About Talk To Your Baby

Talk To Your Baby is a campaign run by the National Literacy Trust to encourage parents and carers to talk more to children from birth to three.

Talking and listening to young children helps them develop good language and communication skills, which enables them to express themselves, listen, learn, read, write and socialise better. It also helps children feel valued, builds their confidence and helps parents and children to bond.

"There is no greater gift that you can give your child at the beginning of life than the ability to communicate." Dr Sally Ward, 2000

Too many children in the UK are entering nursery and school with inadequate language and communication skills. Some of these children, an average of two in every classroom, will have specific speech or language impairments that will need professional help. Many others, however, may not have had enough opportunities to develop their communication skills as babies and toddlers. They can remain at a disadvantage compared with those who grow up in language-rich homes.

Since our campaign started in January 2003, we have developed our website to provide a one-stop shop for information, advice and downloadable free resources on early language and communication to support early years professionals and inform parents. We have made links with a wide range of organisations and have been working through the national, regional and professional media to highlight the messages in order to reach parents and carers. We are speaking at conferences and writing articles for a variety of websites and publications.

In addition we have raised some very specific issues to campaign on, such as the need for pusher-facing pushchairs and buggies and the need for the topic of language acquisition to be taught in schools.

Our vision is that within 10 years we will have facilitated a positive cultural shift so that all children receive a stimulating language-rich start to life from their parents and carers.

• The aims and outcomes of Talk To Your Baby
• Frequently asked questions
• Talk To Your Baby survey results
• Support for Talk To Your Baby

Ten key reasons for our campaign

1. 75% of Heads of nurseries and schools admitting three-year-olds are concerned about a significant decline during the last five years in children's language competence at entry.
(National Literacy Trust and National Association of Head Teachers (2001) Early language survey of headteachers)

2. Teachers' perceptions are that children's talking and listening skills have declined over the last five years, particularly the ability to speak audibly and be understood.
(Basic Skills Agency (2002) Survey into Young Children's Skills on Entry to Education, Wales: Basic Skills Agency.)

3. Too many children are receiving a '"disrupted and dishevelled" upbringing, according to Head of Ofsted, David Bell. As a result, the verbal and behavioural skills of the nation's five-year-olds are at an all-time low, causing severe difficulties for schools. Many are unable to speak properly when they start school.
(Sunday Telegraph (2003) Schools chief: Parents have raised worst generation yet, 31 August 2003)

4. "A high proportion of children (41–75%) with identified speech and language difficulties in their pre-school years go on to have difficulties with reading skills during their school years."
(Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy (1999) Early Communication Audit Manual, London: Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy)

5. There is a suggested link between the home language experiences of children of low socio-economic status and their subsequent literacy skills development: "If reading success is so dependent on oral language skills, should we not be placing more emphasis on vocabulary and rich language environments in the home, pre-school and primary grades, rather than assuming that word reading skills alone will suffice?"
(Professor C.E. Snow (2001) The Centrality of Language: a longitudinal study of language and literacy development in low income children, Institute of Education, University of London)

6. Ann Locke at the University of Sheffield has highlighted "the enormous differences in the quantity of language addressed to children from different socio-economic backgrounds in their first two and a half years of life," and emphasises the fact that early spoken language underlies subsequent reading and writing.

7. An analysis of 350 Ofsted reports found that inspectors were concerned about the speaking and listening skills of half the four and five-year-olds starting school in September 2003.
(Times Educational Supplement (2004) From grunting to greeting, 30 January 2004)

8. "While children from different backgrounds typically develop language skills around the same age, the subsequent rate of vocabulary growth is strongly influenced by how much parents talk to their children. Children from professional families (who were found to talk to their children more) gain vocabulary at a quicker rate than their peers in working class and welfare families. By kindergarten, a child from a welfare family could have heard 32 million words fewer than a classmate from a professional family. Children in professional families heard a higher ratio of encouragements to discouragements than their working class and welfare counterparts."
(Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley (1995) Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, Baltimore, MD, USA:Brookes Publishing (revised January 2003))

9. A survey of nursery workers showed that 89% are worried that the occurrence of speech, language and communication difficulties among pre-school children is growing. The lack of adult and child time spent talking together was highlighted as the key reason by 92% of them.
(I CAN (2004) Nursery workers' poll says "Turn off the TV")

10. "Experts warn that the window to stimulate brain development closes quickly. In the first three years of life, the brain grows from 25% to 90% of its adult weight. And nearly 50% of a child's learning occurs in the first four years of life. Brain development is largely a function of stimulus. The more stimulus babies and young children get in terms of being read and talked to, the greater their capacity for language and literacy." (Early Words)

Background information for TTYB

Following consultation during 2001 and 2002, the National Literacy Trust concluded that a 10-year, generative national campaign to promote the importance of early language, from birth to three, was one of the most significant contributions we could make to sustained long-term improvements in literacy competence and enhanced life chances.

The purpose of the early language campaign was to ensure that by the end of this period:

• all children would be receiving a stimulating language-rich start to their lives.
• the necessary foundations would have been established to ensure a self-sustaining transformation of our national culture.

Rationale

There is a growing body of evidence linking the development of early language and the subsequent successful acquisition of reading and writing skills.

We need to motivate and support parents to provide the good home practices that will give their children stimulating language environments. In order to do this, our society requires a systematic, orchestrated enabling of a wide range of contributors. 

Supporting research

Perhaps the most significant recent confirmations that early spoken language is the foundation for later reading and writing skills have come from the Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) research. This has highlighted the importance, by the age of three, of the home learning environment, and that children significantly benefit from very simple home practices, regardless of the educational background of their parents and the level of home income.

Ours is the first study in Britain to show that more important than the mother's educational qualifications is what the mother does with the child. Education matters, but if the mother reads to the child, plays rhyming games, sings songs, talks about letters and sounds, and takes the child to the library, these behaviours at home are more important.
Professor Kathy Sylva, evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Employment, First Report, 2000.

The work of Professor Catherine Snow at Harvard also suggests a link between the home language experiences of low socio-economic children and their subsequent literacy skills development.

If reading success is so dependent on oral language skills, should we not be placing more emphasis on vocabulary and rich language environments in the home, pre-school and the primary grades, rather than assuming that word reading skills alone will suffice?
Catherine Snow, The Centrality of Language: a longitudinal study of language and literacy development in low-income children, Institute of Education, University of London, 2001. 

However, there is unfortunately much anecdotal evidence to suggest that children are now less well supported than we would wish. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust, in collaboration with the National Association of Head Teachers, suggested that heads of nurseries and schools admitting three-year-olds are concerned about a significant decline, in the last five years, in children's language competence at entry. 

The reasons for this apparent decline are complex and should not be attributed to uncaring parents. However, lack of early language stimulation can lead to language delay, and sometimes literacy and learning difficulties that then extend well beyond early literacy development and can be extremely costly or difficult to remedy.

Full research references

Bruner, J. S. (1983) Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language, Oxford: OUP.

Locke, A., Ginsborg, J. et al. (2002) Development and Disadvantage: implications for the early years and beyond. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders.

Snow, C.E. (2001) The Centrality of Language: a longitudinal study of language and literacy development in low-income children, Institute of Education, University of London.

Sticht, T. G. and James, J. H. (1984) Listening and Reading. Handbook of Reading Research. P. D. Pearson. New York and London: Longman.

Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P. and Siraj- Blatchford, I. (2000) The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) Project. Briefing prepared for The House of Commons Education Committee Enquiry into Early Years Education.

Wells, G and Robinson, W. (1982) The role of adult speech in language development, in C. Fraser and K. Scherer, eds., The Social Psychology of Language, Cambridge: CUP.

Ward, S. (2000) Baby Talk, Century.

Building a more supportive national culture

We concluded that it was necessary to initiate a campaign to build a more supportive national culture that would work to strengthen parenting practices. Institutional early years initiatives, although necessary, are by themselves insufficient for dealing with the issues described above. The basis of the campaign is the need to strengthen home rather than institutional practices. After all, nearly four-fifths of children up to their third birthday are not connected with any sort of service delivery in the mainstream.