Talking Time: Designing integrated interventions to support young children’s oral language

Improving young children’s oral language depends both on the activities children experience and the quality of the interactions through which they are delivered. Yet child-facing activities and professional development (PD) are often treated as separate components of intervention. This talk uses Talking Time, an early language programme for children aged 3–5 years, as a case study to examine both the process of designing an integrated intervention and evidence of its effectiveness.

The talk will consider how research evidence, theory and professional knowledge informed the development of an approach in which activities for children, professional learning for educators, implementation support and flexibility are interleaved. Talking Time combines age-appropriate small-group language-learning activities – including storytelling, language games and narrative discussion – with PD designed to strengthen educators’ knowledge, confidence and range of language-supporting practices. The talk will then present findings from the recent EEF efficacy trial across 123 early years settings, in which children made, on average, one additional month of progress in language development, with larger effects for some disadvantaged groups. It will consider what the design process and trial findings together can tell us about developing and scaling evidence-informed early years interventions.

Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3639640712353302?p=BgXrIoW9CBbfVcWbsM