Teaching and learning process of oral communication in elementary school: a systematic review

Abstract

Oral communication is a fundamental tool to promote the development of various cognitive, interactive and emotional abilities in students and to stimulate communicative equality in multilingual and multicultural classrooms. Nevertheless, the investigation about this subject is still limited. This systematic literature review aims to describe current investigations about oral communication in order to inform and orient future studies. For this purpose, advanced research was done through an adaptation of the PRISMA declaration, which yielded a corpus of 19 articles. The studies were organized by theme into six categories: 1) teaching tools, 2) oral communication and curriculum, 3) teachers' beliefs, 4) oral communication as a teaching subject, 5) oral competence of students and teachers, and 6) teaching-related difficulties. A lack of empirical studies about the teaching practices oriented towards orality was found; and thus, orientation and suggestions for future research are discussed.