Children who enter preschool with good vocabulary and attention skills do better in class, according to new research.
The study, by Ohio State University, was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Early Education and Development from MCERA's Publishing Partner, Taylor and Francis, and are based on 900 four-year-olds from eight US states.
The results, which show how a child’s ability to engage with teachers and peers is affected by the range of words they know, also reveal that young children are more likely to get involved with classroom tasks if they have learned how to suppress inappropriate behaviour and block out distracting thoughts and feelings.
Together with her colleague Associate Professor Tanya Serry, Professor Pamela Snow from La Trobe University, established the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab within the University’s School of Education.
The SOLAR Lab is a platform for research, teaching, advocacy and postgraduate supervision on a wide range of topics pertaining to developmental language and the transition to reading, writing and spelling in the school years.
“This study will be of interest to Australian early years teachers in the sense that it confirms the importance of children’s pre-school oral language vocabulary development and their emotional and behavioural self-regulation skills," Professor Snow said.
"These are areas of development that show high levels of variability in pre-school cohorts and are strongly associated with both academic success and social and emotional wellbeing.”
Unfortunately, says Professor Snow, it is often the same group of children who struggle in both domains, and their trajectories can be problematic from an early stage in their educational journeys.
"Pre-service teaching programs need to support teachers to strengthen children’s language skills [vocabulary was a focus here but other skills are important as well] and also to recognise and respond supportively to signs of immature inhibitory control [self-regulation],” she said.
"Teaching words for emotions and modelling everyday social scripts, for example around making requests and apologising might be ways of approaching this in the pre-school classroom."
This article originally appeared as a media release from MCERA.