I teach at a Language Development Centre and only teach children with DLD. I have been working on teaching the Year 1 Biological Science Curriculum in WA in collaboration with my speech pathologist. Together we are creating a science program about dinosaurs that incorporates language learning as well as the curriculum. Our language goals include similarities and differences, attributes and vocabulary learning. It’s very exciting, the kids are extremely responsive and we are integrating our oral language and curriculum areas very well. 

That sounds like a really exciting program! It's amazing to see how well science and language teaching fit together!

Thanks! We are really excited to see what the results show us when we reach the end of the study in terms of how best to support science learning. NGSS curricula provide so many opportunities to focus on complex language (and so many high-level language demands) that it's a really rich environment for this kind of work!

Thanks for watching & commenting! One of the most rewarding parts of this study is watching the graduate students, parents, and children respond to the camp program and grow over the summer!

Thanks - we are enjoying serving families and the community. And anxiously awaiting results from Years 2 & 3 to get at the question of which interventions best improve academic outcomes. 

The video made a big "Ah-hah!" for me.  Sometime we think that hands-on science brings all kids to a level playing field.  It makes total sense that students who are delayed in their language skills would naturally struggle with their understanding of science as well. That was a realization that occurred to me while watching this.  Blending both science with language development strategies is a win-win... I love it!

Thanks for sharing this - I worry a lot that the NGSS approaches involving discussion and argumentation are really hard for kids with Language Disorder (or ELL) to access and I wonder about how to make them more accessible.  I like the FOSS provided sentence stems and I think boosting visual representations of knowledge might also be helpful but we haven't tried that yet. 

Thanks!

Thanks! We love seeing the graduate students grow and learn along with the children!

Thanks for your comments! In addition to the outcomes you mentioned, we are examining the language gains for each condition (e.g. comprehension of science-relevant vocabulary). We are also examining children's performance in re-telling and responding to questions about science-themed children's show, both in terms of the content they express and the language they use to do so. 

One of the biggest challenges we face in terms of recruitment is that there is a lack of awareness of developmental language disorder (DLD). It's a very common learning disability (approximately 7% children meet criteria for having DLD) but is under-diagnosed and under-treated. When children do receive evaluations and therapy, there is a wide range of terms that are used to describe their difficulties (expressive language disorder, expressive-receptive disorder, specific language impairment, language delay, language learning impairment, and more). This confusion over terms & tendency toward under-identification means that parents or teachers may not be aware that a child fits the kind of profile we are looking for. There are people working hard to increase awareness - dldandme.org is a great resource for this! In the meantime, we actively work to partner with service providers in the community who are able to connect with professionals and parents - school districts, home visiting programs, Speech-Language Pathologists, and others. 

Thanks!

The people providing instruction are clinical master's students. We provide a training packet (papers to review) prior to camp. Then we do a 1 day inservice and they practice with real kids who aren't participants for 4 days while we coach them. We wanted to be sure that their skill with intervention wasn't a barrier to drawing conclusions to the study.   Surprising to us (but perhaps not surprising to anyone else), the clinical SLP students found it harder to do the science than to do the language intervention - we are supporting science instruction better in Year 2.  We do wonder about ways to scale the best language supports up to being provided by regular ed teachers or early childhood educators but we want to know what works best first. 

In this case, we're working with students who have completed a full year of a graduate program focused on speech-language pathology before they come to our study - so they have a stronger background in language than other areas, like how to teach science. They still need a lot of support to learn the language interventions, but they already have at least something of a base to build on in terms of knowing the background and how to engage around teaching these sorts of concepts. The science teaching piece is different - they don't have formal in coursework around how to teach science, and don't tend to have experience trying to teach children these types of concepts. 

I don't think the issue is just that we're working with SLP students, though - the literature is pretty convincing that classroom teachers also find science teaching very daunting. Preschool teachers feel more self efficacy around teaching reading than science - and teachers who don't feel effective in teaching science tend to avoid spending time on it in the classroom (Gerde et al, 2018). This extends up into the elementary school years - teachers tend to be anxious about teaching science, and new teachers don't feel well-prepared for science teaching as some other domains. It's something that can definitely be addressed - preschool and early elementary school science curricula can be really effectively taught by general classroom teachers. But - like we found with the SLP students - I think we have to be really deliberate about how to support teachers and others in providing science instruction. We can't assume everyone in education knows and is comfortable with this kind of teaching just because they know how to teach other skills.