Gillian West

Introduction Language skills are a critical foundation for education and psychosocial development and are particularly closely related to literacy (Hjetland, Brinchmann, Scherer, Hulme, & Melby-Lervag, 2020; Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervag, & Snowling, 2015; Snow, 2016) and numeracy development (Chow & Ekholm, 2019; Hornburg, Schmitt, & Purpura, 2018).

Introduction Language skills are the foundation of virtually all aspects of education, including literacy (Hjetland, Brinchmann, Scherer, Hulme, & Melby-Lervåg, 2020; Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervåg, & Snowling, 2015; Snow, 2016) and numeracy development (Chow & Ekholm, 2019; Hornburg, Schmitt, & Purpura, 2018). They are also vital for psycho-social development (Norbury et al., 2016; van Agt, Verhoeven, van den Brink, & de Koning, 2011).

CFIR consolidated framework for implementation research RCTs randomised controlled trials TAs teaching assistants Delivering Language Intervention at Scale: Promises and Pitfalls A growing body of evidence now suggests that oral language interventions can be effective for improving language use and comprehension (Hulme et al., 2020). In turn, these can provide a better foundation for the development of reading comprehension (e.g. Clarke et al., 2010) and more generally to access the curriculum.