Early education provider the Y WA has forged a partnership with Edith Cowan University’s (ECU) third year speech pathology students, which is seeing children from one centre reap the benefits of their expertise.
Launching last month, the budding speech pathologists are being supervised by an ECE educator as they attend a centre once a week for a period of 12 weeks. Here they work closely with children identified as being in need of more intensive support. This is done at the Tier 2 intervention level.
At the Y WA Baldvis ELC, a screener has found 12 out of 45 children require extra oral literacy intervention.
Literacy specialist Renee Chakaodza said the input from the speech pathology students was of huge benefit to these children.
“When we identify the need for intervention, we have an established method in place, but having the extra support from speech pathology students at ECU is a win for our organisations, our families and our children.
“Early intervention is the key to making sure children do not start school behind and it is much harder to remediate a learning difficulty the longer it is left,” Chakaodza said.
One early literacy expert has recently warned that an increasing number of children are entering ECE centres without the background of rich language experiences needed to build strong oral skills.
Talking Matters Jilly Tyler said poor oral language skills early on place children at a clear disadvantage, and this only compounds once they hit the school classroom.
“…I became aware that a lot of kids were arriving at early childhood centres with quite low oral language capability,” Tyler told EducationHQ.
“If children are not able to talk and haven’t got that language foundation, they are so disadvantaged when it comes to learning to read and write.
“Because they have not had the language experiences, and their neural pathways are not fully developed – it means they need a lot of catch-up work and remedial language development support.”
Meanwhile, children that have been exposed to rich language and lots of ‘serve and return’ interactions with a parent or carer are in a far better position, Tyler noted.
“…as soon as they are starting to look at printed words they will be able to recall a word, they know they have heard it before, or they have been read the word, or it is the language of their family.
“They’re more likely to just lean into learning to read really quickly, it’s the kids that don’t have that language, that struggle.”
ECU’s speech pathology students are also set to develop resources for parents and educators across all of The Y’s centres in the state.
The Y WA CEO Dr Tim McDonald said the project was extending the organisation's work to identify at-risk children as early as possible.
“For children that do not do a language screen at this age, they risk their difficulties with language not being picked up, which could lead in the long term to difficulty reading, learning, and issues with all academic endeavours,” he said.
“Our School ReadY program aims to address these challenges head on and this partnership with ECU is bolstering what we are already successfully doing within the program.”
