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22 - Educational Interventions Targeting Language Development

from Part Three - Impact, Intervention and Equity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2022

By
Laura M. Justice  and
Sonia Q. Cabell
Edited by
James Law ,
Sheena Reilly  and
Cristina McKean
James Law
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Sheena Reilly
Affiliation:
Griffith University, Queensland
Cristina McKean
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
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Summary

There is a great need to develop and test school-based interventions that improve children’s language skills. These interventions can be used to support language development in all children as well as those with developmental disabilities affecting language, such as developmental language disorder (DLD). For young children in the pre-primary grades, these interventions aim to improve children’s readiness for formal schooling and the language demands on classroom settings. For children in the primary grades, these interventions are designed to improve the language skills considered most critical to reading comprehension, such as vocabulary knowledge and inferencing. This chapter addresses these contemporary issues. First, we describe language skills as a critical element of school readiness and an important contributor to reading comprehension. Second, we describe current approaches to facilitating language skills in pre-primary children via classroom-based interventions. Third, we describe current approaches to improving language skills in primary-grade pupils as a mechanism for improving reading comprehension. The over-arching purpose is to provide a contemporary overview of practices used in classroom settings to facilitate children’s language skills.

Keywords

language developmentlanguage disabilitieslanguage interventionword gapreading comprehension
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Development
Individual Differences in a Social Context
 , pp. 519 - 538
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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