Playtime is Learning Time: A Play and Reading Intervention to Teach Vocabulary

• In Event: 1-207 - Exploring Recent Techniques in Classroom Vocabulary Interventions

Integrative Statement

Early language is the best predictor of later reading achievement (Dickinson et al., 2010: Pace et al., 2018). However, children from low-income backgrounds frequently lag behind their peers in early vocabulary acquisition (Hart & Risley, 2003). This is partly because many preschool teachers struggle to provide high-quality language instruction in their classrooms (e.g., Justice et al., 2008). The Language for Reading project investigated the effectiveness of a curriculum that used shared book reading and playful learning activities (e.g., games, songs) to teach vocabulary. Both reading and play presented new words in meaningful contexts using strategies to promote learning (e.g., gestures, simple definitions). Ten Head Start teachers across two sites implemented four curricular units over the course of an academic year. Each four-week unit involved four book readings and four play sessions designed to teach 20 difficult words (e.g., sympathy, scroll, demolish). Students (N = 138) were pre- and post-tested for each unit on receptive and expressive vocabulary assessments.
This curriculum led to significant improvement on both receptive and expressive vocabulary measures. For brevity, we present only the expressive data here. On average, children learned 5 new words per unit (20 total for the year). Children were significantly more likely to be correct at post-test (M = 5.5 words correct) than at pre-test (M = 0.42 words correct; B = 0.93, SE = 0.04, p < .001), and improvement on target words was significantly larger than improvement on control words that were not taught (B = 0.70, SE = 0.04, p < .001). The odds ratio for pre/post change on target words was 26.13, which is equivalent to a Cohen’s d of 1.80. By comparison, a meta-analysis of reading interventions found an average effect size on expressive vocabulary of d = 0.59 (Mol et al., 2008).
These positive effects held up over time: For one unit, children were tested again 4.5 months after the immediate post-test. Although scores at this delayed test (M = 3.4 words correct) were significantly below the immediate post-test (B = -0.81, SE = 0.08, p < .001), they were still significantly above pre-test scores (B = 2.76, SE = 0.17, p < .001).
The benefits of playful learning have been demonstrated in numerous studies (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009), but the majority of vocabulary interventions have centered on shared book reading. In this curriculum, we taught some words only during reading and others only during play in order to compare the effectiveness of the two contexts for word learning. There were no significant differences between gains from reading and gains from play on either receptive (B = 0.01, SE = 0.04, p = .778) or expressive vocabulary (B = -0.04, SE = 0.12, p = .972), suggesting that play can be equally as effective as reading for vocabulary instruction, thus providing teachers with another tool to help foster early language learning in low-income preschoolers.

Authors

• Emily Hopkins, University of Scranton
  Presenting Author

• Molly Collins, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rebecca Dore, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica R Lawson-Adams, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jacob Lev Schatz, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Scott, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marcia Shirilla, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tamara Spiewak Toub, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David K Dickinson, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Univ of DE
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author