TalkTogether Blog

Contributing author:  Kathleen Kupiec This article was written as part of the TalkTogether’s academic blog writing programme for early career researchers. Based on: Nag, S., John, S., & Agrawal, A. (2024). NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child directed print in understudied languages. Behavior Research Methods. Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02339-x   The Problem: Current Guidance and Tools are Limited to Certain Languages Children’s language acquisition and development is immensely important, with far-reaching and wide-ranging benefits that include supporting their social skills, emotional life, academic success, and literacy development [1]. Considered a foundational skill, literacy is the bedrock for an individual’s future, with positive impacts on their educational achievement and quality of life. Unfortunately, without taking additional measures, “an estimated 300 million children and young people will still lack basic nume...

Contributing author: Siyu Ma This article was written as part of the TalkTogether’s academic blog writing programme for early career researchers. Based on: Nag, S., Vagh, S. B., Dulay, K. M., Snowling, M., Donolato, E., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2024). Home learning environments and children’s language and literacy skills: A meta-analytic review of studies conducted in low- and middle-income countries. Psychological Bulletin, 150(2), 132-153. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000417   Income inequality (i.e., the distribution of wealth across a country) is increasing rapidly in many parts of the world, both in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries as well as high-income economies. It appears that growing up in countries with large income inequality has a negative impact on children’s health, school performance, and wellbeing [1, 2]. However, for children in LMI countries with large income inequality, the consequence could be worse developmental outcomes. This is because children from poor...

Contributing Author: Hannah Simmons This article was written as part of the team’s preparation for the 2023 Right to Play Conference hosted by the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford.  Introduction The home environment plays an important role in supporting children’s oral language development. It is a context in which children spend a significant proportion of their life and the primary location of their interactions with parents and caregivers. These interactions have a powerful influence on children’s development and can mitigate risk factors frequently experienced by children raised in language-starved environments. Equipping parents and caregivers with strategies to support their child’s development through these interactions is therefore important – especially for those from low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds.  In keeping with the theme of play for this blog series, we will consider several play-based strategies which parents and caregivers in lo...

Contributing Author: Hannah Simmons This article was written as part of the team’s preparation for the 2023 Right to Play Conference hosted by the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford.  Introduction In keeping with the theme of play, this blog will explore how we can use play as an innovative and effective approach to child assessment. We will explore some of the challenges associated with assessing young children, and consider how these challenges can be overcome when play is part of the assessment experience. We will also cite an example of play-based assessment from the TalkTogether project. Why is it important to assess children? To appreciate how play-based assessment can provide valuable insights on children’s learning, we first need to consider what it is we want to use such insights for. That is, why is it important to assess children? Assessing children’s learning and development serves several purposes. Those purposes differ depending on who, within th...

Contributing Author: Hannah Simmons This article was written as part of the team’s preparation for the 2023 Right to Play Conference hosted by the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford. Introduction Children inevitably use language during play. Play regularly involves children communicating with playmates, interacting with adults, or perhaps singing songs – all of which are language-based occurrences. Closer consideration of how play invites children to acquire and produce language can help us to better understand and leverage the ways in which play provides unique opportunities for effective oral language development, namely: vocabulary, phonology, grammar and discourse skills. (See also our Blog series on syntactic development in children ). Free Play and Oral Language Development As discussed in our previous blog, Perspectives on Play , free play is defined as play which is unstructured and child-directed. During free play, children create and explore imaginative...