Speech Skills Are Helped by Nutfield Language

The Nuffield language for reading study aim to evaluate two language programmes designed to help children with literacy difficulties due to poor language and speech skills at school entry (Caroll, Crane, Duff, Hulme & Snowling, 2011). The study helps to investigate effectiveness of the two forms of intervention that could help children to develop and improve their foundation for language and literacy skills. The two language programmes are Phonology with reading (P+R) intends to work on children’s basic reading and spelling skills with emphasis in three components: letter-sound knowledge, promote phoneme awareness and sight word recognition and oral language programme (OL) emphasizing four key elements: narrative work, independent speaking and listening skills and vocabulary training. (Crane, Snowling, Duff, Fieldsend, Caroll, Miles, Goetz & Hulme, 2007).

The results of the study were in line with what the researchers had predicted. First, they predicted that children receiving P+R programme would do well on phoneme awareness, basic reading and spelling skills and letter sound knowledge than others who received the OL programme (Caroll et al., 2011). Secondly, findings from the study were also in line with researchers prediction that children receiving OL programme would perform better on assessments of grammer, narrative and listening skills and vocabulary compared to others who received the P+L programme (Caroll et al., 2011). However, these children do not outperform their peers in reading or listening comprehension skills (Caroll et al., 2011). In addition, the effectiveness of the two language programmes would sustain after 20 weeks of intervention with most recipients performing on the average range in literacy skills for ...

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...ing children with poor phonological skills. On the other hand, the Oral Language programme facilitated skills such as narrative, vocabulary, grammatical and reading comprehension which are especially helpful for children with poor command of English because it is not their mother tongue (Snowling & Hulme, 2010). It is beneficial to implement early intervention depending on a child’s readiness to develop the foundations of reading through training in letter knowledge and phoneme awareness delivered by trained teaching assistants and not wait until a child has “diagnose” with reading problems (Snowling & Hulme, 2010). In spite of that, if response to a well-founded intervention programme is poor, it is crucial to reconsider and investigate co-occurring difficulties that could possibly affect the progress and may need different treatment (Snowling & Hulme, 2010).