Language and communication constitute important factors in a child’s psychological and emotional development. To create an equilibrated pedagogical map a few references are needed in order to achieve the desired results. An important objective is building communicative competence starting with the primary grades.
Pedagogical practice has shown that rather focusing on strict linguistic acquisition, an emphasis on interactive activities should be present instead. For instance, producing correct statements should be taught in context rather than approached as linguistic operations in themselves. Learning activities should also be of productive type, make sense for the child and offer an intrinsic learning motivation; otherwise, instruction will be time consuming, and results superficial. In this context, the number of words a child can read at an early age, dictation or text copying should be less important than the development of the child’s linguistic comprehension capacity.
Language and communication development could be sustained therefore by a more diverse teaching/learning methodology, instructional time allocation on mono-, trans-, and interdisciplinary activities, together with the use of adequate evaluation mechanisms and tools.
As such, starting from an early age, we believe that emphasis should be placed on:
We understand oral message reception as and propose to work on the development of: child’s understanding of overall oral message, child’s intuition of message correctness, word differentiation and connotation, child’s interest in other interlocutors’ message in concrete communication situations.
We refer to oral expression as and propose to work on the development of: child’s enunciating clear and correct oral message according to specific situations, new word integration, child’s interest and initiative to communicate with others.
We consider written message reception as and propose to work on the development of: child’s identification of words and propositions in a printed/hand-written text, child’s understanding of overall text, word/picture association, paced/correct reading, child’s interest for reading.
We refer to written expression as and propose to work on the development of: child’s orthography and calligraphy, child’s use of language conventions, child’s interest for writing.
