The Early Years is a crucial phase of education, the ripple effects of which can be felt all the way through a child’s educational journey. There is so much evidence that points to this and yet it is often an area of education that is vastly underestimated in terms of the power of it’s learning potential.
Why are the early years so important?
Studies have shown that the gains that children make in their first year of school stay with them all the way through to their exams at age 16[1] and that a focus on language and interaction is a key element of this.[2]
However, we also know that a significant number of children arrive at school with language needs; around 7.6% of the population have a Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and children in areas of social disadvantage are at high risk of language difficulties.
Without support, these language difficulties are likely to have long-term consequences for the education, health and wellbeing of children.[3] The Early Years is the perfect time to build these critical skills.
The Challenge
Early years practitioners, like many other educators are under huge pressure, which pulls them away from talking and listening with the children. Teachers regularly share their concerns with me around the time available for talking and playing
“there is no time to talk to the children”
“once we have done the maths groups, phonics groups, etc, it leaves little time for playing and conversation”
“I don’t feel like I know the children any more – we don’t get that space to listen and talk about their lives”
“I’m under a lot of pressure to get the children mark making … as well as phonics groups and everything else. It’s hard to find the time for talk”
“We’re introducing synthetic phonics earlier and earlier – we whizz through all the listening and talking to get them matching letters and sounds”
Senior leaders are under huge pressure for children to pass the phonics check and attain good levels of development by the end of the early years foundation stage. But when children are starting school with the language of an 18 month old or sometimes less, catching up is a big ask, bigger still when time isn’t prioritised for high quality conversations.
Despite the pressure, many schools and settings are working hard to prioritise early language, giving time to their practitioners to have rich conversations and play. The early years is such a crucial time for children, building in those opportunities for play and interaction will pay huge dividends for the children in the future.
Talking Time
In addition to being a speech and language therapist, I’m also lucky enough to be involved in lots of other roles and projects. For a number of years now I’ve been involved in an Early Years research project called Talking Time©[4][5]. This is an Early Years programme using a combination of professional learning for staff alongside a powerful language intervention, based around conversations, shared reading and other language activities. Unlike many early language interventions, it is an adaptive programme, with a solid foundation allowing it to work for children with different levels of language. Our latest research trial just ended and we are now working with control groups and other settings.
Reflections – what have I learned?
I’ve been reflecting on my own learning and thought I would share a couple of obvious but I think pretty important observations.
Professional learning that impacts on practice takes time – I am regularly asked to ‘do a talk’ on SLCN, to present at a twilight or INSET day, or to speak at a conference. These are fantastic opportunities to spread the word about the importance of language and raise awareness of children who struggle. Often participants follow up with me for next steps as we all acknowledge that changing or embedding practice needs more time.
In Talking Time© we work in partnership with practitioners. We each carry out the language activities with the children and spend time reflecting on what we noticed in our practice and analyse the impact this had on their children. We use a robust framework of practice with clear language learning strategies as a reference point to support our analysis. We take our reflections and refine our practice. It takes time, but it allows practitioners to see how strategies can work for their children, which is very powerful. We can properly explore powerful language strategies, such as ‘following the lead of the children’, ‘recasting’ or ‘expansion’. We can show and talk about what happens when we use contingent or decontextualised talk with different children.
Most importantly, it enhances knowledge and skills; it supports practitioners to know exactly how to adapt their language so that all the children can access conversations. To ensure this at the right level for each child, so they can be scaffolded to develop their language skills.
Practitioners become more skilled at noticing how their own language impacts on the children, at seeing small changes in the social interaction skills of the children, at knowing what the children do and don’t understand and most importantly what to do about it.
They can see the basics of engaging and supporting their children, and have the tools to adapt their language, enabling them to build and extend the language of the children in a bespoke and nuanced way. The practitioners value this opportunity to develop their skills enormously, not just for themselves, but for the difference they can see it makes to the children. Time and space for professional learning is key.[6]
Shared reading is a communication workout! In shared reading, we don’t read the text at all, instead, we use picture books as a starting point for a conversation. This is a different way of sharing books, though is one that has been shown to be effective for children with language difficulties. It allows the adult to follow the lead of the children and to adapt their language so all children can engage with the story in a way that works for them. It is a proper workout and an absolute joy to hear what the children bring to the stories!
Conversations really are key. I find myself regularly talking about how important conversations are for developing children’s language. And yet, as a speech and language therapist I have been guilty of forgetting this most fundamental aspect of language learning. When we find gaps in children’s language, it is tempting to focus right in on those aspects – be it particular vocabulary, concepts or grammatical aspects of language.
Obviously if children have specific gaps in areas of language, we want to fill these. But we can do this through purposeful and intentional focus on these gaps in and through conversation. It requires more skill than traditional paper based language activities, though it is functional and leans into the way in which children learn language. It’s not an alternative to other approaches, but most definitely something not to be forgotten as an impactful approach to language learning.
The power of play – we know how important play is for children’s development.[7] We know and yet, play is slowly being eroded in our busy target driven world. Play is strongly related to cognitive development and emotional well-being. It is also crucial for language – in play children use objects to represent others, just as in language we use words to represent real objects, actions and ideas. It is also great practice for children to learn to organise and negotiate, find compromise and build friendships, to learn how to recognise and regulate emotions. In the Talking Time© project, there is an activity called ‘word play’ – literally building vocabulary through child led conversation and play.
A nod to narrative – one of the language activities in Talking Time© is there to provide a particular focus on narrative skills. I was already noticing how many of the children I work with are struggling with narrative and was reminded just how important narrative skills are for children. They are key for the personal narratives we share as part of our social communication and also provide a key foundation for later writing skills – for example, the ability to retell a story at around age 6 has direct links to writing skills at age 11.
How has all of this changed our practice?
I now use wordless books and a shared reading approach as part of my initial language assessment with children. I identify the areas of language where children need to focus and build these areas into conversations, sometimes linked to stories and other times not. I support settings to identify great books for shared reading (not all books work) and use them as a way to facilitate working on language with children. My current favourite book for sharing stories – Goodnight Gorilla![8] I’d highly recommend it if you don’t know it already.
We have also built a shared reading element into our LINGO Chatterboxes intervention[9], linking story books to common themes of Early Years provision and targeting specific areas of language, such as key vocabulary, sentence building or early inferencing skills.
We have also made the Chatterboxes activities play based, including toys linked to the stories to support children and practitioners to use play based activities to support children’s language. We lean into what we know about typical language development and the importance of multiple turn conversations.
We aim as therapists to link language activities to familiar early years topics, so key language is revisited by practitioners and children throughout the day. Functional and intentional conversations through play.
Our ethos at LINGO was and is very much about working in partnership with our schools, settings and families. My experience with this project has reinforced this. Collaboration with others can make such a huge difference – it means we are more likely to get things right, to allow for necessary adaptations to our approaches, to be prepared to change things to work for each individual child, family and school we work with.
As a result of one of our settings having very high numbers of children with language difficulties, we developed our ‘communication cards’ to support adaptation of language across all areas of the setting. Used alongside professional learning strategies, they have been a big hit in the schools and settings that are using them.
We’ve also built some videoing of sessions into our training and professional learning sessions with some of our schools. It’s not always easy to organise, but we find it a brilliant way to bring to life some of the strategies we’re suggesting.
Finally, the project has got me thinking about how to enhance our support for narrative skills – narrative structure, narrative skills such as describing and explaining and key vocabulary for narrative, such as first, next, alongside connectives important for children to link their ideas together. We use a range of narrative programmes[10], though I think there is some work to do…watch this space.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09243453.2017.1404478
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Iram-Siraj/publication/277292962_No_356_Researching_Effective_Pedagogy_in_the_Early_Years/links/642c16af4e83cd0e2f8dc2e8/No-356-Researching-Effective-Pedagogy-in-the-Early-Years.pdf
[3] Law, J., Mensah, F., Westrupp, E., & Reilly, S. (2015) Social disadvantage and early language delay, Centre of Research Excellence in Child Language, Policy Brief
[4] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/centre-language-literacy-and-numeracy/research/empowering-staff-enhance-oral-language-early-years
[5] https://www.education.ox.ac.uk/research/research-groups/language-cognition-development/child-development-and-learning/talking-time/
[6] https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.748347https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5646b705-8ef9-4fef-bf4e-13be23dbbea3
[7] https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/1/david-whitebread---importance-of-play-report.pdf
[8] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Night-Gorilla-Peggy-Rathmann/dp/1405263768
[9] https://www.lingospeech.co.uk/category/all-products
[10] https://www.marleenwesterveld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Westerveld-and-Gillon-Oral-Narrative-Program-2007.pdf