Lexicon Pirate: Development and Evaluation of a strategy- based intervention program in classroom

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Tanja Ulrich
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432520829

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showed that the strategy therapy 'Lexicon Pirate' is an effective and efficient therapy approach for preschool and school-aged children with lexical deficits. Teaching children lexical learning strategies enables them to learn, store and retrieve new words self-actively. These abilities are of particular importance especially in educational contexts. All children are facing the challenge of learning about 3000 new words (e.g. technical terms of different subjects, words from foreign languages, academic language) each year at school. The aim of the research project is to implement the successful principles of the therapy approach 'Lexicon Pirate' into educational contexts. A concept that supports new word learning of all children is being developed and will provide the framework conditions to enhance understanding, encoding and retrieving words that are part of the educational vocabulary. That means that not only children with language impairments will benefit from a strategy-based classroom intervention. Also children with lower cognitive abilities as well as multilingual children with low language skills may enhance their learning of new words. The strategy-based learning of new words is a method that seems to be especially suitable for educational contexts with a heterogeneous student body. Furthermore, it aims at reducing existing educational disadvantages for multilingual students. Based on first feasibility studies, a detailed intervention concept that can be conducted in all classes is being developed. The effectiveness of this strategy-based intervention program will be evaluated through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) which is conducted in second grade classes of inclusive schools in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The profit of a strategy-based vocabulary expansion (experimental group, EG) is compared to that of a traditional vocabulary expansion in classroom (control group, CG) via a pre-post-test-design. The long-term effects of word learning will be assessed by a follow up-test three months after the intervention has been completed. As far as the strategy-based intervention concept proves to be successful in heterogeneous contexts of inclusive schools, particular modifications can be applied in order to adapt this concept for other educational contexts and other school forms as well.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants