Towards Substantive and Productive Oral Language Skills and Practices in Children from Birth to 8-Year Education Contexts in Times of Extreme Disruption

Oral language is the primary means through which a child controls, describes, organises, and evaluates their life experiences and their ability to use oral language which effectively impacts their future literacy development. Currently, the world is awash with dynamic change and constant disruption. These include natural disasters such as the ongoing Australian floods and bush fires, droughts, the global COVID-19 pandemic, the pervasive use of digital technologies, continuing global unrest, and impacts on economic and social adversity. Many of these disruptions are having a negative impact on the development of children's oral language and ongoing communication capacities. This is interesting given the prioritisation in many western nations, including Australia, of learning to read and write over learning to talk and communicate. This paper serves as an example of what makes good classroom literacy research. It outlines the elements of robust research including a research proposal structure. In this instance, our research investigates educator perceptions of children's developing oral language and communication skills and practices in birth to 8-year-old education contexts within the current backdrop of extreme disruption. The paper includes a literature review, our proposed research methodology which includes interviews from participants in birth to 8-year-old education settings, in both national and global contexts sourced via snowball sampling. The data analysis uses Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the contextualised interview responses from educators within a socio-cultural global malaise of disruption and power. We outline future plans and funding sources, including publications and potential school resources in the spirit of collegial cooperation to support excellence in literacy classroom research.