Planned Impact
We will provide:
a. Empirical evidence about which language boosting behaviours parents use in shared reading.
b. Evidence-based advice about how to design shared reading interventions for children of different ages, different socio-economic status, and with and without identified speech, language and communication needs (SLCN).
c. Evidence-based information about what barriers prevent some parents from reading with their children.
d. Detailed evaluation of a shared reading intervention designed to promote reading for pleasure.
These will benefit:
1. Children & parents. Parents play a crucial role in their child's development, but are often unaware of the value of reading with their children or report that they do not know how to interact with them (Bercow, 2008). Our results, disseminated directly to parents, will provide easy-to-follow guidance about how to read with children to boost language development.
2. 3rd sector groups that promote language and literacy, with the ultimate aim of improving literacy in the UK. We will provide the evidence-base they need for their work. For example, our data on why shared reading promotes language will inform the work of ICAN and The Communication Trust's Communication Ambassadors; a network of 400 volunteers who work with 8,000 families in the most disadvantaged areas of England, sharing information about how parents can best help their children learn language.
3. The Reader Organisation, which will receive information about how to create an effective Get Into Reading (GIR) programme for families with preschool children.
4. Practitioners in early years education (e.g. Early Years Foundation Stage, Children's Centres). The UK government has extended free childcare places to 2-year-olds, recognising the critical importance of high quality early years education. Yet educators report that providing language-rich environments in busy early years settings is a challenge. We will provide concrete advice about how to create effective shared reading programmes and how to harness parental involvement to maximise the environment for language learning.
5. Practitioners in healthcare (e.g. health visitors, speech & language therapists, family nurse partnerships). Shared reading interventions for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) have the potential to be effective language boosting tools. However, how best to utilise them for children with low levels of language or with diagnosed language delay is as yet unclear. We will provide concrete advice about the effectiveness of these interventions with a) children at different ages, b) children from different socio-economic backgrounds, and c) children with identified SLCN.
6. Policy-makers and commissioners tasked with improving the life-chances of UK children (e.g. Local Authorities, Public Health England). The preschool years are increasingly recognised as being crucial in determining a child's later life-chances, with early interventions yielding substantial savings to the UK's economy (Grint & Holt, 2011:£40 million invested in early parenting interventions could save £400 million over a 15 year period). However, commissioners and policy-makers need a sound evidence-base that they can use to design and evaluate cost-effective early interventions (e.g. What Works databases). We will provide the evidence needed to a) design and evaluate shared reading interventions to promote language growth, b) design effective interventions to remove the barriers to shared reading that face many parents.
In this way, our work will directly address UKRC's typology of research impacts:
a) increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy (short, medium and long term).
b) enhancing educational achievement, and thus quality of life, of UK children (medium and long term).
c) fostering the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom (long term).