Transcript

Oral language is a huge topic from a speech language pathology perspective. We actually break language down in to different areas.

When we break language down we are actually looking at individual pieces. Language is extremely complex. And one area of oral language is phonological awareness and phonological awareness is that ability to understand that language is broken down in to sentences, sentences are broken down in to words, words are broken down in to syllables, and syllables are made up of sounds. 

Over all, as a speech language pathologist, we break oral language down in to many components. And all of those components contribute to your reading and writing. If you're looking at decoding words, you're looking at phonological awareness. If you're looking at reading comprehension, you're looking at the higher level components of oral language: vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics. If you're looking at writing, oral language is absolutely critical because spelling, again phonological awareness is important for spelling words but being able to express your thoughts.

If you do not have the expressive language skills, the ability to put your ideas together in clear and coherent sentences and build those sentences in to a paragraph and have words that are connecting the different sentences to have a meaningful paragraph, you won't be able to write. So everything always starts with your ability to speak and your ability to understand what you hear. And that's oral language.