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Why?

Make it your Own!

Children with limited verbal skills can be supported with the strategies featured in Easy Guides: Oral language for beginners. The following methods for promoting oral language for students at the beginning stages include: Description/Self-talk, Narration/Parallel talk, Modeling language, Repetition, and Extension.

Families can create opportunities to build beginning oral language skills by incorporating self talk, parallel talk, language modeling, repetition, and extension into the daily routine. The Easy Guide: Oral language for beginners can be used as a reminder to use these strategies on a daily basis, especially with children who need support in the beginning stages of language learning.

The language that children learn depends on the language learning opportunities provided. Speaking and listening skills learned in the preschool years are essential to future reading and writing achievement and school success. By providing and modeling rich language input for children, labeling words and actions in natural contexts, conveying a message of interest through narration of the child’s actions and repetitions and extensions of the child’s limited language, families pave the way for more advanced language learning.

For families

Building on your child’s interests forms the basis of strategies like parallel talk, repetition, and extension. Remember that you are most likely to build your child’s language when focusing on a topic that is meaningful to him or her. You may choose to use gestures or point to objects that represent words to aid understanding.

Oral LanguageCommunication ToolkitOral language for beginners

Simplified StrategiesOral LanguageOral language for beginners

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Simplified Strategies,LLC - www.simplifiedstrategies.org Strategies

Repetition Extension

Description/Self-talk Narration/Parallel talk

Listen to what your child says then restate your child’s words more completely. For example, if your child is pushing a car and says “car fast,” you might restate: “Yes, your car is going fast.” Repetition is a way to use your child’s interest as a basis for intro-ducing more advanced vocabulary and sentence structures.sentence structures.

Restate your child’s comment then add to the topic in an effort to extend the conversation. In the “car fast” example, you might extend: “Yes, your car is going fast. I seems like your car is racing.” Ex-tension, like repetition, is a way to expose children to new vocabulary and sentence structures. Extension is also a non-threatstructures. Extension is also a non-threat-ening method for initiating and extending conversations.

Describe what you are doing. In this way, you are providing words to describe your actions. Self-talk may be used when leading an activity like cooking. For example: “I see that the water is boiling now, so I am adding the pasta to the water.” Self-talk can build language for all children, especially those with limited all children, especially those with limited language.

Describe, or narrate, what your child is doing or seeing. Observe your child’s action or focus and make comments that do not require a response. For example, you observe your child building with blocks, you might use the following parallel talk: “You are putting the small blue block on top of the big yellow block. Your building is getting big yellow block. Your building is getting taller.” Parallel-talk can build language for all children, especially those with limited language.

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