Improving children’s oral vocabulary with a dynamic intervention programme

ABSTRACT

Objective: Two agendas guided this study. The first is to report on a dynamic intervention programme that utilizes key developmental domains and strategies, such as emotional expression opportunities, motor activity, learning in groups, playful learning, and shared reading. The second is to explore the possibility that dynamic intervention can improve vocabulary growth in a low socioeconomic status pre-K cohort and to examine whether the intervention can mitigate the impact of negative factors that impede vocabulary growth.

Method: To explore the programme’s impact, 62 children were recruited (28 girls and 34 boys) from seven different kindergartens in northern Israel. Their vocabulary skills were gauged pre- and post-intervention, and a MANOVA test was implemented to investigate the programme’s contribution and its potential to mediate impeding factors.

Results: The results indicate that the intervention improved the children’s vocabulary scope in all domains and moderated the negative impact of lower socioeconomic status, low print exposure, and sibship size.

Conclusion: We conclude by discussing how the dynamic intervention programme can address children’s needs and what learning strategies might further enhance their vocabulary development.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocabulary
• dynamic approach
• language development
• Disabilities and Development delay
• components for practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical standards

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Notes

^1. The authors composed a list of 2,845 basic words corresponding to their distribution in elementary school textbooks. The authors recommended teaching vocabulary gradually from kindergarten to elementary school. For example, teaching colours accordingly: green, red, blue, and yellow in kindergarten; white, black, and brown in the first grade; pink, grey, silver, gold, and purple in the second grade; and purple and orange in the third grade (p. 205). Similar lists were prioritized for other semantic clusters as well.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.