An experimental investigation of kindergarten language interventions: Following the effects two years later and establishing the role of booster interventions

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Lenhard; Professor Sebastian Suggate, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268664991

Targeting early language development in kindergarten may constitute one avenue to improve educational achievement, particularly for children most at-risk. Phonemic awareness and vocabulary interventions show promise, however, more research with long-term follow-up designs is needed. In the first phase of this research proposal (2015-2017), over the course of six experimental studies, a new interactive-elaborative storytelling (IES) intervention was developed. The IES approach seeks to activate children’s inherent interest in language via an elaborative story-telling approach focusing on story-level comprehension, as opposed to explicitly instructing individual word definitions. Moreover, an interactive component was added to the elaborative, whereby children are encouraged to tell the stories after hearing these on previous days. In an experimental, randomised intervention study, IES is being contrasted to a phonemic awareness and a just-reading condition, in a sample of 300 kindergarten children. In the current proposal, funding is requested to test the long-term effects of the different approaches, one and two years post-intervention, on measures of phonemic awareness, receptive and expressive vocabulary, oral narrative skill, and early reading development. Additionally, we seek to conduct booster interventions in IES, phonemic awareness and just-reading for the children who will still be attending kindergarten in 2018. Finally, a third aim is to analyse recorded storytelling sessions to determine whether fine-grained features of story delivery relate to vocabulary and language devel-opment. It is hoped that results will have significant theoretical and practical implications for under-standing the kind of skills and interventions required for successful reading and language development.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants