The Coaching Early Conversation Interaction and Language (CECIL) Project, which started in September 2020, has focused on exploring coaching-led approaches to support the effective implementation of early language interventions, especially in Private, Voluntary & Independent (PVI) settings. At the core of the CECIL approach is a way of…

Background: Shared reading interventions can impact positively on preschool children's language development and on their caregiver's attitudes/behaviours towards reading. However, a number of barriers may discourage families from engaging with these interventions, particularly families from lower socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. We…

Oral language skills in childhood are known to predict literacy levels and academic performance. Identification of children's low-average oral language skills in school is challenging when clear criteria for developmental language disorder are not met. There are few studies of targeted, school-based oral language interventions for the older child.…

This report is a summary document which explains the rationale for the CECIL (Coaching Early Conversations Interaction and Language) project, delivery within the context of COVID-19, the findings, the learnings, and next steps. The Institute for Employment Studies (IES) led an Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE), and the University of…

Changes in natural language environments of families receiving quantitative language feedback in Shanghai were investigated. Volunteer parents of 22 children aged 5 to 30 months were recruited from a hospital and a learning center. Quantitative measures of adult word count and conversational turns with children were collected regularly over 6…

The Community Connections preschool program (herein referred to as Community Connections) was developed to help prepare children in home-based child care for success in school and in life. It has three goals: (1) to make state prekindergarten classroom experiences available to children in home-based care, (2) to extend classroom learning…

Purpose: This paper is a personal reaction to Gillam and Gillam's treatise on evidence-based decision making in schools. This evaluation focuses principally on the costs and benefits of clinicians' search for external evidence, potential problems associated with efforts to grade that evidence, and the integration of this evidence with "internal"…

The Even Start Family Literacy Program was established in 1989 to help break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy for low-income families, by improving the literacy skills of parents and their young children. Even Start projects offer family literacy services, defined as four integrated instructional components: (1) Childhood Education (ECE); (2)…

The influence of five programs of the Mt. Druitt Early Childhood Project on the development of preschool children's vocabulary and syntactical skills was assessed in a pretest/posttest design. Programs differed in the amount of structure they imposed on the language experiences of the children and in the content they specified. Different measures…

The first section of this report consists of papers given at the two-day conference on social dialects at the Center for Applied Linguistics, October 1969: (1) "Social Dialects and the Field of Speech" by F. Williams, with response by O. Taylor; (2) "Approaches to Social Dialects in Early Childhood Education" by C. B. Cazden, with response by R.…

Asserting that language enrichment programs are often weakened by the assumption that standard English is necessary for the development of abstract thought, the author discusses problems of educational planning and policy with regard to low-income youth and specifies four areas in which further research must be carried out. (FWB)

This paper reports upon the evaluation and implementation of a 30-item Likert-type rating scale for teachers to use in assessing children's behaviors within preschool classrooms. The Preschool Observation Scale (POS) was developed to evaluate programs of the Mt. Druitt Early Childhood Project, North Ryde, Australia. Items were constructed on the…

Evaluates a comprehensive intervention program for deaf children under age three in Vancouver, British Columbia. Twelve subjects were compared with a matched sample of children undergoing less-systematic intervention. Results indicated more developmentally mature communication and higher quality interaction in families who had received…

This article updates the Culver City Spanish Immersion Program. Research results for the third year of the program (1973-74) are summarized, and research in progress during the 1974-75 year is discussed. The article closes with a discussion of a series of research issues for investigation, issues in many ways prompted by already completed…

A study investigated the writing processes of four fourth grade students--two girls and two boys--as they participated in an 18-session writing workshop. The sessions were held three times a week for 6 weeks, each lasting 45-minutes. Data were collected through (1) observations of the children as they interacted and composed, revised, edited,…