Listening and speaking are crucial in developing children's skills as effective communicators and underpin their selfesteem and social development. Listening and speaking also have a significant impact on the development of literacy skills and children's ability to read and write.

As in their mother tongue, children develop listening skills ahead of learning to speak. Through listening to English, children are drawn into speaking and gradually move from using single words and chunks to learning how to express their ideas and interact in a more sustained way.

The key to developing listening skills is to provide frequent, varied opportunities to listen to language in engaging and meaningful contexts, and to support this in an appropriate way. There are many examples of listening activities in previous sections of this book, such as Storytelling (F), Playing games (G), Songs, rhymes, chants and raps (I). However, the person most likely to provide the main listening input through everyday classroom talk and routines, giving instructions and explanations, managing children, giving feedback and praise and conducting learning reviews, is you.

Although children usually learn to speak English rapidly in immersion contexts, it is important not to underestimate the difficulty in contexts where they have two or three lessons per week. Above all, it is important not to make children speak before they feel ready to do so, and to accept translanguaging by responding positively to children's meaning.

My key tips for listening and speaking are:

• 81 Support listening appropriately

• 82 Repeat, rehearse, recall

• 83 Provide opportunities for creative expression

• 84 Develop pronunciation skills

81 Support listening appropriately

• • Be a good role model: a good listener is someone who looks at the speaker, stays focused, doesn't interrupt and responds respectfully. When you model active listening, you also convey that you are interested in listening to children and this encourages them to speak.

• • Develop attention skills: children often have short concentration spans which make it difficult for them to listen with attention. For this reason, it can be invaluable to do short listening activities that progressively develop children's ability to focus and concentrate. One example is TPR activities (see 65): children listen and follow instructions, e.g. Jump three times! (See also, e.g. 43 and 61.)