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Webinar highlights: Speaking skills in primary school
Integrating Pedagogy and Assessment to Promote Speaking Skills in Primary School English Classrooms
On December 4, we hosted a teacher webinar titled “Integrating Pedagogy and Assessment to Promote Speaking Skills in Primary School English Classrooms” with Prof. Dr. Esim Gürsoy.
In this insightful session, Prof. Gürsoy emphasized that oral communication is the starting point of language development, long before reading and writing. She explained that children learn language primarily through meaningful interaction, not through abstract rule learning. One key reminder for teachers was that children can only learn vocabulary in the target language if they already understand the concept in their first language, making context, visuals, and real-life references essential in primary classrooms.
“Children do not learn language through rules first. They learn it through meaning, interaction, and use.”
The webinar highlighted that young learners acquire language in chunks, not isolated words or grammatical rules. For this reason, decontextualized vocabulary lists are far from ideal. Prof. Gürsoy shared practical examples such as using songs, chants, and repetitive classroom routines to help children internalize formulaic language. These chunks can later be reused in new communicative activities, supporting fluency and confidence. For instance, a song learned during circle time can become the basis for a short role play or picture-based speaking task.
Participants were also introduced to developmentally appropriate speaking activities, including picture description, simple preference statements (e.g., “I like… because…”), and story retelling with visual support. These tasks were presented as effective ways to build vocabulary, sentence control, and coherence while keeping the classroom emotionally safe and engaging for young learners.
When discussing assessment, Prof. Gürsoy stressed that meaning takes priority over form when young learners learn to speak English. Expecting full grammatical accuracy is neither realistic nor appropriate, as grammar rules are abstract and hypothetical concepts that children are not cognitively ready to process. Instead, speaking assessment should focus on functional communication, whether the child can express ideas, connect meaning, and be understood.
In this context, TOEFL Primary® Speaking was presented as an example of a standardized, developmentally aligned speaking assessment that reflects natural classroom communication. The test supports instructional decision-making and long-term tracking of speaking development by focusing on:
- child-friendly visuals and low-anxiety tasks
- analytic scoring for delivery, language use, and coherence
- reliable, standardized conditions for monitoring growth over time
As Prof. Gürsoy emphasized, good teaching is the best test preparation. When instruction is developmentally sound, assessment readiness follows naturally without the need for separate test-focused teaching.