Transcript: Embedding research into language literacy and numeracy practice

00:00:02 Female voiceover 

You're listening to an IOE podcast. Powered by UCL minds. 

00:00:12 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Welcome to the podcast Psyched about Education. This series celebrates the academic excellence of the work carried out at the Department of Psychology and Human Development and the impact this work has on policy and practice. In other words, how can psychology make a difference? 

I'm Dr Chloe Marshall, I’, Professor of Psychology, Language and Education at the IOE. My research is on children’s language and literacy developments, and I'm your host for today. With me I have Professor Julie Dockrell, a very dear colleague of mine who is Professor of Psychology and Special Needs and a world-renowned expert on children, oral and written language development, particularly in the classroom context. 

In this podcast, we're going to be focusing on the work of the Center for Language, Literacy and Numeracy Research and Practice, which is a center based in the Department of Psychology and Human Development that Julie has been directing for many years and that I take over the directorship of in 2022.  First of all, what is the Center for Language, Literacy and Numeracy Research and Practice, and how did it come into being? 

00:01:15 Professor Julie Dockrell 

Well, I think I'd argue that the center is a rather unique setting to bring together individuals who are interested in language, literacy and numeracy, particularly, but also in the way we translate research into practice. So when I came to the Institute about 20 years ago, there was a very strong backbone of research on reading in this department. Some absolutely excellent work. And some work at the time in numeracy, but there was beginning to be an emerging view that, actually, oral language might be important in underpinning reading and particularly reading comprehension, and also in terms of numeracy. So with a range of colleagues we got together and thought about how we could bring these three different areas of psychology, child development, cognition together to be, if you like, more creative in terms of the research we would do and how we would take it forward. 

So together we set up the center, which I've now been leading with three main aims, I'd say. One is to provide a forum for exchanges across these key research areas. People that often didn't talk to each other because, if you like, the work was in some kind of competition. Also to work as a focus for national and international researchers to visit and discuss their ideas, because I think, like you, Chloe, I'm a great believer in bringing people together to create a greater understanding, in our case of children development and difficulties. And to widen participation in the work in terms of policy and practice. So not just make it a one-way track in one direction. 

00:03:07 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Can you tell us a little bit more about what research the centre does?

00:03:12 Professor Julie Dockrell 

Sure, probably it's important to say that I think one of the strengths of the center is that we focus on diverse learners. Everybody is an individual, but it's also important to capture that diversity when one does research. We also engage with children who struggle with learning, and also the parents in terms of who support them. And thirdly, comparative data. I think we've done some quite unique studies that have compared across different languages. Greek in English, for example, I know you've done that work, but also across languages that are easier to learn to read, called transparent orthographies, and those that are harder to see how it impacts on children, both their oral language development and their writing. 

I think basically the expertise that we have has provided an infrastructure to support researchers and to develop research projects. The work has been done both proactively and reactively. So, reactively as the center I think we’ve become much more well known nationally and internationally, and when there are calls for research that are out there we actively try and go for them. With the Education Endowment Foundation, we have done some work about evaluating programmes, for example, talk for writing, but also in creating an early years assessment database for them, and we responded with other universities to the Better Communication research programme. 

I'd like to see us as a responsive research center to contribute more generally. But also members of the center are extremely proactive and from our discussions they've developed research grids that have gone to the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme, and also to the EU. I think probably one of the things I'd hope our center is is collegial. We've been involved in the European Literacy Network and we've contributed some studies to there. Also in terms of hosting, over that period I think we had five to six different post-doctoral and doctoral students coming to us. 

00:05:40 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Thank you and can you tell us a little bit more about who is involved at the center?

00:05:47 Professor Julie Dockrell 

The center is inclusive, so we welcome really any researchers who are interested in language, literacy and numeracy. We have a core group who represent staff and doctoral students and post-doctoral students within the department but also in IOE more generally as a core where we have monthly seminars. But we also have regular talks, which people come in and out of depending on their interests and expertise.

I think we've all learned tremendously from our doctoral and post-doctoral students because I would hope they feel that it's a forum in which they can freely discuss issues that are challenging for them. To take the field forward and to accept the fact that all research has limitations, the question is how you use those limitations to enhance our understanding, in our case of language. literacy and numeracy development. 

00:06:53 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Indeed, and I think it's particularly challenging in our case, isn't it, to make that leap from the asic research to the more applied research and to evaluate the impact of that applied research. It's, challenging to do. 

00:07:07 Professor Julie Dockrell 

I think now it's my time to ask you a question, Chloe. I'm really thrilled that you're prepared to take up the gauntlet and go forward with the center. What I'm particularly interested in is finding out what your visions for the future of the center are and how you intend to sustain and develop it. 

00:07:29 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Well, long term my vision is to continue to support this basic and applied research that we do. Because, you know, this research really does have the potential to lead to better support for children and young people’s learning and attainment, and that's what drives us forward, that's what inspires us every day. But, of course, shorter term, you and I've been thinking, haven't we, about the pandemic and the aftermath of the pandemic and how to support the work of center members during this time. 

I was hoping that we'd be able to call this the aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic, obviously we're we're still in it. One of the things that I think we've really missed out on in the last year and a half is this ability to meet regularly in small in-person groups. As you say, this support that we give to doctoral students and early career researchers is so important and I think when it's done in person, it creates a very rich and vibrant and very motivating research environment. So we're gradually getting back to having those types of meetings which will support our doctoral and our early career researchers – these opportunities to discuss research projects, to discuss enterprise projects, to discuss public engagement projects that that's really important work. 

And as you've also mentioned, we've traditionally had a lot of international collaborations at the center, and I'm hoping that as the travel restrictions lift, potentially, we can have more opportunities to get international researchers back to the center, whether these are short term visits to give talks with us, to have meetings, or longer term to actually collaborate on research, I'm hoping that we're going to be able to get that back. 

And I'm also very mindful of how our undergraduate and postgraduate students, so below doctoral level, can benefit from the center as part of the UCL Connected Curriculum. So, as you know, the UCL Connected Curriculum is all about trying to ensure that students are able to learn through participating in research and inquiry, and I want to see how we at the centre can give students more opportunities for that, to be involved in research alongside their studies. 

00:09:36 Professor Julie Dockrell 

I think I'm really looking forward to seeing how this develops. I think this idea of discussion is really important. Some things we've really done a good job over the pandemic in many things, but that exchange with each other has been, I think, lacking.

Chloe, how do you think your work and research in the area has made a contribution to policy or practice? 

00:10:01 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Well, I'm very proud of my recent work as part of the NeuroSENse public engagement project, which is led by our center colleague Doctor Jo van Herwegen, where I've written a blog and produced a video busting some of the neuromyths about deaf children and making a case for why cochlear implants and hearing aids don't cure deafness, and why parents and educators need to pay particular attention to giving deaf children high quality accessible language input, including sign language input if possible from the very start of the child's life. And this builds on my research and the research of my collaborators, but also on the research of people, deaf and hearing, around the world. It links to another project that I've just launched with my colleague Dr Manjula Patrick at UCL’s Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Center, which is a free online deaf awareness course for educators. It's in the early days, but we're getting a lot of very good sign-up for that course, so I'm hoping that the good practice that we're hoping to share with educators really is going to make its way into mainstream schools where a lot of deaf children are educated in mainstream schools but there isn't yet the expertise in the schools for supporting them. So I'm hoping that that work is going to have measurable impact.

And now I'm going to turn the question back to you and ask you the same thing, Julie. You've done a huge amount of relevant work over the last few decades, so if you could just pick one piece of work that you're particularly proud of, and the way that it's influenced policy, what would that be? 

00:11:38 Professor Julie Dockrell 

I'd say it's challenging this notion about diagnosis. Because there's been a lot of work where you diagnose a particular disability, and my view has been about profiling needs, because diagnosis and needs don't necessarily match, and this is particularly true with oral language. So there are many children in classrooms with language learning needs, and the question is, how are teachers empowered to meet those language learning needs by talking with children? And in that vein, we developed, I developed with a colleague, James Law, the Communication Supporting Classrooms Tool, which is a way in which teachers can look at their classroom as an environment to develop the ways in which they talk with children to scaffold that language learning. Because I think many people thought, well, children start talking at the age of two and that's it, we don't have to do anything after that. But of course we're continually developing our language and that language then, once it's developed, feeds into reading comprehension. And I think we were the first people to actually do some work on the writing of children who have language difficulties, to see how that at the time was limiting what they could produce, but to turn it on its head, how we, as educators and practitioners, could scaffold the environment to support them in producing written texts. If you go with a very narrow approach of diagnosing a problem, then you miss the diversity of learners who are out there who might benefit from some of these different approaches that we can think about. And we're all unique in some ways. 

00:13:22 Professor Chloe Marshall 

Thinking back to the composition of the center, I think this is one of the values at the center is that we've had, over the years, we've had colleagues, collaborators, doctoral students, early career researchers, who bring a real wealth of real-world expertise, don't they? You have a background in educational psychology. I'm a Montessori early years teacher. We've had PhD students who were speech and language therapists, who were teachers head teachers, who bring a wealth of expertise. So it's not just research into practice, it's also practice then informing research. 

00:13:56 Professor Julie Dockrell 

Absolutely, absolutely. And also, preventing us from making some very egocentric English generalizations about what teaching and learning is about. Because we need to think more broadly about society as well as multilingual learners, but also languages in terms of the way they impact on children’s development. 

00:14:19 Professor Chloe Marshall 

So that's it for us today. You've been listening to Psyched about Education for further details or other podcasts from the Department of Psychology and Human Development, please see the links at the end of this podcast. 

00:14:33 Female voiceover 

Thanks so much for downloading and listening to this IOE podcast.