Waiting Control Intervention

The waiting control group received oral language intervention in form of the Reading and Language Intervention—Group (RALI-G) programme in Year 1. RALI-G is designed to help improve children’s vocabulary, develop their oral and written narrative skills, encourage active listening, and build confidence in independent speaking. The content of these group sessions is based on evidence from earlier intervention programmes targeting oral and written language components that were devised by the research group at the Centre for Reading and Language (e.g., Bowyer-Crane et al., 2008; Clarke et al., 2010; Carroll et al., 2011; Fricke et al., 2013). It also takes into account knowledge from the research literature about the importance of oral language in the development of literacy.

The programme is designed to allow children working with the teaching assistant (TA) on a story book to:

• Consolidate their knowledge about concepts of print

• Increase and deepen their vocabulary knowledge

• Develop skills and knowledge about how to extract word meanings from context

• Develop their knowledge and skills regarding story structure, story elements, and inferences

• Learn strategies to enable them to write down spoken language and practise their writing skills

The techniques used are based on what is recognised as best practice for oral and written language interventions. Storybook-based vocabulary and narrative instruction has been shown to be a valid method which provides an immediately supportive context from which to teach word meanings and story structure components (e.g. Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). The programme has been written to encourage active participation on the part of the child. The activities have been designed to be enjoyable and to encourage the children to actively engage with each other and with the teaching assistant delivering the programme. RALI-G aims to:

• teach new words

• encourage active listening

• build confidence in independent speaking

• improve story telling skills

• practice independent writing

The (RALI-G) programme is delivered by TAs and runs as a 10-week intervention, with 3 group sessions each week (see figure below). The group sessions focus on improving vocabulary skills and spoken and written narratives and are broken down into a number of themes: Animals, Hobbies, Feelings, Home, and Growing.

There are 6 group sessions per theme, and each theme is linked to 2 story books.

Intervention: Main components

The following section provides some information/examples of the main components of RALI-G:

1. Vocabulary

Each session, new words are introduced as ‘special words. They are shown with a picture, the written word, and a definition of what the word means (see below for an example).

2. Story telling (spoken narrative)

When working on story telling skills, the children are:

• Listening to stories

• Putting pictures in order to make a story

• Making up their own stories

The children are learning to tell stories that include the following elements:

• Who (e.g. Who is in the story?)

• What (e.g. What is happening? What happened first/next/last?)

• Where (e.g. Where does the story take place?)

• When (e.g. When did the story happen?)

Question cards are used to help remember the important parts of a story. They help e.g. to tell who was part of the story or when something happened.

3. Writing (written narrative)

The TA and the children work together on coming up with a sentence which describes one of the story pictures. With help of the children the TA writes the sentence down. Then the children have a go at writing a word, part of a sentence or a whole sentence themselves.