Example of developing competency in listening skills and oral language ability conversation essay

The effectiveness of the strategies employed by a teacher to teach will be reflected by the proficient of the student in the oral language. The teacher, the strategy and the environment of the class have a significant effect on the compression of the student on the reading material. The language skills and the listening skills are much influence on how the child relate to the teacher. Furthermore, the mastering of vocabulary, listening skills, reading, listening skills and sentence structure skills, don’t come automatically to the child once he or she join school. Thus, these skills are required to be nurtured with a close assistance of the teacher and the learning material in the class.
More than a third of students who join schools in the United States are said to be unprepared to read, listen and write. This gives teachers a hard time trying to teach the child these important skills. Therefore, it’s common to find these children struggling with school life hence they tend to be left behind academically. Unfortunately, these children find the going tough and they opt to drop out of school (Whitehurst, 2008). It is this sad state of the nation that necessitated me to visit a kindergarten to have the glimpse of the statement in real life situation. I had the opportunity to meet a four years old child called Alex and he volunteer to read a story for me. I used the PEER (prompt, evaluate, expand and repeat) or CROWD (completion, recall, open-end, wh-questions and distancing) strategies to help him read, familiarize and understand the story.
At the beginning of our conservation with Alex, I asked him to bring an interesting story book he enjoys reading. He brought a colorful animal storybook, and I immediately employ the CROWD strategy. Since he was already familiar with the story and the character, It was easy to have conversation with Alex. I started reading the story but let Alex to complete most the sentences since he was quite familiar with the story e. g. “ Switch on the tele..” This method helps the student to master sentence structure technique and enhance his/her memory (Whitehurst, 2008).
It has been found useful to tell a child stories using pictures since it helps them recall the events of the story later. As such, as I was reading the story and come across a picture I will pose and ask Alex to tell me what was happening in the story. In addition, the pictures helped Alex to remember “ when, how, why, where, what” was happening in the story. Furthermore, as we were reading the story, I tried to relate the animals and the things in the story with the real world situation. I would often ask him if he has come across such animals at home or in the zoo. Alex informed me he had seen several animals in the story at the zoo.
I put PEER into consideration; by having Alex telling me the story that we have just read from his mouth without using the story book. At first he was shy and struggle but through encouragement by chipping in during the story telling. This gave him confidence, and he felt free to tell the story. As he was telling the story, I evaluate how he was pronouncing words and constructing sentences. Where he went wrong, I corrected him and expounded it in a bigger sentence and ask him to repeat with me. This was essential, since it aimed at giving Alex the ability to think, listen, remember, memorize and have confidence in having a good conversation (Whitehurst, 2008).
Conclusively, PEER and CROWD strategies help the student recognize and understand the words as they come across in various print materials. In essence, student development of reading and thinking abilities originated from the proficient in the oral language. Therefore, much emphasis should be put on how the oral language skills can be developed by having regular conversation with a student. By giving the student easy test which aim at triggering the student memory to remember the things he/she have come across while reading or listening to a story (Whitehurst, 2008).

Work cited

Whitehurst, G. J. ” Dialogic reading: An effective way to read to preschoolers.” Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education 2008 (1992).
(Whitehurst, 2008)