Accessibility statement

Intervention at the Foundation of Reading Comprehension for children with English as an Additional Language

Wednesday 29 April 2015, 1.00PM to 2.00 pm

Speaker(s): Dr Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Psychology in Education Research Centre

The Get Ready4Learning Project aimed to extend existing intervention research with monolingual children (Fricke et al., 2013) to the growing population of children with EAL in UK primary schools.  The project is an RCT with 80 children being randomly allocated to receive intervention and 80 children allocated to a waiting control group; 40 children in each group were learning English as an Additional Language (EAL).  Children in both groups were identified as having weak English oral language skills compared to their peers.  The intervention group received 18 weeks of daily intervention, alternating between group and individual sessions and delivered by trained teaching assistants.  Following initial screening and selection, children were assessed midway through the intervention and immediately after the intervention, and were followed up after a delay of 6 months. The intervention group showed a significant advantage over the waiting control group on measures of taught vocabulary.  However, analysis using latent variable models to examine the extent to which the intervention produced generalized improvements on tests of language, narrative skills, phoneme awareness and literacy skills showed no significant effects of intervention immediately after the intervention or after a 6 month delay. Results suggest it is possible to improve vocabulary skills in both EAL and monolingual children with language weaknesses.  However, these improvements did not generalise to broader language skills, a finding that is disappointing but common in the literature.  Possible reasons for this missing of transfer effects and implications for carrying out intensive setting-based intervention work in the current educational climate will be discussed.

Location: A/D017, Science Education building, Alcuin D Block