11 June 2025

How can play be a powerful tool for developing young children's language skills? In this episode we sit down with Professor Louise Paatsch, Deputy Director of Deakin University's Strategic Research Centre in Education to explore how intentional play-based learning environments can nurture children’s oral language skills, setting a strong foundation for lifelong learning. This episode is aimed at preschool educators. For primary and secondary school teachers, listen to our episode with Dr Yael Leibovitch and Professor Ian Wilkinson.

Show Notes

Louise Paatsch - Let's play and talk

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode and any ideas you have for future topics. Get in touch with the Teach Podcast team at education.teachpodcast@sa.gov.au.

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we are still with the 2025 Literacy Summit topics and we are talking with Professor Louise Paatsch, who is the Deputy Director of Deakin University's Strategic Research Centre in Education.

Louise, thank you for joining us.

Louise Paatsch: Thanks very much for having me.

Dale Atkinson: So supporting preschool children's oral language development through play. How do we do it?

Louise Paatsch: Well, I think the first thing for all of us is really to think about setting up the learning environment for the children. I think, you know, for preschool educators, it's well known that play is a central tenet of all the early childhood practices. And educators are great at developing a child-centred curriculum, but it's important for us to be thinking about that environment as far as setting up activities, experiences, their interactions with others and events that occur in the environment to support that language.

Dale Atkinson: Why is play so important for developing very young children's language and communication skills?

Louise Paatsch: There's a large body of research that clearly shows that there is a strong link between young children's language acquisition and their pretend play abilities. Partly the reason for this is both play and language. They share many conceptual similarities because both are symbolic and both rely on communication within social context.

So when we look at pretend play, for example, we know that that requires an ability for the child to represent objects and actions. It's carried out through telling stories and narrative. It's about social conversation, but it's also about negotiation between peers. So what play does actually do is place high linguistic demands on children to use language within various social contexts, with a range of partners. So that's not just with peers, it's with other adults in their life, it's with educators. So what we see in play is that during that time, children have to talk about what's happening in the play. They start to identify and elaborate in their play themes.

They have to negotiate, they have to take turns with their partners. Sometimes they don't particularly want to do that, so they have to negotiate problem solving and taking the perspective of another person. So there's again, also about providing these opportunities also in play to use what we call meta-communications.

So that's when children talk about their roles, how they're gonna plan the play, and how they're gonna build the story. So, you know, for example, you know, a child might say, I'd like to be a shopkeeper, and you can be the customer and then they have to set the plot. Saying that we're in a cafe. So they have to really think about who they are in the, in the story, but also who others are and they have to talk about that as well.

Dale Atkinson: Such an important part of developing their social skills as well as many other things. Now, there are kind of three interrelated components within language. Can you tell us about what those three components are and how this is kind of unlocked through the play space.

Louise Paatsch: Yeah, absolutely. So we would say that there are three major components that are interrelated within language. And those three components are the form of language, so that takes in what we call syntax, which is around the structure of phrases and sentences. It takes in morphology, which is around the organization and the internal structure of words so that's when we might add something to a word, either at the beginning of the word or at the end of the word. So if we think about the word comfort, it might be discomfort, might be uncomfortable, for example. And then it also takes in phenology, which is basically our sound system. So the distribution and structure of sounds.

So the second component is what we call content, and that involves semantics, which is basically vocabulary or the meaning of words and how words are combined. And the third one of these major components is use, which we would call that pragmatic language, which is all about that social use of language.

So in any exchange that children have with each other, they're using all those subsystems of language to communicate their ideas and needs because they have to formulate their words into sentences, you know, if they want something like two cakes, for example then they'll have to add an S to show that it's more than one.

They'll have to put their sounds in both the sequencing and distribution of those sounds, which is phonology. Then they'll use a whole lot of different word types. So for example, they might use pronouns like I and you, they might use nouns like, dog, lady, cake, coffee. They might use conjunctions like, and, and of course lots of verbs to make them much more complex sentences.

But as children do converse with each other, they are using a really important part of that language. Which is pragmatics, which is related to the form of use. And that's all about social, so that's how children interact, how they use eye contact, how they engage with the partner, how they take on roles and turns, how they might pause, how they might greet people, how they end, how they might extend a topic.

All of those skills that are really important, but altogether these verbal and nonverbal language across all those major components are critical because it supports children to develop their sense of self. It's about building dialogue, it's about social competencies and critically it's about how they build friendships.

Dale Atkinson: So as a preschool educator standing among a swarm of very tiny people, what are the intentional teaching practices they can use to support the language and communication development?

Louise Paatsch: There are many, many strategies that educators can use, but I think one of the important things is to provide these rich, authentic and abundant opportunities for children to actually talk, and talk not just with an adult, but with a wide range of partners.

We know that it is important for educators to provide children to engage in role play, where they're able to take on the role of another person or character. It's important that educators talk with children about different words, about the language they're using. Perhaps things like intonation and other nonverbal cues, talking about stories and characters, how we communicate in different ways.

The other important thing that's come from our research is for educators to think about their own language use too. So thinking about how they model language, how they include opportunities for the social use of language with young children. They might use self-talk or parallel talk as they engage with the children.

It's important to talk about feelings and building up vocabulary around those feelings. But for some children they might need visuals to show some of these skills, particularly in pragmatics where there's turn taking. So, you know, using some of those cues of pausing and eye contact. But it's also for educators to be aware of children's communicative attempts and what they're trying to say and acknowledging that.

Again, coming back to the adult's own talk. Think about using open questions, so that enables children then to respond in a more lengthy way, in a more detailed way. Sometimes as educators, we probably talk too much and don't pause enough, so thinking about pausing and letting children just talk.

So for example, they can just ask them what's another word for something? Or what's the opposite for something? Perhaps using the sensors to describe some events, you know, how does it smell, how does it feel? And of course the talk around picture story reading, what we call this dialogic talk around the book that extends really beyond just checking for comprehension, but actually enables children to connect to their own world experiences as they read these picture story books.

Dale Atkinson: That's a really comprehensive rundown of strategies there. Now, I'm assuming all of those apply in various degrees to working with children with perhaps diverse language needs or whose speech and language comes as a difficulty to them. Are there specific approaches that educators should be considering with those cohorts of students?

Louise Paatsch: Yeah, absolutely. I think you've mentioned it, but like all children educators need to understand the needs of every child, irrespective of whether they have, a diagnosed speech or language difficulty, whether their children where English is not their first language, it's important that they find out what the child knows, what the difficulties are, and how to set up an environment to support that.

So that might mean, for example, working with some allied health professionals to understand what the difficulties the child does experience and finding from them common goals that you can support that child together rather than in contrast to the goals of what perhaps allied health professionals may set as objectives, as well as what the educators set as the objectives.

For some children, they may need visuals. So they may need lots of pictures, they may need a series of pictures to show a sequence, for example, in an event they might need a visual to show turn taking. So they hold something, for example, then it's your turn to talk, pass it over to another person, and it's their turn to talk.

So when we think of other children, say for example, children with hearing loss who use spoken language. Then it's important for educators to think about the acoustic conditions in which these children act in the classroom. So that might be ensuring that, you know, on tops of tables you might pot felt, or something that actually starts to absorb some of the echoey sounds.

I think when we are thinking about children where English is not their first language, this doesn't mean that they don't have language, it's just that they don't understand English. So I think again, it's important to support these children to go known to the unknown. So for example, in play for educators to think about what the objects are that they would put in the play scenes, for example, as they plan their environment. Being very respective of the children's culture and their background and try to perhaps put some of those things within the environment as well,

Dale Atkinson: So much to consider and apply in that space. If there was one key takeaway for, for educators to remember in their work what do you think that would be?

Louise Paatsch: I think my big one is that supporting young children's communication and language through play just continues to be of paramount importance for all children.

Dale Atkinson: Professor Louise Patch, thank you very much for your time. Now, if you want to engage a bit more with Louise's presentation from the 2025 Literacy Summit. You can go to the link below in the show notes, she's talked about presentation on Let's Play and Talk. It's a focus on the importance of intentionally supporting preschool children's oral language development through play.

Professor Louise, thank you very much for your time.

Louise Paatsch: Thanks for having me and having a discussion.