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This is the third of three articles where speech and language therapists Diana McQueen and Jo Williams, Directors of Soundswell, talk about how children learn language, what helps that process, what can go wrong, and what you can do to help.
As promised at the end of the second piece, we’re going to look in much more detail at the specific ways you can help children develop language skills, once you’ve noticed that they’re having trouble.
When we think about how we address speech difficulties in the Early Years, it’s not just about what the children are going to do. A lot of this process rests on us adults — and with the way we observe, assess and respond to the speech difficulties we find in our settings.
As we’ve said before, Jo and I have long been supporters of the Wellcomm Early Years toolkit for strengthening our understanding of speech difficulties in the Early Years. In our opinion, Wellcomm should be routinely used as a “first line of defence” when it comes to addressing speech and language difficulties.
Over the years, we at Soundswell have adapted and enhanced Wellcomm so that practitioners are beginning to look at possible reasons why children are behind. If you look back to the second article in this series, you can get a quick refresher on the steps we follow:
If practitioners can take ownership of these crucial stages, it makes it easier to identify a delay in a child's language development earlier on, which gives them more time to make improvements.
In turn, more children will progress out of the ‘danger zone,’ and we will have an easier time identifying the children experiencing long-term difficulties, so that we can connect them with specialist help before they get to Reception.
At the end of article one we said: ‘pretty much every child will make progress’.
Some will make dramatic progress, and will no longer be a cause for concern. This group will probably be those where the ‘nature’ component is working fine but the ‘nurture’ aspects may have fallen short.
Others will make some progress — it may be that their language skills are below average, other communications skills work just fine. Then, there will be a few whose progress is minimal. In these cases, there may be underlying problems that are contributing to the child’s difficulties. These will be the children who need more than a universal approach.
We’re going to take a look at some examples of real cases, which help to illustrate the different kinds of issues you will encounter, what you might do, and how you can measure progress. These materials are part of the Soundswell enhanced Wellcom training, which you can learn more about here.
Down below we’ve got a sample table, drawn from real assessments, that gives you an idea of how you can assess and organize your children’s language skills and needs.
Once you have screened your children, you can organise your data into a chart similar to the one below. You’ll note that children’s ages are not sequential — this is because we’re organising it by rank of the greatest language needs first. This way, we can order our priorities a little better.
Here’s how we fill this out:
Once you’ve got this first table in order, the next step is to group children together by the form of interventions or support you’ve got planned for them. You should be careful to not just group every high-priority child together — instead, look for the reasons why they need help.
A child who is very behind in English because English isn't their native language will need something different from a child with cognitive difficulties, like autism spectrum disorders, for example.
Then, the next step is to proceed with your interventions using the Wellcomm ‘Big Book of Ideas’ – everything is there for you.
At the point which best suits your setting, it’s time to do another screening, just like the one above. Remember, the whole point is to allow time and opportunity for children to make progress and so you can embed your strategies for language effectively. Leave time to deliver those early language development interventions.
Always re-screen everyone if you can, even children whose speech and language abilities are age-appropriate or even advanced. This is as a safety net, to make sure nobody’s falling behind. Occasionally a child’s language and speech development progress will falter at a specific point, and if you don’t re-screen everyone, you risk missing that.
Below, we’ve got an example of a table used to compare children’s original scores with the results from the re-screen. You can add additional columns for later re-screens, too, repeating this as much as you need.
Let’s just take a moment to look at whether scores have improved, and if so, by how much. It’s also important to reflect on why we aren’t making progress, if you don’t see that reflected in your re-screenings.
As you carry out this re-screening exercise for the second and third time, your knowledge and skills will be far greater, and your results will be more reliable.
You’ll find that you prove your hunches right more often than not, and will increase in confidence in terms of how you assess and address speech and language development difficulties.
As you carry out these assessments and screenings, be alert for the children who make minimal or no progress, and the occasional instance where a child's ability has regressed. This does happen, and it’s as good a cause for alarm as the huge gains are cause for celebration.
When there is no change or possibly a child seems to have ‘gone backwards’, it’s really important to try and find out why.
Revisit the narrative column from the start, where you remark on why the child might be experiencing difficulties, and reflect on the information you have there. Now decide what action to take – it may be that more of the same is not necessarily the answer!
Draw upon the knowledge you now have to create the best course of action:
Through these three articles, we hope you’ve gained a stronger understanding of what can cause children to fall behind in their speech and language skills, what that looks like in your setting, and what you can do to help.
Of course, there’s still a great deal more to learn, and many more resources to reach out to. This is just a start.
Remember, you could also refer to speech and language therapy, if you feel it’s necessary in some instances. Just because this is a scarce resource, doesn’t mean you should give up on making referrals!
Diana McQueen and Jo Williams are the Directors of Soundswell, an Early Years speech and language therapy service offering both direct therapy as well as consultancy services. You can visit the Soundswell website to learn more about their work.
Guidance from the Danish Health Ministry, translated in full to English.
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The full recommendations from a working group of over 70 nursery chains in the UK.
Please note: here at Famly we love sharing creative activities for you to try with the children at your setting, but you know them best. Take the time to consider adaptions you might need to make so these activities are accessible and developmentally appropriate for the children you work with. Just as you ordinarily would, conduct risk assessments for your children and your setting before undertaking new activities, and ensure you and your staff are following your own health and safety guidelines.
