Esposito, Rosanne;
Lervag, Arne;
Hulme, Charles;
(2024)
Oral language intervention in the late primary school years is effective: evidence from a randomised control trial.
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
10.1111/jcpp.14084.
(In press).
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Abstract
Background: Oral language skills provide the foundation for formal education, and children may require language support over an extended period of time to maximise their education potential. Most work on language intervention, however, has focussed on the preschool or early school years. Here, we describe the development and evaluation of the Oral Language for Literacy Intervention (OLLI) programme which is designed to support children with weak language skills in the later primary school years. Methods: We conducted a randomised control trial in 33 schools (50 classrooms). The language skills of all 8–9 year‐old children in each participating classroom (n = 1,423) were assessed using an automated app (LanguageScreen). The six children with the weakest LanguageScreen scores within each classroom (n = 296) were randomly allocated to the intervention (n = 148) or control group (n = 148). The children in the intervention group received the OLLI programme delivered in individual and small group sessions over 20 weeks. Children in the control group received their typical teaching. Results: Children receiving the OLLI programme made significantly larger gains than children in the control group on a preregistered latent variable reflecting standardised measures of oral language ability (d = 0.38) and on a measure of their written expression (d = 0.42). Conclusions: These findings have important implications for improving educational attainment in children in the late primary school years. The OLLI programme is designed to be deliverable at scale and is of relatively low cost.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Oral language intervention in the late primary school years is effective: evidence from a randomised control trial |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/jcpp.14084 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.14084 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The images or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Language, RCT, education, primary school intervention |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Psychology and Human Development |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204335 |
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