Developing Language and Literacy: Effective Intervention in the Early Years - Hardcover

Carroll, Julia M.; Bowyer-Crane, Claudine; Duff, Fiona J.; Hulme, Charles; Snowling, Margaret J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470711868 ISBN 13: 9780470711866

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Synopsis

Developing Language and Literacy: Effective Intervention in the Early Years describes successful intervention programmes to improve the phonological skills, vocabulary, and grammar of young children at risk of reading difficulties.

• Presents two structured intervention programmes to provide support for young children with language and literacy difficulties
• Describes clearly how to improve the language and foundation literacy skills of young children in the classroom
• Includes information about how to assess research, and how to monitor and design intervention strategies for use with individual children
• Helps teachers to develop an understanding of the intervention and research process as a whole
• Additional journal content to support this title is available click here

About this title

About the Author

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

From the Back Cover

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.

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Developing Language and Literacy

Effective Intervention in the Early YearsBy Julia M. Carroll Claudine Bowyer-Crane Fiona J. Duff Charles Hulme Margaret J. Snowling

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-71186-6

Chapter One

Theoretical Framework: Foundations of Learning to Read

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 location while adjectives and adverbs are used to describe nouns and verbs respectively.

Most children have a grasp of simple sentence structure but more complex structures may cause difficulty through the primary school years. More complex constructions include:

? passives, e.g., 'The window was broken by the boy.'

? embedded clauses, e.g., 'The girl with the red hair ran away.'

? relative clauses 'The boy who delivered the news was scared.'

Children also sometimes have difficulties with pronouns. They may often misuse them or have difficulty knowing who or what they refer to, both within a sentence ('he is in the car') and across sentences ('The boy loved his puppy. He put it in the car').

Pragmatic Abilities

Pragmatics is the system of language which is concerned with communication and specifically, how language is used in context. Efficient communication depends upon the speaker and listener sharing certain assumptions, for example, that communication between them should be both informative and relevant to the topic under discussion. Ideally it should also be truthful, clear, unambiguous and economical. More generally, communication frequently involves looking beyond the precise information stated or beyond its literal interpretation. When people have pragmatic difficulties, their language behavior violates these assumptions: they may talk at length about topics not directly relevant to the present situation or use an inappropriate 'register', such as speaking in an overly formal manner for the context. Perhaps most commonly they get the 'wrong end of the stick'.

Pragmatic failure commonly occurs when the speaker does not take into account the listener's perspective and either provides too much or too little information for them to be able to communicate well. Young children often make social 'gaffes' because of limitations in their pragmatic skills. Generally such pragmatic failure is acceptable in a young child but in older children the failure to take account of the perspective of another person can seem rude or ill-judged. Figure 1.2 shows a child who is having difficulty understanding the use of figurative language when his mother tells him, 'Pull your socks up.'

Phonological Skills

Phonology is the system of language that is concerned with how speech changes denote changes in meaning. For example, there is a very small difference in sound between the words 'bat' and 'pat' but this change signals the difference between something we use to hit a ball and the way we pet a dog. The phonological difference between 'bat' and 'pat' is at the level of the phoneme. From a very early age children are sensitive to phonetic cues and they can use these to differentiate word meanings, but they are not aware of phonemes. Later when children start to speak, they mark phonemic distinctions but for some time their speech production is immature and so they may be difficult to understand.

For most children, phonological development follows a typical course and some types of speech error are common. Often before their speech becomes fully intelligible at around school age, children omit syllables from words (e.g., they say 'jamas' for 'pyjamas or 'nana' for 'banana'), misarticulate words (saying, for example, mouse for mouth) and miss out consonants from clusters (e.g., 'kate' for 'skate'). Importantly, during the pre-school years, children are not explicitly aware of the internal structure of speech; although they use speech to communicate they do not typically reflect upon it and have only limited ability to manipulate its components.

We usually use the term phonology in a rather different way to that discussed above when we consider phonological development in relation to reading. In this context, 'phonological abilities' usually refers to skills that involve reflecting on, processing and manipulating speech sounds (usually called phonological awareness tasks). Before reading instruction, children have considerable difficulty with phonological awareness tasks that involve phonemes. However, a persistent difficulty in segmenting the sounds of spoken words can be an important marker of a specific reading difficulty.

It is generally believed that the development of phonological awareness proceeds from large to small units. English has a complex syllable structure. Figure 1.3 shows how a syllable in English can be split into units of different sizes. Thus, all syllables contain a vowel; simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables (e.g., hat) comprise an onset (the consonant before the vowel –h-) and a rime (the technical term used to describe the unit comprising the vowel and the final consonant or coda - at). In turn, rime units can be segmented into phoneme units, namely the vowel (a) and the coda (t). In more complex syllables, both the onset and the coda may include consonant clusters (crisp).

The difficulty of a phonological awareness task depends on the size of the phonological unit and the nature of the manipulation that is required. Generally tasks involving the manipulation of larger units (e.g., syllables or rime units) are easier than tasks involving smaller units (phonemes) (Figure 1.4).

Tasks involving the deletion or transposition of sounds within words are typically harder than tasks requiring judgments about the similarity between sounds in words. When thinking about reading instruction, it is important to bear in mind that there is strong evidence that reading development depends upon having well developed phoneme awareness; activities involving syllables and rhymes help children to tune into the sounds of words but it is phoneme awareness that is critical for learning to read and spell.

LANGUAGE SKILLS AND LEARNING TO READ

It is useful to distinguish speech skills from language abilities when considering literacy development. Learning to read in an alphabetic system, such as English, requires the development of mappings (or connections) between speech sounds and letters–the so-called alphabetic principle. In turn, the alphabetic principle depends on phonemic skills. Wider language skills (vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics) are required to understand the meanings of words and sentences, to integrate these in texts and to make inferences that go beyond the printed words.

In the early stages of learning to read within an alphabetic system such as English, children's attention is devoted to establishing decoding skills (phonics). Later children begin to rely increasingly on word meanings to gain fluency in their reading, and they use broader language skills including vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics to appreciate both the gist and the detail of what they read. Children with poor oral language remain at risk of poor reading comprehension even though they may be able to accomplish the initial task of word-level decoding. Such children include those whose mastery of English is poor because it is not their mother tongue.

A large number of studies have now followed the progress of children during the early stages of reading development. On the basis of findings from these studies we know a great deal about what predicts individual differences in reading attainment. In one such study conducted by our group (Muter et al., 2004) we followed the early reading development of 90 children between the ages of 4 years 9 months and 6 years 9 months. We assessed each of the children once a year on tests of letter knowledge, word recognition and phonological awareness. The tests of phonological awareness tapped the ability to detect rhyming relationships between words and also to identify and segment phonemes, the smallest units of spoken words. At 4 years of age the children were also given a test of vocabulary and a year later at 5, they completed two tests of grammar; one of these required the children to order words to make a sentence and one required them to add morphemes to words (e.g. to make the number 'five' into an adjective–fifth). Finally, we assessed reading comprehension at the end of the study.

The findings of our study are displayed in Figure 1.5 in what is known as a 'path model'. They were clear and quite simple: there were two predictors of individual differences in reading at age 5–these were phoneme awareness and letter knowledge at age 4; and from age 5 to age 6 there were three predictors–phoneme awareness, letter knowledge and 5-year-old reading skills. In short, the children who had come to school knowing letters and being able to segment spoken words into speech sounds fared better in learning to read (and the same situation held for learning to spell). As Brian Byrne of the University of New England, Australia has argued, these two skills are fundamental to the alphabetic principle (Byrne, 1998).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Developing Language and Literacyby Julia M. Carroll Claudine Bowyer-Crane Fiona J. Duff Charles Hulme Margaret J. Snowling Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0470711868
• ISBN 13: 9780470711866
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192