Early years practitioners working in socially disadvantaged areas should receive bespoke professional training to help boost children’s English oral language development, finds a study led by IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society.
Specialist training tailored to this group would increase the amount of talking by children in groups and their vocabulary development, by changing how staff talk with the children in their care.
Experts from IOE, the University of Oxford’s Department of Education, and Newcastle University carried out a trial of a universal language-focused intervention supported by the Nuffield Foundation. The intervention, Talking Time, empowered staff in early years education settings to boost oral language skills for three- to five-year-olds in the lowest quintile for social deprivation.
Previous studies have found that 20% of children in areas of high social deprivation in the UK will face difficulties or delays in language development, compared to 5-8% of all children. Furthermore, children in the lowest quintile are on average nearly a year behind children from middle-income families in vocabulary tests by the time they are five. Children who speak English and at least one other language, known as dual language learners (DLL), often have particular difficulties in English compared to their monolingual English-speaking peers.
