Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julia M. Carroll is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick.

Claudine Bowyer-Crane is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and a chartered psychologist.

Fiona J. Duff is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of York.

Charles J. Hulme is Professor of Psychology at the University of York.

Margaret J. Snowling is Professor of Psychology at the University of York and a chartered clinical psychologist.

Illustrations by Dean Chesher

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It is now common knowledge that successful literacy development in children is built on a foundation of strong oral language skills. Yet while recent government reviews emphasise the importance of developing early language skills, relatively little information is available on how to build these skills effectively.

Developing Language and Literacy: Effective Intervention in the Early Years bridges this important gap by presenting the details of two proven intervention programmes. The programmes were developed by the authors, a team of noted academics and specialists, to improve the phonological skills, vocabulary and grammar of young children at risk of reading difficulties. After explaining the early research that led to the intervention, the authors show how they utilised and adapted a series of intervention strategies and activities to improve the language skills of young children. The book includes a section explaining the ways and reasons for monitoring progress and tailoring specific interventions for individual children, including those with a range of additional difficulties. It concludes with a chapter devoted to their experience of training teaching assistants to deliver the programme.

Illuminating and insightful, Developing Language and Literacy represents a valuable contribution to our knowledge about one of the most crucial stages in the development of a child.

Aus dem Klappentext

It is now common knowledge that successful literacy development in children is built on a foundation of strong oral language skills. Yet while recent government reviews emphasise the importance of developing early language skills, relatively little information is available on how to build these skills effectively.

Developing Language and Literacy: Effective Intervention in the Early Years bridges this important gap by presenting the details of two proven intervention programmes. The programmes were developed by the authors, a team of noted academics and specialists, to improve the phonological skills, vocabulary and grammar of young children at risk of reading difficulties. After explaining the early research that led to the intervention, the authors show how they utilised and adapted a series of intervention strategies and activities to improve the language skills of young children. The book includes a section explaining the ways and reasons for monitoring progress and tailoring specific interventions for individual children, including those with a range of additional difficulties.  It concludes with a chapter devoted to their experience of training teaching assistants to deliver the programme. 

Illuminating and insightful, Developing Language and Literacy represents a valuable contribution to our knowledge about one of the most crucial stages in the development of a child.

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Developing Language and Literacy

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Children vary in the age at which they first start to talk and in the skill with which they use language to communicate. For this reason, it is not unusual for late-talking, speech difficulties or slow language development to go unnoticed in a family, particularly in a first-born child. However, delays and difficulties in speech and language provide some of the first clues that a child is at risk of reading difficulties. This book is concerned with how children with such difficulties can be helped, not only to learn to read, but also to improve their spoken language skills. In this chapter we begin by outlining the structure of spoken language before going on to describe how language skills are the foundation of literacy development and specifically, how the development of reading draws on these skills. We close by considering some of the main characteristics of children who, despite having received good instruction, fall behind their peers in reading development.

THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE

Language is a complex system that requires the coordinated action of four subsystems: Phonology, Semantics, Grammar and Pragmatics. Phonology is the system that maps speech sounds onto meanings and is critical for reading development, while meanings are part of the semantic system. Grammar is concerned with syntax and morphology (the way words and word parts are combined to convey different meanings) and pragmatics is concerned with language use.

An assumption of our educational system is that by the time children start school, the majority are competent users of their native language (but see below).

? They can listen to what people say to them and understand.

? They can follow instructions.

? They can speak clearly.

? They can use language to express their needs.

? They can convey a message to someone else.

? They can take turns in conversation.

These are all reasonable expectations. But for far too many children, poor language at school entry can begin a downward spiral of poor literacy, underachievement and in the longer term, poor job prospects. Before we consider language skills specifically in relation to literacy development, let us spend some time describing the different language skills children bring to the task of learning. These are vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics and phonology.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary knowledge refers to all of the word forms and meanings that we know and is a key component of language comprehension. Vocabulary is also one of the strongest predictors of educational success. During the pre-school years, typically developing children extend their vocabulary at a very rapid rate, possibly adding around 50 to 70 words to their vocabulary-base each week mostly through conversation. By the time children go to school, they typically have an oral vocabulary of some 14,000 words. However, as Isobel Beck and her colleagues (Beck, McKeown and Kucan, 2002) have pointed out, beyond school age, most conversations contain words that everyone understands and therefore they no longer provide an effective means of promoting vocabulary knowledge. Rather, at this stage, children begin to learn words through reading and explicit teaching.

When a child hears a familiar word, he or she automatically activates its meaning in what is known as a 'semantic representation'. If the child has good vocabulary, they also activate the meanings of related words. Therefore children with good vocabulary are at an advantage in learning: not only do they know the meanings of the individual words they hear but also these words provide them with a context within which to interpret larger units of discourse.

Some words cause particular problems for comprehension in young children or those with language delay. These include:

? question words (what, who, whom, when, where, how, whose, which, how many, how much, why (Ripley, Barrett and Fleming, 2001));

? words with more than one meaning (ambiguous words, such as bat, minute); and

? homophones (words that sound alike, such as bear and bare).

Grammatical Skills

Grammar is a system of rules that specifies how words are used in sentences to convey meaning. In order to comprehend, children must be able to use grammatical clues in sentences. Children also use grammar to learn the meanings of new words. In a classic example reported by Lila Gleitman (1995) children were shown a picture of someone sifting through a bowl of confetti. How children interpreted the meaning of a nonsense word depended on the grammatical construction of the question they were asked. For example, if asked, 'Can you see any sebbing?' (verb), children pointed to the person's hands (where the action was performed). If asked, 'Can you see a seb?' (common noun), they pointed to the bowl. If asked, 'Can you see any seb?' (mass noun), they pointed to the confetti.

Formally, grammar is made up of morphology as well as syntax. Morphology refers to the basic structure of words and the units of meaning (or morphemes) from which they are formed; the word 'boy' is a single morpheme but the compound word 'cowboy' contains two morphemes, 'cow' and 'boy'. In English, there are relatively few compound words of the 'cowboy' type; however, words like 'camping' (camp + –ing) or 'camped' (camp + – ed) also contain two morphemes and 'decamped' contains three. Inflections are parts of words that cannot stand alone (e.g., –ed, –ing, –un) but when combined with a stem they serve a grammatical function. Verb inflections are particularly important to comprehension–they denote contrasts between for example, past and present tense (walk/walked), singular and plural forms (house/houses). The verb 'walk' is a single morpheme; when it is usedto refer to the past, the inflection –ed is added making 'walked'a twomorpheme word. Similarly, to use the verb 'walk' to refer to a man, it is necessary to add the third person singular inflection –s; hence 'he walks'. 'Walks' is also a two-morpheme word (even though it has only one syllable). Figure 1.1 illustrates a task often used to assess children's ability to produce grammatically correct forms of verbs. In the first picture, the girl is picking flowers. The child is asked to say what the girl has done in the second picture: 'She has picked the flowers.'

Pre-school children often have difficulty with grammatical markers like inflections. In particular, they may miss off inflections when referring to third person singular: 'mummy cook'. They may also make mistakes on irregular past tense forms: 'the man goed there'.

Syntax refers to the grammatical structure of sentences; different grammatical forms generally take particular semantic roles in the sentence. Nouns usually refer to agents or objects whereas verbs refer to actions or feelings. In a similar vein, prepositions signify...