Projects and the development of competencies in oral communication in the early years

Abstract

The development of competencies in oral communication is a topic that puzzles both early childhood educators and primary school teachers, since we cannot consider a child as proficient in this domain because he/she can talk. It demands the use of certain strategies, and will benefit from projects making the teaching/learning of the mother tongue interact with other content areas. In this text, we propose an analysis of some projects developed in Portuguese kindergartens and primary schools within teacher training articulated with a seminar dealing with research on Education we supervised in what concerns the teaching/learning of oral communication. In this study, we used a qualitative methodology based on content analysis of data concerning the activities developed with the children during the didactic intervention in the center of each project. Our main objectives were to identify and describe the perspective of didactic approach of oral communication underlying those projects. The results of this study revealed that using certain didactic strategies to approach oral communication is both recommendable and possible and allowed us to reflect on the way we are training our students in what concerns teaching the mother tongue to develop such competencies in the children.