Background

Principal Investigators: Margaret Snowling and Charles Hulme
Research Team: Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Silke Fricke and Ally Haley

Researchers at the University of York launched the Nuffield Language4Reading (L4R) project in January 2009. The project seeks to explore the role of oral language in developing literacy skills.

What are the aims of the study?

Since it is now well established that important foundations for literacy development are laid before children start school, the L4R project aims to:

• identify children with oral language weaknesses at preschool age
• evaluate the effectiveness of the L4R programme for improving oral language skills in Nursery and Reception
• investigate if the L4R intervention will help children respond to reading instruction

Who is involved in the project?

The project involves 15 schools and feeder nurseries across Yorkshire. In early 2009, 12 children from each nursery were selected to take part in the project based on their language skills. These children were then randomly allocated to either an intervention group or a waiting control group. Six children were additionally selected from each nursery to act as a peer comparison group.

Children allocated to the intervention group received 30 weeks of the L4R intervention in addition to the standard Nursery and Reception curriculum (spring 2009- summer 2010). In the spring/summer term of Year 1 (2011), the waiting control group received intervention targeting language and literacy skills.

What is the L4R programme?

The L4R language intervention programme was designed for preschool children who show areas of weakness in their oral language skills. It ran over 30 weeks starting with a 10 week block in nursery and continuing with 2x10 week blocks in Reception class. During the first 10 weeks of the programme in nursery, children take part in three 15-minute group sessions per week. This increases to 3x30 minute sessions per week plus 2x15-minute individual sessions for the remainder of the programme.

The L4R programme was developed especially for this project based on earlier work by researchers at the Centre for Reading and Language and with reference to the Early Years Foundation Stage. The L4R programme aimed to help children in 3 key areas: vocabulary knowledge, narrative skills and listening skills.

    

In each session, children were rewarded for following the listening rules, taught new vocabulary and took part in a variety of activities to improve their knowledge of story structure, grammar and speaking skills. The sessions were designed to be multi-sensory and children were encourage to join in and take an active role.

 

During the final 10 weeks of intervention, the L4R programme also included training in phonological awareness and letter work to supplement the reading instruction children were receiving in the mainstream Reception classroom.

Nuffield L4R storyboards created by the children and their Teaching Assistant (TA) - Vocabulary topics 'Growing' (left) and 'Journey' (right):

Programme Delivery

Programme Delivery

The L4R programme was delivered by Teaching Assistants (TAs) selected by each school or nursery. They all attended 2-day training courses at the beginning of the Nursery and Reception part of the intervention. They also received additional training prior to the final 10 weeks of the programme to support them with the added phonological and letter sound component. Over the course of the intervention TAs were asked to attend fortnightly group tutorials and received individual tutorials in school. For each 10 week intervention block, the TAs received a detailed intervention manual that included the majority of resources. The TAs showed a huge degree of motivation and commitment to the project, and also provided important feedback about the feasibility of the programme. The initial evaluation of the feedback has been encouraging and indicates that the intervention programme can be effectively administered by trained TAs in preschool and Early Years settings.

Our Research Team and one of the participating schools has been involved in producing three short programmes about the Nuffield L4R project and you can watch the 5min videos via the Teachers Media website (the videos were originally made for the Teachers TV website):

• The case for early years language intervention
• Language intervention in nursery
• Language intervention in reception

Current stage of the project

Children allocated to the intervention group completed all 30 weeks of the L4R programme in addition to the standard nursery and Reception curriculum before the summer break 2010. Each child received a certificate for their work when they finished the programme. Feedback from children indicates that taking part in the L4R programme had been an enjoyable experience.

Awards evening

An awards evening was held in November 2010 at CRL to celebrate and acknowledge the contribution of the TAs. Each participating nursery and school was presented with a certificate of achievement by Jean Gross, Communication Champion.

  (from L-R: Silke Fricke, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Maggie Snowling, Jean Gross and Charles Hulme)

Findings

Progress and preliminary findings

The research team regularly monitored children’s progress at key points during the project until July 2011, to see if and where the children have progressed. Immediately following 30 weeks of intervention, children allocated to the intervention group performed better than children of the waiting control group on all applied language and literacy measures. These wide-ranging improvements included expressive language skills, such as the use of vocabulary and grammar, with gains also in letter-sound knowledge and spelling.

These findings indicate that the L4R programme is successful in promoting oral language skills with some positive impact on emergent literacy skills. Also, this oral language intervention can be effectively delivered by trained and supported TAs in nursery and Reception (see also Nuffield Poster 2011 (PDF , 886kb)).

Analyses of data collected six months after the L4R intervention had finished suggest that the L4R intervention programme was not only effective in promoting different aspects of oral language immediately following the intervention, but that children in the intervention group maintained the progress they made during the intervention period. A particularly encouraing finding is that the intervention group outperformed the waiting control group on reading comprehension.

We are now in the process of analysing data collected one year after the intervention had finished (summer 2011) and investigating the gains made by the intervention group compared with those of the peer comparison group.

We are very excited about the progress of the project so far and we look forward to posting updates and further results when they are available.

Further Information

If you would like more information about this project, you may want to have a look at the following documents:

Parent Information Sheet - ParentInfoNuffieldL4R (PDF , 167kb)
Parent Newsletter 1 - NuffieldNewsletter1 (PDF , 286kb)
Parent Newsletter 2 - nuffieldletter2 (PDF , 699kb)
Parent Newsletter 3 - nuffieldletter3 (PDF , 873kb)
Parent Newsletter 4 - nuffieldletter4 (PDF , 1,033kb)
Nuffield Overview - poster - L4RPoster (PDF , 990kb)
Poster (Ally Haley 2011) - AHPoster2011 (PDF , 698kb)

There are also a number of videos about the research, available on the Nuffield Foundation web site.

Presentations

*Fricke, S., Snowling, M., Bowyer-Crane, C., Haley, A. and Hulme, C. Building a secure foundation for literacy: An evaluation of a preschool language intervention. Paper presented at the 18th Annual SSSR Conference, Florida, 2011.
*Fricke, S., Snowling, M., Bowyer-Crane, C., Haley, A. and Hulme, C. Promoting oral language in the Early Years - a randomised controlled trial. Poster presented at the International Conference on Reading, Spelling and Writing Development: Enhancing Literacy Development in European Languages (ELDEL), Prague, 2011 (Nuffield Poster 2011 (PDF , 886kb)).
*Fricke, S., Snowling, M., Bowyer-Crane, C., Haley, A. and Hulme, C. The Nuffield Language4Reading (L4R) project: Promoting oral language skills to build a secure foundation for reading. Paper presented at British Dyslexia Association 8th International Conference, Harrogate, 2011.
*Fricke, S. and Nash, H. Current research in early identification and intervention for children with SLCN and literacy difficulties. Paper presented at the Speech, Language and Communication: Rising to the Challenge of 2011 conference, Ripon 2010.
*Fricke, S., Snowling, M., Bowyer-Crane, C. and Hulme, C. The Nuffield Language4Reading Project - Promotion oral language at preschool age. Paper presented at the CRL Summer Workshop, University of York, 2010.
*Fricke, S., Snowling, M., Bowyer-Crane, C. and Hulme, C. Promoting oral language skills to build a secure foundation for reading. Poster presented at the 17th Annual SSSR Conference, Berlin, 2010. (view poster: NuffieldSSSRPoster2010 (PDF , 918kb))
*Fricke, S., Snowling, M., Bowyer-Crane, C. and Hulme, C. The Nuffield Language4Reading project – Building good foundations for literacy by promoting oral language at preschool age. Paper presented at the Child Language Seminar, City University London, 2010.

Associated projects

• Ally Haley, a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher working on the ELDEL project, has been running an extension of the nursery part of the Nuffield L4R programme; we call this the ‘Nursery Language4Reading programme’. The Nursery Language4Reading programme follows the same general format as the original nursery block, but the duration of the intervention has been extended to 15 weeks and the session length to 20mins. In addition, the taught vocabulary has been modified and certain programme components have been emphasised. The Nursery Language4Reading project began in late 2010 and following a screening and pre-testing phase in each nursery, the 8 children with the lowest language skills amongst their peers were allocated to either an intervention group or a waiting control group. Children allocated to the intervention group received the Nursery Language4Reading programme from February 2011 – June 2011. If you would like more information about this associated project, you may want to have a look at the Parent Information Sheet: Nursery L4R Parent Info Sheet (PDF , 424kb) or the following poster: AHPoster2011 (PDF , 698kb)
  

• Another supplement to the Nuffield Language4Reading project is under way in Sheffield. This study aims to evaluate a modified version of the Nursery Language4Reading programme for nursery aged children learning learning English as an additional language (http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ris/post-project/kta/sfricke.htm). Furthermore, we are currently planning a second project aiming to evaluate a modified version of the Reception part of the Language4Reading programme for children learning English as an Additional Language in Reception classes: Use of the Language 4 Reading intervention programme with children with English (PDF , 77kb)
  
  

Contact

If you have any queries, please contact Susannah Harrison, CRL Administrator on 01904 324366 / crl@psych.york.ac.uk or write an email to Silke Fricke (S.Fricke@psych.york.ac.uk) or Claudine Bowyer-Crane (c.bowyer-crane@shu.ac.uk).