In 2001, newly returned from Zimbabwe with a one-year-old in tow I began a job that would challenge everything I knew about teaching. Over the next five years, I worked in two schools within a relatively deprived catchment area, where I learned about the importance of relationships, community and the dangers of making assumptions.
I wasn’t an experienced teacher, I didn’t have much experience as a parent, but I did know that every child is innately curious and wants to communicate. Yet, in this school many children found it hard to do so. They didn’t have the words, so they told us through their behaviour. From Nursery to Year 6 there were children blocked from telling us who they were and what they needed, they were unable to stay in class and over time became disengaged. We were failing to communicate.
My school had been gifted a new library, which was a responsibility that no-one had time for, so being the newbie I took it on. The doors of the library opened on to the playground, and I decided that if I could entice families to come in at pick up, I might be able to bring them into a neutral space and start to learn about them. I cannot pretend this was easy, it took time. It helped that the library was cool in the summer and warm in the winter and that I had juice and biscuits.
So, what did I learn? I saw that when parents could give one child just five minutes of their attention something shifted. The child’s body gravitated towards their parent, their eyes searched their parent’s face for affirmation, for meaning. Often, I would pop books on the carpets for the children to ‘find’ and when the child and parent sat on the floor close to each other to share the book or on a low seat, they leaned close together and were calmer. This might not last long and other distractions would ultimately pull them away, but twice a week I opened the library doors and families came.
Many years later, I read about the ‘Word Gap’ in the seminal research by Hart and Risely (1 and 2) and I could see the children I taught in their data. I could see why some of the children I worked with had a better start: they engaged in more talk; they were read to and gained more positive attention. I also saw how that made school more accessible for these children, why they could regulate better and have the energy and self-belief to learn. I could also see that other children needed more support, positivity and interactions to feel safe in school and have access to learning. I knew language was a crucial component, but I also felt that a language programme was not enough. I felt that imposing a curriculum of language on children wouldn’t help them tell us what they were thinking or feeling I was sure that the relational aspect of communication, the back-and-forth of talk was needed to truly grow language and relationships.
I thought about the Story Sack work (3) I had done with parents, when we made props together to help bring the books children took home to life. How, as we worked together, they told me their stories. That by having a book as a focus, we all had something in common to start talking about. I reflected on how that talk often drifted to other subjects, how tentatively personal and important conversations were started, dropped and returned to. I wondered if there was a way to bring this quality to a session with children. Was it the activity, was it the book, was it the coming back together over time?
I had read the work by Isabel Beck (4) and could see that many schools were inspired to use her ideas to enrich children’s vocabularies and teach ‘Tier 2’ language, so children could understand what they read. But I felt this didn’t serve the needs of the children I worked with who didn’t have the foundational language needed to express their basic needs and thoughts. I was working with schools across the country with diverse communities, all of which had cohorts of children who were struggling to access learning or even speak at all. I wanted a natural way to weave language learning into an affirming experience. And this is how I discovered the concept of contingent talk, dialogic book sharing and the work of Professor Pine and the International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)(5).
My first sessions of what was to become Story Talk took place in Nurseries across London and the South-East and they were based on one simple rule: the child is the boss of the book. My job was to let the child lead, look where they looked, give them time to initiate talk and only talk about what they were interested in. And most importantly stop myself from taking control!
I have films of these early sessions, in busy, noisy nurseries with children who had been chosen because they were shy, anxious, quiet, or not talking at all. Some were completely new to speaking English. The children choose the book, we settled down, and they waited for me to lead, to read, to take charge. I said: You are the boss of the book. You are in charge. They turned the page and looked at me, and I looked at the page and said, ‘ohhh’ or ‘hmmm’. I smiled. They looked at the page. I looked where they were looking and pointed and made another ‘ohhhh’. And the work began. We told the story of what was happening together, I named objects that were pointed at, I repeated back what the child said. And soon we were singing a nursery rhyme or talking about the things that mattered to the child.
The schools used the Book Sharing sessions to support children in Nursery and Reception, and we built up a store of practice. We found we could teach new words in context, that children started using “What’s that?” to point and ask for the words they needed. We found they did the same with their parents. We realised children often knew more than we thought, we found children grew in confidence through their relationships with the adults they shared books with. However, we had two problems: we didn’t have the right books, and we didn’t have a resource that could train and support schools to implement this programme. Until now! Already schools across the country have trialled the Story Talk programme. More children are growing their language, communication, confidence, and a love of reading. I can’t wait to share the power of Story Talk with you in your setting.
Charlotte Raby is a teacher, author, and early reading and inclusion specialist. She is the programme creator for the Story Talk programme.
References
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Hart, Betty; Risley, Todd R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. P.H. Brookes. ISBN 9781557661975.
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Hart, Betty; Risley, Todd (2003). The early catastrophe: The 30-million-word gap by age 3. American Educator: 4–9.
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I. Barron & J. Powell (2003) Story Sacks, Children's Narratives and the Social Construction of Reality Citizenship, Social and Economics Education Vol. 5, No. 3, 2003 (Story Sacks were created by Neil Griffiths)
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Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2013) Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, Guilford Press