Helping to improve children’s language and communications skills

Posted on 30 June 2014

Investigating ways to support children’s language and literacy development is the focus of Dr Claudine Bowyer-Crane’s research.

A group of children learning to read.

Investigating ways to support children’s language and literacy development is the focus of Dr Claudine Bowyer-Crane’s research.

Recently this has led to Dr Bowyer-Crane becoming involved in the Better Start Bradford programme.

The community-led partnership, supported by Bradford Trident’s successful Big Lottery Fund bid, will run a variety of projects to support families and children at key stages of their early years development.

The programme is supported by the Born in Bradford study, in which the University of York plays a pivotal role, that has been tracking the lives of 13,500 babies and their families since 2007, exploring why some children stay healthy but others fall ill.

Information collected from children in the Born in Bradford cohort, and the unique understanding the study provides of the challenges faced by Bradford families, guided the selection of the key themes in the Bradford Trident bid around environmental changes, nutrition, obesity, communication and language development.

Dr Bowyer-Crane will be part of an Innovation Hub, led by Professor Kate Pickett from the University of York, and will lead a workstream looking at the development and evaluation of interventions to improve communication and language development. The Hub will unite leading academics from the Universities of York, Bradford, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan University.

The effectiveness of additional reading and language support

Previously, Dr Bowyer-Crane was involved in the Nuffield Language4Reading (L4R) project, aimed at finding out if an approach delivered by teaching assistants was effective in helping children in nursery and reception respond to extra reading and language support.

One of the findings was that immediately following 30 weeks of intervention, children who received extra support performed better than children in a waiting control group on a number of language and literacy measures. These wide-ranging improvements included expressive language skills, such as the use of vocabulary and grammar, with gains also in letter-sound knowledge, spelling and reading comprehension. The results have been published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

What next?

Dr Bowyer-Crane is also looking into ways to support the language needs of children learning to read in English as an additional language.