Supporting Oral Language Development

Children with a small vocabulary are at a disadvantage for all aspects of learning. Unless there is targeted support, children who start slow will continue to fall behind their language-rich peers. A powerful way to ensure all children are ready for learning, particularly in school, is to offer high quality oral language education early in a child's life. The power of early language intervention is supported by a large body of evidence showing a combined foundation of strong spoken language and listening comprehension cascading to reading and writing skills. However, little is known about the efficacy of oral language interventions in low- and middle-income countries where communities are often multilingual. We aim to address this gap in the literature through a mixed-methods study with children ages of 3-to-6 living in India and the Philippines. The study will examine oral language development under the particular complexities of multilingual urban poor settings. Research in these settings is of importance as there is reason to believe resources that spontaneously support children's language development may be under strain for the urban poor (e.g. reduced social networks, a new school language), making them a particularly vulnerable group for school failure.

A co-developed project

The proposed project was co-developed by multiple agencies. Government partners shared that a pressing systemic concern was the low literacy rates in primary schools. Community partners stressed the need for evidence on quality programs that will work in local schools and university partners echoed the need for a comprehensive program of research. We therefore propose to understand children's language development in-context and will test an intervention that could potentially better prepare children for primary school. The research sites will be Udupi district in India and Quezon City in the Philippines. Defining characteristics of these sites include the multiple languages around the child and a policy commitment to either mother-tongue or multilingual education. Hence, these contexts offer an opportunity to research a topic that is understudied in not just DAC countries but also internationally: children's oral language development and oral language intervention in a multilingual setting.

Objectives and Outputs

The primary objective of this research is to provide descriptive and causal evidence on quality (in early childhood development and pre-primary education) and readiness (for primary education) through three studies that aim to a) map opportunities and barriers to oral language development, b) validate assessments to track children's developing oral language and c) examine a targeted intervention delivered by teachers one year before entry into primary school. We will map opportunities and barriers by following thirty children over one day to record their language experiences, examining language knowledge of their conversation partners, and conducting an ethnographic inquiry of classes they attend. We will finetune fifteen assessments by analyzing 3000 data points on each test and, in a study with 800 children, evaluate a language intervention designed with teachers that draws upon folk tales and local narratives.

This inter-disciplinary project will provide an approach to reach the Sustainable Development Goal of effective learning outcomes for all children by focusing on the language bedrock of early childhood learning. Outputs include evidence briefs for policy makers and open access toolkits for educators. Multiple bodies of data for the research community will expand the evidence-base in these contexts. These include a word bank, an archive of child language, a rich description of talk in the classroom, performance data and outcomes data. Taken together, the proposed research could potentially act as a catalyst for informed early childhood education in India, the Philippines, and other DAC countries.

One outcome of a quality early childhood education (ECE) program is children ready for formal learning when they enter school. The proposed research project will examine 'readiness' in language and literacy learning and the layered and complex idea of 'quality'. The research sites are in India and the Philippines. In both locations multiple languages co-exist, quality is a policy priority, and there is agreement that readiness programs in local schools need research attention. The proposed research will map children's language experiences, find ways to assess developing skills, develop a program using local folk tales and narratives and examine the feasibility of running the program in public pre-schools.

Beneficiaries of the project are 3-6-year old children from vulnerable groups (urban poor, may not know the school language), ECE teachers, officials who train, mentor and administer ECE programs, policy reviewers, and policy makers. The project is inter-disciplinary and as such will benefit academics across disciplines (e.g., education, psychology). The global community will benefit from a fresh, locally relevant perspective on quality and readiness, concepts at the core of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals for all children everywhere.

Children who receive the oral language intervention will directly benefit from instruction that is tailor-made to provide firm foundations for literacy learning in school. Teachers will benefit from opportunities for professional development. A direct benefit for the education system is the proof of concept for a supplementary oral language program. For the research community, benefit would accrue from added knowledge and tools, with particular relevance to these local communities.

A multi-tiered plan has been developed following in-country meetings and drawing upon the considerable policy, community and research networks of the research team. This includes a series of in-country meetings and interviews with key government officials, NGO representatives, teachers and academics. The key concern in both contexts is the low attainments of children in primary schools and the need to intervene early to prevent failure. The potential impact of the proposed research is considerable because it directly examines the felt need of how to strengthen foundation skills such that literacy attainments are improved. Acceptance and ownership will be enhanced because the intervention will be co-produced with teachers and local experts, drawing on local oral narratives and building on teachers' prior knowledge.

For the policy maker, an evidence brief will interpret findings from this research against policy priorities in each country. We will also make sound links with ongoing initiatives. For example, Nag (PI on the research team) is anchor for the ongoing language and emergent literacy curriculum reform in India. This role presents a potential pathway to impact at a critical period in the policy cycle. Similar opportunities are now available in the Philippines, where Ocampo and Padilla (Co-Is) have actively engaged with the K-12 language curriculum. The aim is to inform policy makers in both countries that the intervention is sustainable and sensitive to systemic realities (based on classroom ethnography, co-production process document, preliminary trends available from 2021) and is effective (based on evidence from the feasibility study, available by mid-2022).

Government, community, and in-country academic partners will retain intellectual property of materials developed in the project, ensuring that the use, adaptation, and benefits of materials developed will continue after the project period. Dissemination activities will also cover wider Asia and other contexts with similar challenges in providing quality early childhood education.