The importance of providing learning opportunities to enable children to develop literacy skills, in order to be able to use language and communicate effectively in wide variety of contexts, modes, and media, is emphasised significantly throughout the Australian Curriculum and NSW Syllabus. The English learning area; speaking and listening is aimed to develop childrens capacities to become effective communicators, to understand the ideas of others, and to be able to communicate ideas in meaningful ways (REFERENCE). By drawing upon the Behaviourist theory of development and linking these ideas to the pedagogical approach explicit teaching, teachers can provide enriched learning opportunities for students to develop their skills in speaking …show more content…
From the moment of birth, children under normal circumstances are exposed and introduced to language. However an individual’s ability to acquire and use language, and become literate, represents a vital evolutionary development. For behavioural psychologists, learning means acquiring new behaviours, and new behaviours are learned because of the role that external stimuli play (REFERENCE). The Behaviourist theory dwells on spoken language, and emphasises it to be a priority of language teaching, before written language. However it it is interrelated with written language, and acknowledged by GILES 1996 (p. 10) as “the basis of verbal thought, social communication, and the complexities of reading and writing”. Oral language competence is thus crucial for literacy development, and can be a key indicator of children’s early reading ability. For children learning to read, comprehension can take advantage of skills they have been using in their oral language: the shared basic language components (lexical, syntactic. , and interpretive processes), cognitive mechanisms (working memory), and conceptual knowledge (vocabulary, topic