Intent

To ensure that through quality first teaching all children become confident articulate communicators, enabling them to engage fully with the curriculum and the wider community.

Aims (KS1/KS2)

• To develop skills that enable them to listen and respond appropriately to adults and their peers, maintaining attention and participating actively in collaborative conversations, staying on topic and initiating and responding appropriately. 
• To develop skills needed to ask relevant questions to extend their understanding and knowledge, articulate and justify answers, arguments and opinions and give well-structured descriptions, explanations and narratives for different purposes, including for expressing feelings.
• To acquire a wide range of vocabulary and conceptual understanding and use spoken language to develop understanding through speculating, hypothesising, imagining and exploring ideas.

Implementation (KS1/KS2)

• First quality teaching provides opportunities for children in KS1 and KS2 to develop their Speech, Language and Communication skills. Reciprocal reading approach and writing schemes are designed to promote language development through exposure to a variety of texts, understanding the context of texts and exploring the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary.

• The topics across KS1 and KS2 place an importance on vocabulary development. Children are encouraged to activate prior knowledge around new topic areas through discussion, reading texts and discussing what they already know. Guided reading books are linked to each class's current topic to expose children to more new vocabulary and embed what they may have already learnt. They are encouraged to identify unfamiliar vocabulary and explore the meaning and context of these words in order to deepen their understanding.

• Opportunities for talk and discussion are key for developing children’s speech, language and communication skills. Children in KS1/2 are given opportunities to work collaboratively i.e. through Kagen groups which promotes discussion and gives children the opportunity to present, explain and justify their ideas/methods to adults and peers. The use of inference within topic lessons promotes discussion i.e. using an image facilitation a discussion about what is happening.

• Intervention programmes are put in place to support those children who require additional support with Speech, Language and Communication. TA’s spend time exploring new topic related vocabulary with these children prior to beginning a new topic.

• Outside agencies and trips provide children with new exciting and engaging experiences to help children develop a broader range of vocabulary within a meaningful context.

Impact

The impact of our spoken language curriculum is that the majority of children, at the end of year six, will;

• Establish secure foundations for effective spoken language, helping them to achieve in secondary education and beyond
• Display competence in their own spoken language and effectively communicate across a range of contexts and to a range of audiences.
• Demonstrate an increasing range of vocabulary, ranging from describing their immediate world and feelings to developing a broader, deeper and richer vocabulary to discuss abstract concepts and a wider range of topics, and to enhancing their knowledge about language as a whole.