The oral language proficiency of students in early education is crucial as teachers draw on this as a resource when developing literacy. There is a need to better understand what this oral language resource consists of at school entry, particularly the diversity amongst children so as to address inequalities. This article reports a study on a key…

An AB single case design was used to measure the effect of data-based feedback for 6 children in a listening and spoken language early intervention (EI) programme in Australia. Changes in the number of parent-child conversational turns following feedback were measured using an automated language environment analysis system. The perceived value and…

Background: Early childhood teachers (ECTs) play a significant role in equipping children with oral language and emergent literacy skills ahead of school entry. They are well positioned to play a vital role in ensuring preschool children receive a high-quality preschool curriculum to prepare them for later literacy learning. Aims: The purpose of…

Learning to read is a process that begins well before children commence formal schooling and well before children learn to decode print. Children's early reading skills are, first and foremost, foundationally contingent upon children's oral language and phonological awareness proficiencies -- skills that can be mapped across a continuum of…

This study designed and evaluated the efficacy of a manualised programme for children in mainstream school with delays in narrative discourse. Efficacy was evaluated using a Phase 1 non-randomised single-subject across multiple-baselines design. The programme was delivered by a speech pathologist with 11 mainstream children aged 5;0-5;11 years, in…

This paper describes the findings of research into children's interactions with educators who were of the same or different culture from that of the children. The research investigated the effect of cultural context on the children's communication and the quality of their interactions in one mainstream early childhood setting. Aboriginal and…

Using video as a mode of data generation in research involving young children and their teachers has become a more common practice in educational research. Digital video recordings provide the opportunity to capture the complexity of interactions that occur between people, time, space and objects, however, working with this methodology and form of…

This paper explores teachers' and teacher assistants' self-efficacy of delivering PrepSTART, a classroom based, oral language and early literacy program for five-year-old students. In the current study, speech pathologists developed, provided training and monitored program implementation. Teachers and teacher assistants (n = 17) shared their…

Friendships and play provide children with opportunities for mutual engagement, which both require and facilitate children's language use. Modality is a semantic system in the language associated with children's learning. One way in which modality is realised is through linguistic expressions which allow speakers to moderate the degree of…

This study used elicited production methodology to investigate the negative sentences that are produced by English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Negative sentences were elicited in contexts in which adults use the negative auxiliary verb doesn't (e.g., "It doesn't fit"). This form was targeted to see how…

The current study investigated the influence of a play-based curriculum on the development of pretend play skills and oral language in children attending their first year of formal schooling. In this quasi-experimental design, two groups of children were followed longitudinally across the first 6 months of their first year at school. The children…

Early intervention aims to prevent poor literacy outcomes associated with social disadvantage. This study examined whether the short-term positive effect of a preschool classroom-based oral language and phonological awareness (PA) programme was maintained and transferred to literacy 2 years later. The vocabulary knowledge, grammatical skill,…

"Sound Foundations," a literacy curriculum designed to teach phonological awareness to preliterate children, focuses exclusively on phoneme identity (that is, different words can start and end with the same sound). It works from the principle that phonemic awareness is necessary but not sufficient to reading, which depends on the…

This is a record of the proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA). The theme of the conference is "Mathematics: Essential research, essential practice." The theme draws attention to the importance of developing and maintaining links between research and practice and…