A challenge that early years practitioners in the UK face is that they are not sure how best to communicate with children who are learning English as an additional language (EAL). Across the UK, the percentage of EAL pupils has more than doubled from 7.6% in 1997 to 19.5% in 2020. For some of these children, (pre)school is one of the first and few environments where they hear and speak English. It is vital to support these children in learning English as early as possible to integrate them into preschool, and later school, because being behind in the societal language may have implications for later academic achievements. One of the first steps in overcoming this challenge is to find out how preschool teachers speak to EAL children, and then find out which language features of preschool teacher speech relate to EAL children’s language development. Jacky Chan and colleagues did exactly that. Please read Jacky's recent blog to find out more. 

What predicts story comprehension in bilingual children?

An essential aspect of language development is the need to understand spoken language and make sense of what others say. Children need to comprehend what is explicitly mentioned (literal understanding), and they often need to make informed guesses about what is being implied but not said.  In other words, they need to make inferences. Literal comprehension and inferential comprehension are crucial for understanding stories. Although some evidence exists for what predicts good story comprehension in monolingual children, relatively little is known about how bilingual children’s cognitive skills (memory and attention) and their linguistic skills (knowledge of words and grammar) predict their literal and inferential comprehension of stories. Because bilingual children’s language input is divided across two languages, another important predictor of how well these children comprehend stories is the quantity and length of exposure to English. Our LuCiD Co-Investigator Ludovica Serratrice (University of Reading) and her colleagues recently published their work on listening comprehension in bilingual children in Language Learning, and alongside the open access article provided an accessible summary for the OASIS database.