Primary and Early Years > Interest > Home and school

P25: Using Talking Books at home to encourage speaking skills with a class of Year 1 and 2 children.
Author: Kate Gair, Sunnybrow Primary School, County Durham
Date: 2005

Summary

This piece of action research found that the use of Talking Books at home led to the use of longer and more complex sentences by children in Years 1 and 2.

Actions

Children were instructed to use Talking Books at home over a weekend to record stories about their weekend activities.

Data was collected on the average length of utterance for a group of children in class prior to the use of the Talking Books. This was then compared with to the average length of utterance in the Talking Books stories they recorded.

Outcomes

It was found that in the recorded stories, children were using longer and more complex sentences than their previous utterances in class. The less confident speakers in the class showed the greatest increase in length of utterance, while the most able speakers showed the greatest increase in complexity. It was speculated that this arose from having greater time in the home to think about what they were saying. For the majority of children, increased confidence was evident in the speech recorded at home.

When presenting their work to the class, children wanted to explain the context for each picture, provoking further communication among students with low speaking skills. For students who normally struggled to organise their sentences, the 'visual hook' of the images in the story book enabled them to concentrate better on what they wanted to say.

An additional bonus was the high level of parental involvement in the use of the Talking Books over the weekend. The exercise received very positive feedback from parents.

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