Measuring pre-school teachers’ knowledge of oral language pedagogy

This project will complete the validation of the Observing Language Pedagogy tool, designed to capture preschool teachers’ pedagogical knowledge related to early language development.

Early language underpins later learning, but many children start school without the language skills they need. At school entry, the language skills of disadvantaged children are on average almost a year behind those of their advantaged peers, which has serious consequences for long-term outcomes. While high-quality early education has the potential to narrow this gap, evidence suggests that current practice does not nurture early language adequately, particularly in disadvantaged areas. A recent review found that teacher professional development in England is insufficiently evidence-based and inconsistent in its quality. Teacher knowledge of both subject content and pedagogy are thought to be fundamental, yet while language-related content knowledge of preschool and primary teachers has been linked to child outcomes, studies of pedagogical knowledge have found minimal effects. This may be due to methodological failings of these studies.

The new Observing Language Pedagogy (OLP) tool uses videos of real classroom interactions to provide an authentic context for assessing teachers’ pedagogical knowledge accurately. It is currently the only video-based tool focused on early language development. This project will assess whether the oral-language related pedagogical knowledge of preschool teachers, as measured by the OLP tool, can predict child language outcomes, and whether different elements of knowledge predict language outcomes more strongly than others. The project will involve analysis of data already collected as part of a previous study on the language outcomes of children attending nursery and the language-related pedagogical knowledge of their teachers. The researchers will collect additional data from the schools involved in the earlier study, and a range of child-level and school-level variables from the National Pupil Database, to explore whether pre-school teachers’ language-related pedagogical knowledge does predict child language outcomes.

The findings will provide practical guidance for the design of teacher qualifications and professional development, and the OLP tool will enable much-needed future research to determine how teachers’ pedagogical knowledge can be developed to support young children’s language skills. The researchers will publish a main public report and a sector briefing, summarising findings in a practical and accessible form for schools and policymakers.