Book Review: Language for thinking: a structured approach for young children

Abstract

Language for Thinking has been devised by two speech and language therapists working in City and Hackney Teaching PCT. The foreword by James Law identifies this programme as a way of therapists and teachers establishing and working on common targets in the area of verbal reasoning by 'tackling headon the issue of language comprehension'.It is intended to be a tool to be used by all professionals working with children who have specific difficulties in language comprehension and reasoning from preschool to end of primary age but could be used with all children in Foundation and Key Stage 1. Through a focus on developing the child's verbal reasoning in response to structured, differentiated questions, the programme aims to enable children to ultimately apply their language skills to reading comprehension, particularly where understanding of inferred meaning is needed.The photocopiable resource includes 50 black and white drawings with accompanied question sheets, three parallel assessments and additional text and web based support guidance. It can be used flexibly with whole classes, small groups or individuals. The drawings and questions support the child in gathering and analysing information, moving from a concrete to an abstract level. The range of drawings comprehensively covers a range of social situations within many children's experiences. With the increasing use of interactive whiteboards in classrooms, a CD Rom of the drawings would make the resource even more accessible.The authors based the resource on the work of Marion Blank et al. (1978) who developed a framework for the assessment and development of classroom discourse and the questions used with the drawings in this resource are differentiated into three levels, A, B and C, which generally relate to Blank's progression from concrete level of language to abstract.

A UK Study of Thinking and Language Expression

“…One way is to study speech and an ability to develop narrations (Kaczmarek, 2018). It is related to the notion of a close link between thinking and language revealed both in the developmental (Parsons & Branagan, 2016) and pathological arena (Minor et al, 2019). However, there is a pressing need not only for evaluating thinking but also for the way it is developed.…”