Charles Hulme
University of Oxford

Charles Hulme

University of Oxford
United Kingdom

Interventions to improve children’s early language skills

Language is the foundation for education and the medium of instruction.  Many children, especially those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, enter school with poor oral language skills which compromise their ability to develop literacy skills and to benefit from education more broadly.

I will present the results from several studies showing that interventions delivered early in a child’s life can have positive effects on language and reading comprehension skills.  Studies of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention programme developed by our research group show that an oral language programme delivered by teaching assistants working in schools can produce improvements in children’s oral language skills with moderate to large effect sizes. This programme is now being delivered at scale with DfE funding in many English primary schools. In addition a recently developed automated language assessment App (LanguageScreen.com) allows schools to identify children with language weaknesses and monitor their progress.

I will conclude with a plea for the importance of embedding oral language enrichment work in early educational settings.