This research paper explains how increasing and improving practitioners’ knowledge of the importance and value of speech, language and communication skills contributes to advancement of educational, social and emotional competences; focus was on development for children in the Early Years. Proposed is the necessity to embed speech, language and communication development in practice, and the provision of a language and communication rich environment is considered a key strategy to influencing progress. The paper describes a research project that was subsequently evaluated using a multiple-method approach to afford a comprehensive analysis of findings. Outcomes were to highlight necessity for improvement of knowledge of less experienced practitioners, and added reinforcement for those who were relatively proficient; further, it was suggested that effective mentoring was required to maintain wide-ranging and continual growth of practitioners’ expertise. Development of confidence in subject knowledge was also essential in providing a child-initiated approach to learning; this, it claims, would enhance the fostering of a learning community which would place greater importance on the requirement for enhancement of speech, language and communication skills.
J. Yamagishi, T. Nose, H. Zen, T. Toda, and K. Tokuda. Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), page 3957-3960. Las Vegas, NV, USA, (March 2008)
R. Jäschke, A. Hotho, F. Mitzlaff, and G. Stumme. Recommender Systems for the Social Web, volume 32 of Intelligent Systems Reference Library, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, (2012)