Evidence-Based Class Literacy Instruction for Children With Speech and Language Difficulties

Abstract

This study investigated the response to class-wide phonological awareness and oral language teaching for 40 children who entered school with speech and language difficulties. A stepped wedge research design was adopted to compare the immediate impact of the 10-week teacher-led instruction. The progress of the children with speech and language difficulties was monitored over the first school year and compared with 110 children with language difficulties alone and 95 children with typical development. Children with speech and language needs showed a strong intervention response in phoneme awareness and vocabulary learning but needed more support to transfer skills to word decoding and spelling. Implementing the approach earlier in the school year resulted in stronger literacy performance at the year-end for all three groups. The importance of positive speech–language pathologist and teacher collaborations to support a systematic approach to evidence-based foundational literacy teaching is discussed.

A better start literacy approach: effectiveness of Tier 1 and Tier 2 support within a response to teaching framework

“…Accelerated growth for children in Tier 2 towards the levels of their peers was clearly evident. This finding is consistent with previous findings (e.g., Carson et al, 2013;Gillon et al, 2020) that some children require greater support to integrate knowledge about a word's sound structure into their reading and spelling attempts. However, as children were not randomly assigned to Tier 2 vs. control groups in this study, no conclusions around causal relationships can be drawn.…”

“…Evidence for the BSLA Gillon et al (2019) found that the BSLA significantly accelerated the early literacy achievement of 143 children across seven classrooms with lower levels of oral language when compared to the usual literacy curriculum (where the usual literacy curriculum did include other types of structured phonic and phonological awareness programmes). Further analysis of the performance of all children (i.e., children with typical and lower levels of oral language) showed that children who had received the BSLA earlier in the school year had stronger reading and spelling than children who started the approach 10 weeks later (Gillon et al, 2020). The study reported here replicates and extends these studies with a new cohort of children, teachers, and families.…”

“…Further, the concept of "intervention" is contrary to the more holistic perspectives of learning held by many indigenous communities (Toulouse, 2016) and the term may have negative associations for these groups where previous interventions have focused on alignment with the knowledge of the dominant culture. Evaluation of the BSLA response to teaching framework has shown that it is more effective in advancing early word reading and spelling development for children who entered English medium schools with lower levels of oral language than the teachers' usual curriculum approach (Gillon et al, 2019(Gillon et al, , 2020. This current study extends these findings through a larger scale implementation of the BSLA across differing socioeconomic groupings, including children with both typical language development as well as those with lower-level language skills.…”

“…• Identify children who required more support after 10 weeks of teaching (i.e., required Tier 2 level support). Gillon et al, (2019Gillon et al, ( , 2020 provide further details of these online assessments. For the purposes of this study, the following assessments were implemented at baseline, following Group A receiving 10 weeks of the BSLA, and following Group B receiving 10 weeks of the BSLA.…”

The Effect of Cognitive–Behavioral Play Therapy on Improvements in Expressive Linguistic Disorders of Bilingual Children

“…Engel de Abreu et al emphasized the greater learning difficulties of bilingual students than monolingual students and showed that if cognitive development and cognitive control in the group of bilingual students improves, it will improve their academic performance ( Engel de Abreu et al, 2012 ). Thus, language is one of the most important elements of developmental learning that should develop in a child before primary school and is the basis for his social, economic, and educational life, and language disorders are one of the most controversial groups in the diagnostic category of communication disorders ( Gillon et al, 2020 ). The main diagnostic characteristics of these disorders include language acquisition and use difficulties due to reduced vocabulary, limited sentence structure, and impairment in discourse.…”