Let's Talk: Speech and Language in the Early Years

Communication and language skills are crucial to young children’s holistic development. Being able to speak clearly, understand others, express ideas, and interact with those around them are fundamental building blocks for a child’s development and future learning.

It is undeniable that the pandemic has severely impacted many children’s speech and language development. Children worldwide have faced a lack of interaction and communication with others and masks have obscured social cues provided through facial expressions. Schools have performed brilliantly in incredibly challenging circumstances and have provided a wide variety of opportunities for students to communicate with their peers, even whilst teaching virtually.

Schools have had to adapt and look towards developing additional provision to ensure that students do not become labelled as a COVID generation. This year, BIS Abu Dhabi has implemented a speech and language toolkit called ‘Wellcomm’ that not only allows for quick and effective screening of language needs, but also comes with teaching aids and ready-made interventions to improve children’s speech and language. This enables tailored and personalised support for all children in BIS Abu Dhabi’s early years setting. They receive sessions twice a week and the school has seen rapid improvement and progress amongst the youngest students since the beginning of the year.

For those students who need even more specialised support BIS Abu Dhabi builds working partnerships with outreach services. An example is that there is now a wonderful Speech and Language Therapist based in school, who observes, assesses, and provides regular speech therapy and support for those students who may need it. This reduces time out of school for travel to appointments, speeds up the communication and liaison between the specialist and class teachers and allows the school to work in a more effective partnership on a daily basis for the benefit of the students.

Our Early Years teachers at BIS Abu Dhabi have also received specialist training from ‘Elklan’, who are national leaders in training practitioners to help children develop their speech and language skills. They have given practical ideas, strategies and support that teachers have implemented in their classroom. Through positive relationships with their teachers, children respond to eye contact, verbal, and non-verbal interaction; they anticipate and initiate communication with others, learning to respond in many ways.

Young children need rich language environments. Their brains are wired from the early days for speech and language development, and we all have to make sure we provide rich opportunities to model, practice and intervene when necessary. If you have young children, ask yourselves what provision there is at home and in school for developing rich language at this important stage of their lives.