By the end of the EYFS, children should:

 Interact with others, negotiating plans and activities and taking turns in conversation.

 Enjoy listening to and using spoken and written language, and readily turn to it in their play and learning.

 Sustain attentive listening, responding to what they have heard with relevant comments, questions or actions.

 Listen with enjoyment, and respond to stories, songs and other music, rhymes and poems and make up their own stories, songs, rhymes and poems.

 Extend their vocabulary, exploring the meanings and sounds of new words.

 Speak clearly and audibly with confidence and control and show awareness of the listener.

 Use language to imagine and recreate roles and experiences.

 Use talk to organise, sequence and clarify thinking, ideas, feelings and events.

 Hear and say sounds in words in the order in which they occur.

 Link sounds to letters, naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet.

 Use their phonic knowledge to write simple regular words and make phonetically plausible attempts at more complex words.

 Explore and experiment with sounds, words and texts.

 Retell narratives in the correct sequence, drawing on language patterns of stories.

 Read a range of familiar and common words and simple sentences independently.

 Know that print carries meaning and, in English, is read from left to right and top to bottom.

 Show an understanding of the elements of stories, such as main character, sequence of events and openings, and how information can be found in non-fiction texts to answer 
questions about where, who, why and how.

 Attempt writing for different purposes, using features of different forms such as lists, stories and instructions.

 Write their own names and other things such as labels and captions, and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation.

 Use a pencil and hold it effectively to form recognisable letters, most of which are correctly formed.

Source: Early Learning Goals Statutory  Framework
Background from QCA