Dissertation help! Assessing speaking and listening

[Guest]

Hi everyone,

 

I am a third year speech and language therapy student at Newcastle University and am thinking about ideas for my dissertation for next year. I am very interested in writing about collaborative working between SLTs and teachers. One area I would like to investigate further is how teachers are involved in the early identification of speech and language difficulties in the EYFS. In view of the changes to the EYFS statutory framework and its emphasis on developing children's speaking and listening, I wondered if teachers feel more confident about identifying atypical development in these areas. I appreciate you are all very busy, but would be grateful if people would be willing to respond to the following questions, which will help me to focus me research questions more specifically:

 

1. In what way (if any) have you changed your practice in view of changes to the EYFS framework which places more emphasis on developing a child's speaking and listening ?

 

2. What strategies do you use to develop children's speaking and listening?

 

3. What speaking and listening assessments do you carry out?

 

4. Do you feel you had enough training in the typical development of children's speech and language in order to feel confident about being able to identify atypical development?

 

Thanks very much in advance.

[SueFinanceManager]

Hi Freybex1

 

I am not in a setting any more but will do my best to answer your questions;

 

1. In what way (if any) have you changed your practice in view of changes to the EYFS framework which places more emphasis on developing a child's speaking and listening ?

 

Speaking and listening were always important even before the new EYFS placed more emphasis on it. In our setting we gave the children lots of opportunities to speak by having a good ratio of staff to children (1:13 ratio would not help this) and what I mean by that is our setting was divided into 3 distinct areas with one member of staff placed in each area and a 4th member of the team who could be deployed where needed. So if for example I was in the messy room I would have between 2 or 8 children in the space with me and we used lots of open ended questions to encourage the children to talk about what they were doing and anything else they wanted to talk about. We used to have a bit of a narrative going to explaining what we were doing ie "today I am getting out the blue paint and the red paint" then we would ask the children "What else do we need" and then talk through their responses. By working in small groups we were able to encourage shy speakers to join in and by following the interests of quiet children we could find something that they would be enthused by and therefore encouraged to talk.

 

2. What strategies do you use to develop children's speaking and listening?

 

As above small group, one to one work. Lots of music and singing, this is an easy way to encourage children to listen and repeat words. Story time - reading books with repeated phrases are great fun and encourage children to use words to join in and they need to listen to know when to join in.

 

3. What speaking and listening assessments do you carry out?

 

We would plan specific activities that focused on speaking and listening and then other observations would record S&L developments or wow moments also

 

4. Do you feel you had enough training in the typical development of children's speech and language in order to feel confident about being able to identify atypical development?

 

I was lucky as I worked with 2 colleagues who had received further training but I think it you work with children for a number of years you begin to learn normal speech development and can easily notice when you think a child isn't developing at the normal rate. If you have a child that is quiet we made time for one to one work to find out if the child was quiet by choice or by some developmental delay. We were able to get support form the LA speech and language unit too if we wanted to seek another opinion.

 

I hope this helps and good luck with your dissertation.

 

[Guest]

Hi Sue,

 

Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply and answer my questions. I am still working on developing a specific research question and it's been helpful to get your perspective. From a lot of the literature I have been reading, not all teachers are able to get the support they need from their LA speech therapy service and ensuring teachers are trained to identify children who may have speech, language and communication needs is very important.