Oral language enrichment in preschool improves children's language skills: a cluster randomised controlled trial

Gillian West · Arne Lervåg · Julia M. H. Birchenough · Caroline Korell · Mariela Rios Diaz · Mihaela D. Duta +4 more

29 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Early Childhood Education and Development Reading and Literacy Development

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Oral language skills provide the foundation for formal education, yet many children enter school with language weaknesses. This study evaluated the efficacy of a new language enrichment programme, the Nuffield Early Language Intervention-Preschool (NELI Preschool), delivered to children in the year before they enter formal education. METHODS: We conducted a preregistered cluster randomised controlled trial in 65 nursery schools in England (https://doi.org/10.1186/ISRCTN29838552). NELI Preschool consists of a 20-week whole-class language enrichment programme delivered by a teacher each day for 20 min. In addition, children with the weakest language skills in each class are allocated to receive additional targeted support delivered by classroom assistants (whole-class + targeted). The language skills of all children (n = 1,586) in participating classrooms were assessed using the LanguageScreen automated app (https://oxedandassessment.com/languagescreen/). Settings were then randomly allocated to an intervention or control group. The children with the weakest language in each class (whole-class + targeted children n = 438), along with four randomly selected children in each class allocated to the whole-class only programme (n = 288) were individually tested on a range of language measures. RESULTS: Children receiving NELI Preschool made larger gains than children in the control group on an oral language latent variable (whole-class children d = .26; whole-class + targeted children d = .16). CONCLUSIONS: This study provides good evidence that whole-class intervention delivered in preschool can produce educationally significant improvements in children's language skills. The intervention is scaleable and relatively low cost. These findings have important implications for educational and social policy.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

References

2005Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Review of Research 1996Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children 2013Bringing Words to Life : Robust Vocabulary Instruction 2020Interpreting Effect Sizes of Education Interventions 2016The impact of nonverbal ability on prevalence and clinical presentation of language disorder: evidence from a population study 2000The Mechanisms Mediating the Effects of Poverty on Children's Intellectual Development 2006An effective method for building meaning vocabulary in primary grades.2007Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.