The ninth #ResNetSLT Tweetchat of 2019 will take place on Wednesday, 30th October, running from 19:30 – 20:30 UK time.
The chat will be hosted by Sai Bangera and Chiara Vivaldi and will be based around the paper: The effectiveness of classroom vocabulary intervention for adolescents with language disorder by @HilaryLowe2, Lucy Henry and @vjoffe.
Introduction
The authors’ aim was to determine the effectiveness of ‘Word Discovery’, a phonological-semantic intervention, at improving the school-related vocabulary of adolescents with language disorder, when delivered by teachers in a mainstream secondary school setting.
The authors argue that despite a lack of research and somewhat mixed findings there is evidence to suggest that the phonological-semantic approach can enhance the vocabulary of adolescents with language disorder.
Furthermore, they identify the secondary-school age as being particularly appropriate for a classroom wide approach, as specialist language support tends to diminish as children move from primary to secondary education.
Methods
The study took place at eight non-selective mainstream secondary schools, from across England with thirty science teachers and seventy-eight students (52 male and 26 female), aged 11-14 years taking part. Forty-nine participants were monolingual English speakers and 29 participants were bilingual with 14 reported to speaking English predominantly at home.
The study used a within-subjects repeated measure design. Three ten-word sets, selected from the science curriculum, were created: the first set, targeted using usual teaching practice (active control words), was implemented during the teaching of science topic 1, the second set (experimental words), targeted using the phonological-semantic intervention, was implemented during the teaching of science topic 2 and the third set with no intervention (passive control words).
The students’ depth of word knowledge and expressive word use were measured pre and post intervention and at follow up. The phonological-semantic intervention activities were taught to the teachers in a one-hour training session that took place between the teaching of science topics 1 and 2. Fidelity measures were collated from teacher’s records, students’ work and observations during lessons.
Key research findings:
- Post-intervention measures of depth of knowledge and expressive word use in usual teaching practice were significantly higher than pre-intervention measures and this increase was maintained after 5 weeks.
- Post-intervention measures of depth of knowledge and expressive word use in experimental condition were significantly higher than pre-intervention measures but this increase was partially maintained 5 weeks later.
- At pre-intervention, measures of word knowledge and expressive word use did not differ between usual teaching words and experimental words
- At post-intervention, word knowledge and expressive word use measures of experimental words were significantly higher than usual teaching words
- At follow up, there was no significant difference in depth of knowledge between usual teaching and experimental words, and no-intervention measures were significantly lower than both conditions. For expressive word use, there was a significant difference between both conditions (experimental measures being higher than usual teaching practice) with no-intervention measures being significantly lower than both conditions.
Conclusions
The phonological-semantic intervention was more effective than usual teaching practice in increasing the depth of word knowledge and expressive word use. However, depth of word knowledge and expressive word use in this intervention (i.e. Word Discovery) did not fully maintain their gains at follow-up.
Although expressive word use measures following Word Discovery intervention continued to be significantly better than usual teaching practice at follow-up, depth of word knowledge measures did not. The authors suggest that making the links between phonological and semantic information more explicit can facilitate ‘mapping of phonological form into semantic content’.
Activities involving verbal repetitions, visual supports and orthographic input resulted in exploring various modalities and skills in word learning.
The authors also point out that the intervention’s success was dependent on the effective collaboration between teachers and researchers. The relatively small amount of teacher training and intervention input suggests that it has the potential of being translatable into practice. The authors highlight the timing of the intervention, may be key, as it comes at a time of transition for students (primary/secondary) and a time of neurological change.
Questions
- What is your experience of implementing classroom wide interventions?
- What do you see as the advantages/disadvantages of using whole class approaches?
- What outcome measures have you used to measure effectiveness of whole class approaches?
- How can teachers and speech and language therapists best facilitate collaboration in a school setting?
HERE’S THE SUMMARY OF THE CHAT ...
The ninth ResNetSLT Tweet chat journal club discussing classroom interventions for DLD took place on 30th October 2019. Chiara Vivaldi and Sai Bangera were joined by 22 participants as well as Billie Lowe (paper author), and the discussion generated 152 tweets with 234.291K impressions. The transcript can be found here.
Contributors to this tweet chat shared their experiences of using classroom interventions working closely with teachers, covering a range of topics – vocabulary (e.g. Word Aware), social skills and social understanding (e.g. social thinking, LEGO), idioms, and team teaching. From the subsequent discussion, advantages of classroom interventions clearly outweighed the disadvantages. The main advantages identified by tweeters were better understanding of the curriculum, joint target setting involving teachers, pupils not feeling singled out, holistic approaches, and generalisation of targeted skills. Difficulties around finding time to liaise with teachers and less individual feedback were highlighted. Participants felt that interventions were more effective when delivered jointly by teachers and therapists supporting academic expectations.
As far as outcome measures were concerned, participants indicated that they often used mixed approaches, including questionnaires to measure levels of confidence in both teachers and pupils, pre- and post-measures of targeted skills and classroom observations. The RCSLT outcomes programme is currently looking at how outcomes for universal and targeted interventions can be measured.
Listed below are some top tips for improving collaborations between therapists and teachers in schools:
- Working as equals using a co-teaching model
- Better understanding of roles of therapists and teachers
- Increased teacher involvement for joint goal setting
- Establishing closer links with senior leadership team and being part of the school (i.e. embedding speech and language input in school)
- Discussing benefits with teachers (e.g. demonstrate links between vocabulary/reading and academic achievements)
- Improving opportunities for training and on-going support, and continuity of working relationships
- Finding ‘speech and language champions’ in schools
- Promoting collective feedback and reflections
Here are some links to resources that you might find useful:
- Overview of DLD @RCSLTLearn: https://t.co/6OCR5TOmtL
- “Measuring language progress in students with Developmental Language Disorder while attending a specialist school: A retrospective analysis”
https://speechpathologyaustralia.cld.bz/JCPSLP-March-2018/4/
- Top ten DLD research priorities
