Abstract
In recent years there has been increased interest in universal provision in that spoken language and communication development is supported for all children in schools, classrooms and early years settings. As well as supporting all children this approach is facilitative for children with speech, language and communication needs, and for children whose home language is different from the language of the school, classroom or setting. Within this context there has been an emphasis on providing environments that are ‘communication friendly’.
As editors, we are delighted to present this exciting special issue focusing on the definition, identification, implementation and evaluation of communication friendly environments. The articles selected represent the UK, Europe, New Zealand and Australia, spanning quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
The exact nature of communication friendly environments need defining so that they can be implemented and then evaluated to determine their effectiveness in facilitating children’s spoken language and communication. Dockrell, Bakopoulou, Law et al. and Gràcia, Vega and Galvan-Bovaira describe the tools they have devised to identify and measure communication friendly classrooms. Dockrell et al. carried out an extensive review of the literature to determine the aspects of a classroom and the behaviours of professional(s) in the classroom that can be measured and then developed further to enable a classroom to become more communication friendly. Their Communication Supporting Tool (CSC) is not only grounded in the research literature but has also been tested in schools to confirm it has inter-rater reliability and validity and is, therefore, a robust measure for primary schools to use that can also facilitate professionals to make classrooms more communication friendly. The EVALOE tool (Gràcia et al.) is perhaps more specific, aiming to capture and measure the interaction between teachers and children. The EVALOE tool measures the spoken language learning and teaching in the classroom and then offers a method by which teachers can reflect on their practice and develop strategies to improve this. An ethnographic approach to exploring the nature of communication friendly classrooms and the role of the education practitioner is taken by Bain, James and Harrison. Here, a detailed and reflective account is given of the practitioner and her or his role in supporting children’s communication development, with an emphasis on the often neglected role of the children’s parents in creating communication friendly environments.
Communication friendly environments are an intrinsic component of the current universal provision ethos. Universal provision promotes the development of practitioners’ knowledge of children’s language and communication development across early years and into primary school age. Along with increased knowledge, these practitioners are also expected to implement strategies that can develop children’s language and communication as part of their everyday care of the children. McDonald, Proctor, Gill et al. evaluated training of early years practitioners to become more communication friendly. The study used video-based training in which practitioners viewed their own communicative behaviours and the language used when working with children and evaluated these. The training was partially successful with practitioners able to learn and use communication-facilitating strategies more easily than the language modelling strategies. The study highlights the many challenges of evaluating such training programmes in real life settings.
Effective collaboration is required between education (teachers and teaching assistants) and health (speech and language therapists) for the development and implementation of effective communication friendly environments. Using questionnaires and a focus group with mainstream teachers and speech and language therapists, Glover, McCormack and Smith-Tamaray identified a great desire from both professional groups to know more about each others’ roles and how to engender inter-professional collaboration when working with mainstream school children with identified speech, language and communication needs. Wilson, McNeil and Gillon look to the new generation of teachers and speech and language therapist entering the work place to find that there is still a considerable lack of inter-disciplinary education and training across education and health to support children’s spoken and written language development in the classroom.
The articles in this special issue rightly highlight the roles of education professionals and speech and language therapists. The children themselves and their families are less studied and yet certainly have a crucial role in how we develop, implement and evaluate communication friendly environments. The child as a causal agent in their communicative development is explored by Alper and McGregor. Here, a very enlightening theoretical account as to how the child’s agency is inter-linked with their communicative development is given, with an emphasis on how communication friendly environments need to place the child at the centre of this dynamic.
This highly informative and timely special issue shows that communication friendly environments can be defined and measured. School and early years professionals know how to be communication friendly in their every day practice and, indeed, can be trained to be more so. Inter-disciplinary collaboration between health and education is essential for schools and classrooms to be able to provide communication friendly environments that can be effective as part of universal provision. Future research needs to take forward the findings from these studies on a larger scale and to identify how the child and his or her carers and family can also be involved. The challenge for research is to show if and how communication friendly environments impact on the development of the children themselves. The key question still to be answered is whether, at the level of universal provision, communication friendly environments facilitate measurable change in children’s spoken and written language development, and ultimately impact on their subsequent educational attainment.