CASE STUDY 3: PROMOTING PEER TO PEER LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

case study snapshot

Children can often feel excluded from playground activities if they’re behind in their communication development stages.
Clinicians & educators both noticed children with typically developing language skills, children learning English as a second language, and children who had additional language needs and identified disabilities such as ASD were all drawn to playing the TalkiPlay games.
Children’s language development was enhanced with peer-to-peer involvement.
TalkiPlay created an opportunity peer-to-peer language practice.

We begin the experience with about six children and quickly other children are drawn to the activity and join us too.
The educator scaffolds the interaction and helps children to take a turn and share the equipment around.
There are lots of opportunities for children to listen to instructions, make comments and ask questions.
The educator reflects afterwards that a child in the classroom who has a diagnosis of ASD and can find social interaction difficult, was interested to join in with the game and had shown more confidence to talk and communicate with the other children.

We observed that Talkiplay sparked the interest of a wide variety of children at different developmental stages and provided opportunities for practicing receptive and expressive communication skills for these children.
For example, children with typically developing language skills, children learning English as a second language, and children who had additional language needs and identified disabilities such as ASD were all drawn to playing the talkiplay games.
The educator also demonstrated that he could adapt the experience to cater for a larger group of children –6 plus –by scaffolding their turn-taking. How to manage children’s interest and participation in these experiences via the program plan is also identified as an ongoing point of discussion.

Educators with a range of backgrounds (qualification, position in the room, age, bilingual/monolingual, familiarity with technology) were all able to take part in the trials and these dimensions didn’t appear to impact on how they participated in the trials.
The trials allowed educators to identify and express further professional learning needs and opportunities, including continuing to think about appropriate use of technology when programming.
Educators were able to use and think about Talkiplay’suse in an integrated way with a wide range of children with varying levels of ability and English-proficiency across centres.

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