ABSTRACT
Spoken language is the foundation of children’s personal, social, cultural, cognitive, creative and imaginative development. It is a means of thinking through ideas, a medium of communication and an extremely important resource for teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom. Teaching spoken language has often been considered more difficult than teaching reading or writing. It seems more challenging to describe different strands of spoken language – its purposes and functions, different audiences for talk, how context influences how people speak and listen. Talk is transient, making it difficult to pin it down without recording it. Whilst recognising that language continually changes, the Australian Curriculum emphasises the importance of teaching Standard Australian English (SAE) as the ‘common language’ of all Australians. Although SAE is just one dialect of English, it is the form that is officially recognised as the ‘correct’ (high status) dialect to be used in formal contexts and written texts.
