Thank you to all of the Language 0-7 families

The sessions for the Language 0-7 project have ended and we want to thank all of the families who stuck with us through the most unpredictable couple of years.

This project began in 2020 and followed-up the families who took part in the Language 0-5 Project as part of the first five years of LuCiD. The Language 0-5 Project helped us understand how babies and young children learn to talk and communicate with others in their first years. In the Language 0-7 Project, we have learned about early literacy skills with the aim of looking at how preschool language influences children’s early reading development.

When we began this project back in 2020, we were so excited to meet all of the families and again head into schools to begin the sessions. The first sessions were booked in for the Spring term of Year 1 primary school. However, the week before we set out for schools the Covid-19 outbreak meant schools shut for most pupils and remote education was introduced into so many of our lives. After taking some time to come to grips with what these changes meant for the families and for our project, we re-worked the sessions so they could be run online, over a video call, during the first term of these children’s Year 2.

Happily, in three short sessions, we were able to capture a lot of invaluable information about language and literacy development. The children and caregivers in this project have provided us with an impressive dataset that will allow us to better understand how children learn to read. From the online questionnaires on communication, to language games and the stories we read together, we collected a wealth of data that will enable us to build a comprehensive picture of children’s early literacy skills. The findings from this project enable us to bridge the unparalleled detail of the Language 0-5 Project to see how that transfers into children's early school experience.

It was an honour for us to be able to run our sessions with these children who were so familiar with research, and to share in their journey as they learned to read.

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