do four things with your child: Talk, Read, Play and Listen.
Talking and listening are both in there as two things any parent can do, at almost any time, and that will contribute to their child’s development, helping them to learn and grow.
The second point is that when parents speak to their children, they model for them how to use language, how to express yourself verbally, and many of the different words that help to make up a broad and deep vocabulary.
Thinking about it in this way, we can say that as soon as a baby is born, they are immersed in a sea of words. These words are delivered verbally, and the child continues to be exposed to them day in, day out, helping to facilitate their initial development of language. The continuation of language development then progresses, in part, through the continued exposure to words both in the home and at school, as well the exposure to different ways those words can be used. To illustrate the last point, consider how your language use with your child differs now, compared to when they were only a few months old.
In conclusion, speaking and listening are at the heart of learning. They are central to any child’s learning journey. And every parent can support their child’s development through talking with their child, listening to them and modelling effective language use.
Mike Gershon is the author of over 40 books on teaching and learning, including many bestsellers. He has also written over 90 guides for teachers, and created six bestselling online courses for teachers and school leaders, delivered via the TES Institute platform. He supports schools and colleges in the UK and overseas, helping them to develop teaching and learning and raise achievement. In Mike’s new course for parents, Help Your Child to Learn with Mike Gershon, Mike calls on all his experience and expertise to present parents with the tools and insights they need to support their children, to help them to learn, grow and flourish. You can try the entire first section of Mike’s course for free, to see what you think. Take a look today and start your journey.
