Background: In recent decades, the responsibilities placed on schools for dealing with the crucial European challenges of reducing inequalities and social exclusion, providing for children with special needs and enhancing diversity and cultural identity, are even more exacting. There are different perceived needs and different laws between the countries of Europe: some countries are now beginning gradually to abandon the distinction between ‘special’ and ordinary schools, making all schools inclusive, a change that some other countries made several years ago. One critical aspect is the transition between infant and primary school and the early identification of a child’s difficulties. Many studies have shown a relationship between early language development and literacy and learning skills and have specifically focused on the implementation of early intervention programmes and curricula. These programmes, however, have usually focused on particular, single skills or dimensions of language; no clear guidance has been offered to teachers on facilitating the transition from infant to primary school. Objectives: The present study adopts an innovative cross-cultural approach. It aims to implement, and verify the efficacy of, an innovative curriculum/intervention programme (hereafter, TALK) for the early assessment of the child’s language skills in the preschool period. The motivation for these aims is that they will help to ease the transition to primary schools, to promote the inclusion of children with special educational needs, to support teachers’ skills and to prevent long-term scholastic difficulties. Participants: The participants will be 100 preschool children in Italy, 100 children in Belgium and 100 children in Romania, along with their infant and primary school teachers. The participants in each country will be in two groups (TALK group and control group). Methodology and activities: The project has a three phases. First Phase: a three-part series of assessments. 1) A multidimensional curriculum of language/communication and literacy for the pre-schoolers. It will be implemented using ICT and the outputs will be scores on a range of tasks: nonword repetition, phonological awareness, naming, lexical decision, sentence repetition, grammar decision, rapid automatized naming, social story comprehension and visual-motor integration. 2) Assessment of interactions between teachers and children, undertaken through direct observation in the classroom during story time, snack time and circle time. 3) Assessment of the social well-being: Each child’s social competence and social popularity will be tested using a questionnaire and a sociometric measure and each child’s self-concept will be assessed using a questionnaire. Second phase: intervention programme with teachers in the TALK group. Teachers and children will be involved in a range of TALK programme curriculum activities (in small group laboratories and during children’s ordinary daily activities): phonological awareness activities, focused book reading and story telling, vocabulary games and activities, expository language and themes, social/emotional language activities, musical play, writing/drawing/fine motor activities. At the same time, each teacher in each working group will be shadowed once a month by a specialist who will monitor the development of the intervention programme; there will also be web-based meetings with the support of an e-learning platform. The children’s families will receive a parallel programme aimed at helping them support their children’s language/communication skills at home. Each child in the TALK programme and in the control group will be tested again at the end of the school year to assess the changes in their language/communication skills. Third phase, the follow-up, each child will be assessed again early in the primary school year. Six months later, each child’s reading/writing skills and social well-being will be evaluated and correlated with the previous evaluation of ability. Results and impact: We expect to test the efficacy of the TALK for language, learning development and social-well being in the primary school both by comparing experimental and control groups and by comparing predictions made on the basis of the earlier assessment with the children’s subsequent levels of skills. The three main outputs are expected to be an assessment (curriculum) of the child’s skills, related to the school’s prerequisites, an intervention programme for teachers and a support programme for parents. Potential longer term benefits: These could be particularly useful in facilitating better integration of the procedures for both the early evaluation of children and their transition to the primary schools of the different EU partners, in promoting a more widespread sharing of open source materials for schools and in contributing to the construction of a common curriculum which respects differences between contexts and cultures.
Background: In recent decades, the responsibilities placed on schools for dealing with the crucial European challenges of reducing inequalities and social exclusion, providing for children with special needs and enhancing diversity and cultural identity, are even more exacting. There are different perceived needs and different laws between the countries of Europe: some countries are now beginning gradually to abandon the distinction between ‘special’ and ordinary schools, making all schools inclusive, a change that some other countries made several years ago. One critical aspect is the transition between infant and primary school and the early identification of a child’s difficulties. Many studies have shown a relationship between early language development and literacy and learning skills and have specifically focused on the implementation of early intervention programmes and curricula. These programmes, however, have usually focused on particular, single skills or dimensions of language; no clear guidance was offered to teachers on facilitating the transition from infant to primary school. Objectives: The present study adopts an innovative cross-cultural approach. It aims to implement, and verify the efficacy of, an innovative curriculum/intervention programme (hereafter, TALK) for the early assessment of the child’s language skills in the preschool period. The motivation for these aims is that they will help to ease the transition to primary schools, to promote the inclusion of children with special educational needs, to support teachers’ skills and to prevent long-term scholastic difficulties. Participants: The participants were 139 preschool children in Italy, 122 preschool children in Belgium and 102 preschool children in Romania, along with their infant and primary school teachers. The participants in each country will be in two groups (TALK group and control group). Methodology and activities: The project has three phases. 1) The first phase consists of a three-part series of assessments: a) A multidimensional curriculum of language/communication and literacy for the pre-schoolers. It was implemented using ICT and the outputs were scored on a range of tasks: nonword repetition, phonological awareness, naming, lexical decision, sentence repetition, grammar decision, rapid automatized naming, social story comprehension and visual-motor integration. b) Assessment of interactions between teachers and children, undertaken through direct observation in the classroom during storytime, snack time and circle time. c) Assessment of social well-being. Each child’s social competence and a sociometric measure and each child’s self-concept was assessed using a questionnaire. 2) The second phase is an intervention programme with teachers in the TALK group. Teachers and children were involved in a range of TALK programme curriculum activities, in small group laboratories and during children’s ordinary daily activities. The activities are in the following areas: phonological awareness, focused book reading and storytelling, vocabulary games, descriptive language, emotional language, musical play, and writing/drawing/fine motor. At the same time, each teacher in each working group was shadowed once a month by a specialist who monitored the development of the intervention programme. The children’s families received a parallel programme aimed at helping them support their children’s language/communication skills at home. Each child in the TALK programme and in the control group was tested again at the end of the school year to assess the changes in their language/communication skills. 3) In the third phase, the follow-up, each child was assessed again in their reading/writing skills, which were correlated with the previous assessments. Results and impact: We test the efficacy of TALK for language and learning development in the primary school both by comparing experimental and control groups and by comparing predictions made on the basis of the earlier assessment with the children’s subsequent levels of skills. The four main outputs expected are: an assessment (curriculum) of the child’s skills, related to the school’s prerequisites, an intervention programme for teachers, a support programme for parents and the construction of a project website accessible by all participants. Potential longer-term benefits were expected to include improvements in the procedures for the early evaluation of children, facilitation of a better transition to primary school, enhanced integration of the evaluation and transition procedures, the promotion of a wider sharing of open-source materials for schools and a contribution to the construction of a common curriculum which respects differences between contexts and cultures.