Listening and Speaking Skills As They Relate to Reading

Most people define oral communication narrowly, focusing on speaking and listening skills separately. Traditionally, when people describe speaking skills, they do so in a context of public speaking. Recently, however, definitions of speaking have been expanded to include school plays, dramatic recitals and group activities. Even when the majority of the class has mastered basic listening and speaking skills, it is important to keep in mind that not every student learns effective verbal communication or skillful listening abilities at the same rate. Those students who are not "catching on" as quickly as the rest of the class, are not so much unskilled as they are undisciplined. The skills that can make the difference between minimal and effective communication can be taught, practiced, and improved.

Those experts and researchers who maintain that the process of learning to read is different than the process of learning to speak assert that most children in cultures with writing systems have had to be taught to read. Moreover, they contend that learning to read is not a natural developmental phenomenon, since numerous cultures throughout history never developed writing systems on their own. On the other hand, whole language educators have identified at least two important parallels between learning to speak one's native language and learning to read. First, in both cases the child is most concerned with meaning; adult speech and adult accuracy in reading are mastered only gradually. In other words, children learning to talk begin with the "whole" of what they want to communicate, and only gradually master the parts. Similarly with reading: it is easiest for most children to recount or even memorize familiar texts, then learn more and more of the words and the letter/sound patterns within them. A second important point is that both learning to talk and learning to read are facilitated when adults treat children as "meaning-makers" and focus on meaning first.

The fact is, spoken language and reading have a lot in common. If the printed words can be efficiently recognized, comprehension of connected text depends heavily on the reader's oral-language abilities, particularly with regard to understanding the meanings of words that have been identified and the syntactic and semantic relationships among them. Indeed, many early research reports called attention to the differences between good and poor readers in their comprehension and production of structural relations within spoken sentences.

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