Sad but true!

I cant help but feel sad that the level of apathy in some sections of society is so bad that its debilitating. The Sure Start children's centres aim to provide quality pre-school activities to both entertain and support parents and children. They do prioritise families with needs such as sole parents, children with disabilities, travelling families, fathers or those known to social services  but everyone is welcomed.


The sessions they provide are mostly free in Staffordshire. They are sourced from the leading pre-school activity providers in the area and strive for excellent service. There's choices of messy play, yoga, Debutots drama, music with mummy, cookery club and of course our own Smart Talkers Pre-School Communication groups to name but a few. It sounds great doesn't it and in most of the centres it works really well. However, because of the level of apathy in some of the areas or in the sections of society they most want to attract, the numbers attending are limited. In one Centre I couldn't get anyone at all and after 3 weeks of twiddling my thumbs, we had to give up. I'd tried everything possible including posters in local shops and  newsagents, a newspaper article, adverts, netmums etc and contacted all the health professionals, local nurseries, pre-schools and other groups.


At these centres, I see mothers with pyjamas under their coats dropping youngsters off at the adjacent school claiming they're going back to bed, others chatting aimlessly smoking with their mates at the school gate. They usually have a pre-schooler or two in tow (complete with the essential badge..... sorry dummy). They would be welcome at the groups but they'd prefer to do nothing except press the button on the remote control for little Keesha or KayD.

Unfortunately, many of these little ones suffer from a lack of appropriate stimulation and as a result are likely to have an increased risk of delayed speech, language and communication. This will then mean that they will have problems with written language as spoken language skills are the building blocks for written language.    


Unfortunately, research shows that the gap at aged 7 years is likely to persist into adulthood. This has in turn been linked to lower expected socio-economic status in later adult by such eminent scholars as Professor James Law from City University. Another US study showed that language deprivation and teen pregnancy can be linked.It is estimated here in the UK that 75% of young offenders have speech, language and communication difficulties of some type or other.


These problems could be transient difficulties i.e. they'd develop appropriate skills with stimulation or intervention, but will be real and intrusive.  These cases are not to be confused with speech, language and communication disorders which are unavoidable and will need speech and language therapy input, these are children who are language deprived.


We're not entirely sure what is happening to the children's centres after April 1st 2011 but one thing is for certain.... we cant stop trying to engage with these families by breaking through the apathy. There's too much at stake to stop!

Tweet

Related articles

• Language intervention provides educational benefits for preschool children (scienceblog.com)
• Language intervention provides educational benefits for preschool children (eurekalert.org)

Giving Voice

Part 2 of the video viral. Please share

Language link to 'bubble blowing'

I was looking at some old archive news on language acquisition and I thought 

this was worth sharing from 2006. It's from the BBC news website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5106294.stm

Infants who can blow bubbles and lick their lips are more likely to pick
 up language quickly, research suggests.

A Lancaster University study of 120 toddlers found the ability to perform 

complex mouth movements was strongly linked with language development. 

They also found children who were good at 'pretending' an object was 

something else had better language skills.

The findings could help experts identify children who may struggle with language skills at an early stage. At 21 months - the age of the toddlers in the study  - children are learning new words at a faster rate than any other time 

in their lives.

Children pick up language skills at different speeds - some children will be late 

to start talking - but this doesn't mean they will always have poorer language 

skills than other children.

In a study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Dr Katie Alcock, lecturer in psychology at Lancaster University, carried out a series of tests to identify skills that might predict a child's ability to develop language. She looked at the infants' ability to perform hand gestures and mouth movements and to carry out tasks involving puzzles and pretend play.

The children's language ability was also assessed through a parental 

questionnaire, word games with simple images, and monitoring during normal play. 

As well as oral motor skills, she found that hand gestures such as waving 

or making shapes were associated with better language development but 

other movements such as walking and running were not.

Pretending

The researchers said they expected to find that children who had better cognitive development, such as being able to do a puzzle or match pictures and colours, would have better language skills. But in fact, only the ability to pretend that one object was another object - such as pretending a wooden block is a car or hairbrush - was associated with better language skills. Dr Alcock said: "Until children are about two they are very poor at licking things off their lips or giving someone a proper kiss. "If they don't have those skills it's going to be a big stumbling block in learning to form sounds. "Children who have speech and language problems before they go to school do tend to have problems with learning to read and write. "It's important we give children who need it extra help as early as we can."

Dr Alcock added that children learn to speak at different times and most children who start late will catch up. "The best thing parents can do to help is talk to their kids," she added.

The team are planning to follow the children at three, four and five years to see how the skills that were found to be linked to language impact on later development.

Giving Voice Campaign

Speech and language therapists have  quietly gone about their business of helping clients with all sorts of speech, language and communication difficulty for many, many years. It's time now to celebrate this. The RCSLT giving Voice Campaign is launched!!

Smart Talkers Training for franchisees

    I've just finished writing the distance learning course for Smart Talkers Pre-School groups. This means that franchisees can train at their own pace. It will be easier to come to Centrix House for a week but there are some who would prefer not to spend a week away from loved ones. It is actually for the international franchisees who start very soon. The training comprises:

•    Normal speech, language & communication development
•   The importance & development of play
•         Vital components: attention, listening, information-carrying words,vocabulary, sentence structure, social interaction etc.
•        What happens when things go wrong?
•         Ways to encourage speech, language & communication development
•         Basic functional signing 
•         Group running
•    Introduction to programmes
•         Working with parents
•    Legal necessities
•         Book keeping & accounts
•         Marketing & advertising
•         Web site development
•         Search engine optimisation
•         Business planning
•         Business development                  

Kindergarten Program Boosts Students' Vocabulary in 1st Grade

by Sarah Sparkes


A new randomized control trial in Mississippi has found that a good kindergarten literacy program can boost disadvantaged students' vocabulary in kindergarten by as much as an extra month of school.

Early childhood programs like Mississippi's have focused heavily on early vocabulary for decades, with growing urgency since a seminal 1995 University of Kansas study showed children of parents on welfare enter school knowing about 525 words, less than half of the 1,100-word vocabulary of children of parents in professional jobs.

The Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, housed at the SERVE Center of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, evaluated the Kindergarten PAVEd for Success program, which trains teachers to supplement their normal literacy instruction. Pam Finney, the research management leader for the study, said the program was purposely "not a very complicated intervention," and it helps teachers engage in the same complex conversations that the Kansas study showed professional parents have with their children, "introducing 50 cent words as opposed to 25 cent words," as Ms. Finney put it.

Each teacher gets a list of thematically related and complex words; for example, "temperature," "exhaust," "steam," and "boil," or "pineapple," "banana," and "kiwi." The teacher reads stories that incorporate the words with the students and opens conversations with the students.

"One of the strategies is building bridges, having conversations with students whatever they want to talk about," Ms. Finney explained. "The teacher learns how to have these conversations. Take 'apple,' 'banana' and 'Kiwi.' Students in the Delta may never have heard of a kiwi or seen the fruit. So the teacher shows them and they talk about it."

Researchers tracked nearly 1,300 kindergarteners at 30 Mississippi Delta school districts, in which 128 kindergarten classes were randomly assigned to either use the program or teach literacy as they normally would. Teachers in the program received training but were allowed flexibility to implement it. All of the schools had to have at least 40 percent of their students in poverty, and both groups of children were similar demographically.

The researchers found children who participated in K-PAVE had an expressed vocabulary one month ahead in vocabulary development and academic knowledge at the end of kindergarten compared with students in the control group, as measured by a normed test. The students showed no significant difference in listening comprehension skills.

"These students who were below the norm for vocabulary to start, they're one month closer to the norm, one month closer to those middle-class kids," said Ludy van Broekhuizen; the executive director for SERVE Center and the REL's director. "To actually get an impact on an intervention that required such a small effort on the part of the district is sort of remarkable in some ways."

Teachers trained in the program were significantly more likely than the control-group teachers to include activities focused on students' vocabulary and comprehension development, but they did not show significantly more instructional or emotional support for students.

The researchers have just submitted a follow-up study on the children's literacy skills by the end of 1st grade, but they wouldn't share those details yet. Because the students in the K-PAVE study improved in vocabulary, but not in comprehension, compared to their peers, I'd be interested to see what a follow-up study on these kids would show. Considering kindergarteners and 1st graders are just learning to read, would a one-month edge be enough to boost these students reading development, get them moved to more advanced groups, and so on? It would be interesting to find out. Moreover, since the original "vocabulary gap" study focused on parents' conversations, not teachers', I'd be interested in whether similar training could help parents improve their conversations with their children, too.

Sarah spent the last five years writing about federal and state education regulations. Now covering education research, she can most often be found with a double-shot mocha in one hand and the latest academic journal in the other. Join her in a discussion of the politics, personalities, and p-values in education studies, and help bring research out of the lab and into the classroom.

First published on Education Week blog 29th November 2010

Related articles

• Vocabulary for 1st Grade (brighthub.com)

The number one skill

Talking Point http://www.talkingpoint.org.uk/video.aspx is an excellent web site with lots of information and support for parents and professionals. They have a series of videos. This is the first in the series about the importance of being able to Learn to speak, listen and communicate well. Its really the most important thing that children can learn. There are great tips and information in this video.