Young children should be seen and heard!

A study in 2 inner-city primary schools

Recently, there has been increasing concern about the level of oral language competence with which children enter school. (Examples). The National Literacy Strategy, introduced in 1998, encouraged schools to focus exclusively on the development of pupils' reading and writing skills. Now, however, the National Primary Strategy, introduced in 2003, has begun to address concerns about speaking and listening.

Why speaking and listening matter
Language enables communication, and through language an individual can represent feelings, beliefs, desires and knowledge. The links between the ability to express oneself and the ability to integrate socially and to establish and maintain personal relationships are clear. It is through well-developed language skills that children are able to function as social beings.

Success in the educational system is also linked to spoken language competence. Government documentation states that 'Pupils' use of language is a vital skill which influences their progress in every area of the curriculum' (SCAA, 1997). All lessons in the primary school include, and largely depend on, oral communication. Therefore fluency in, and comprehension of, spoken language are the keys to effective learning.

A study in two inner-city primary schools
The small-scale study that we are going to describe here arose from the concerns of the headteachers and staff in two primary schools serving deprived, multicultural areas of an inner-city. Concerns focused on the level of their pupils' spoken language skills through the whole school and the perceived impact this was having on wider learning. Two reception teachers in these schools received Best Practice Research Scholarships (BPRS) to support classroom-based research into the issue, and worked in collaboration with researchers at the Institute of Education, University of London, with the aim of enhancing their pupils' speaking and literacy skills.

The research project sought to see if the development of the children's spoken language could be enhanced by:

• raising the teachers' awareness of the nature and importance of spoken language development
• sharing this awareness within the whole school
• providing assessment information on each child's spoken language skills
• developing activities and supporting resources/materials
• training parents, helpers and classroom assistants.

All the children in the two reception classes were assessed during their first three weeks after school entry, in order to determine whether their spoken language skills were depressed in comparison with those of the general population. The children were tested again, using the same assessment, at the end of the year. This enabled the research team to establish the progress the children had made in their speaking and listening. Children in another reception class, in a school located within half a mile of the other two, served as a comparison and were assessed but did not receive the language enrichment programme.

The assessment used was the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) Assessment Preschool UK (Wigg, Secord and Semel, 1998) and this was administered by the Institute researchers. This tool measures a range of receptive language and expressive language skills. Receptive language refers to what is heard or understood, and expressive language to what is said or articulated. The test aims 1) to assist in the identification of children with language delay and difficulty, 2) to provide a diagnostic assessment of the areas of either strength or weakness in language development, and 3) to identify areas for follow up support and intervention.

The CELF assessment contains six subtests.

1. Linguistic concepts subtest
Children had to look carefully at pictures presented to them and follow instructions (e.g. 'Point to a fish or a cat.')

2. Basic concepts subtest
Children had to look carefully at pictures of children engaged in different activities or pictures of inanimate objects and point to the one that fitted a given description (e.g., 'Show me the one that is cold').

3. Sentence structure subtest
Children had to look carefully at a series of three pictures of people engaged in different activities and point to the one that fitted a given caption (e.g., 'The girl is swimming').

4. Recalling sentences in context subtest
Children had to repeat words from the text of a story read to them by the researcher.

5. Formulating labels subtest
Children had to look carefully at pictures and answer questions about them (e.g., 'What is the girl doing?')

6. Word structure subtest
Children had to look carefully at pictures and follow a language pattern modelled by the researcher (e.g., 'This doll is out of the box. This doll is ... the box').

The assessments undertaken at the beginning of the school year indicated that the language skills of the children in all three schools were less well developed than those of the general population.

Intervention programme
The two BPRS reception teachers were provided with supported study of the relevant background literature, coupled with advice and support from academic staff at the Institute of Education. The project also involved the systematic sharing of good practice across all classes in the intervention primary schools.

The aim of the enrichment sessions was to provide effective learning experiences and targeted teaching for the reception children, in order to develop both their comprehension and their use of spoken language. The sessions were based on a theme or topic, such as toys or transport, and provided a range of activities, including visits. Each theme was taught in a one-hour session, and sessions continued at the rate of one per week for 12 weeks at a time. During the sessions, particular emphasis was placed on vocabularly development, recounting or describing a situation and using different tenses. Volunteers (including TAs and parents) were trained before each prepared session with the children. Evaluation and feedback was systematically done after each session.

The children's progress
The children's progress was measured using the pre- and post-intervention CELF scores. The results of the study are encouraging, since all the children made progress in their language skills, with the greatest gains being in expressive language.

Positive outcomes of the study
Those participating in the project identified a number of benefits in addition to the progress the children made in their speaking and listening skills. These were:

• Improved adult-pupil ratios - the children were able to work in small groups led by an adult. This provided opportunities for the kinds of sustained interaction that are often difficult to achieve where adult-pupil ratios are less favourable. It also provided valuable assessment opportunites.
• Assessment for learning - the results and analysis of the CELF assessments enabled the teachers to target specific areas of language performance for attention and support.
• Quality time in the University and away from school - this provided the teachers with opportunites for reflection, sharing and mutual encouragement. The teachers developed further insights into the nature and development of spoken language.
• Curriculum resource material - to accompany the activities that teachers devised to develop spoken language skills, appealing resources, such as finger puppets, were purchased and made.
• Improved session formats - sessions were evaluated to find the most effective format. For example, a play break for the children half way through the session and then a recount of what had been done in the first part of the session was built in. This allowed for recounting and narrative skills to be used.
• Partnership - the collaboration between teachers and researchers was seen as valuable. The research addressed the concern of the headteachers and staff of the schools involved in the project.

Future developments
The research team is keen to build on the positive outcomes of this study, and there will be a second phase of the research which will include improvements in the design of the intervention. As the children's ability to recount events and narrate stories significantly improved, this skill will be focused on and given greater emphasis. This aspect of language functioning is a key skill for a successful start in literacy learning. With this in mind, a formative assessment task developed and extensively used in New Zealand will be used in addition to the CELF assessment to gauge children's grasp of language structures, use of language to convey meaning, and comprehension.

(The Primary English Magazine, April 2004)

Adult learning benefits children

Parents taking up opportunities for adult learning find communicating with their children easier even if their courses have nothing directly to do with parenting, according to a team from the Government-backed Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning at the Institute of Education. The report, The Benefits of Learning, showed that when parents went out to study their children broadened their range of social relationships at college crèches or playgroups, while getting out of the home and daily routines alleviated stress and depression. Many also reported that studying made them more confident as parents, better able to communicate with their children and more understanding and patient even if the content of the course had nothing to do with parenting. Co-author Cathie Hammond said that doing courses 'changed women's attitudes, hopes, plans, social circles and self-perception'.

(Nursery World, 18 March 2004)

Language is key to the class divide

A vital piece of social research from America should be read by politicians of every party, who all profess to want to see disadvantaged children succeed. A key ingredient in determining future social class is language - the basic tool for thought, argument, reasoning and making sense of a confusing world. There is only a short time during the first three years that the brain absorbs language, the concepts it embodies and the culture implied.

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is one of the most thorough studies ever conducted. Three groups of children were tape-recorded throughout their first years - welfare families, working-class families and professional families. With painstaking care, researchers counted then extrapolated all the words a child would hear and speak in every encounter and interaction with its parent or care-giver. When they analysed the hours of recordings, the sharp class differences in the three groups' early experiences were startling.

By the age of four, a professional's child will have had 50 million words addressed to it, a working-class child 30 million and a welfare child just 12 million. Consider this: they found the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of the welfare child. The way children were spoken to was also measured, how much they were listened to, explained things, given choices and in what tone of voice. So at the age of three the professional child has had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it and only some 80,000 discouragements. But the welfare child will only ever have been encouraged 60,000 times in its life, suffering twice as many discouragements, with the working-class child in between the two.

This epic analysis confirms what we all secretly know already. The educated are better at communicating with their children than the uneducated - and the child is branded for life. When the children in the study were measured at age nine to 10, the authors, with an uncharacteristic slip from their stern academic terminology, conclude: "We were awestruck at how well our measures of accomplishments at three predicted language skill at nine to 10." In other words, school had added little value after the age of three: it was already too late.

Smug conservatives might think this confirms all their prejudices: class is in the DNA, or at least permanently deep-dyed into a child's immutable culture. But the point of this work is to prove it is not so. Intervention works. Give very young children intensive interaction with teachers and they make up for what they lack at home; parents can easily be taught to read and talk to their children constructively. IQ, they say, is only a measure of the child's early experience and that can be changed. But it takes a major effort: to get the welfare child up to the vocabulary standard of the working-class child, it would take 41 hours a week of talking at the level offered by the professional parent.

So if we really want to change class destiny, it can be done. But it takes good teachers in high-quality children's centres where children of all classes mix, not bundling all the deprived together. The Treasury sees a limited roll-out of children's centres in poor areas as a getting-mothers-off-benefit-and-back-to-work policy. But if they took the long (and expensive) view, this must be Labour's key remedy for social class division.

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd R Risley, is published by Brookes Publishing in the US.

(From an article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, 2 January 2004)

Babies can spot the ball

Babies learn to follow objects with their eyes at between four and six months old according to American researchers. Scott Johnson of New York University said: "Our research provides the first conclusive documentation of how and when infants learn about object concepts, and serves as a strong argument against theories that infant knowledge in this area is innate." Humans are born with brains that must start making connections from the first gasp. The question has always been: how much knowledge is innate and how much acquired at an early age? Psychologists have focused on how babies make sense of language, how early they can identify music, how they make sense of motion, and how quickly they recognise faces. Dr Johnson and his colleagues used an eye-tracking instrument to measure how babies aged between four and six months watched a ball moving across a screen. Babies as young as four months who had seen the whole trajectory of the ball, could anticipate where it would re-emerge. Dr Johnson said that one implication was that babies could learn from observation, and did not necessarily benefit from "stimulating toys or exercises".

(Guardian, 26 August 2003)

Scottish report identifies under-3s provision to facilitate development

Under-threes provision that "will support well-being, companionship, shared understanding, and a sense of belonging, and facilitate development" was identified in a report published by the Scottish Executive Education Department in July 2003.

The report is a review of the research evidence on the development of children from birth to three years old, and considers the implications of that evidence for the provision of out-of-home care. It provides an overview of the ways in which adults can contribute to children's development from the earliest stages, the kinds of adult attention and care that are beneficial, and the characteristics of out-of-home provision that meets young children's changing needs.

The report highlights the increasing pleasure 3-12 month infants get from vocal play and song, and the emphasis on expressive play required from caregivers (not largely reliant on toys or other material resources) in order to foster the child's disposition to learn in company. At 9-24 months a growing vocabulary comes along with a repertoire of gestures, behaviours and imitations. Before they can use words, infants communicate interest and pleasure in what they are doing non-verbally and use imitation to negotiate interests and form relationships. They will respond to talk and action that aims to foster their natural sociability and concern for others. Very young children need a social environment rich in opportunities to develop language, symbolic coding and classifying, movement and engagement with music, rhyme and creativity.

Between 24 and 36 months young children need imaginative and inventive play and discovery in groups, alone and with interested adults. The report highlights that practitioners are the most important resource in out-of-home provision.

Meeting the needs of children from birth to three: research evidence and implications for out-of-home provision, by Christine Stephen (University of Stirling), Aline-Wendy Dunlop (University of Strathclyde) and Colwyn Trevarthen (University of Edinburgh).

Visit www.scotland.gov.uk/insight/

Sure Start Language Measure

Sure Start Language Measure - The First Implementation (September 2002), by Frances Harris, Department of Language and Communication Science, City University.

This summary presents an overview of the national baseline results which were collected from Sure Start local programmes during November/December 2001. It includes feedback on the use of the SSLM, with plans for future development and implementation.

Download the summary

Reading and Early Literacy - US research paper

Reading and Early Literacy is one of a series of reports designed to support the implementation of Proposition 10: The California Children and Families Act. It takes as its basis that "success in school and life in today's society is more dependent upon literacy skills than ever before".

The paper provides practical evidence-based guidelines for considering strategies to promote children's development relevant to emergent literacy from birth to 5 years of age. It summarises the findings and recommendations of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, and discusses examples of systems and programmes that may serve as models for promoting early literacy.

Finally, the paper provides guidelines for best practices and policy in the area, and makes recommendations for developing services to enhance early literacy programmes.

M. Regalado, C. Goldenberg and E. Appel, Building Community Systems for Young Children: Reading and Early Literacy, in N. Halfon, E. Shulman and M. Hochstein, eds., Building Community Systems for Young Children, UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, 2001.
Website: http://healthychild.ucla.edu