What is TWiTCH?
Young children entering school with poor oral vocabulary skills may be ‘doubly disadvantaged’. Their poor oral vocabulary skills will likely impede their attempts to become proficient readers while also possibly increasing the frequency of other problem behaviours.
TWiTCH is a professional development programme for early years practitioners. In the TWiTCH programme we coach practitioners to use dialogic reading prompts and specific language structures to encourage meaningful conversations to support their language development.
Through TWiTCH training, practitioners learn how to use a clearly structured intervention that builds on familiar early years practice such as storytime and small group work. This approach has been shown to improve the quality and quantity of adult-child interactions, leading to improvements in the vocabulary, sentence complexity and ability to articulate their ideas.
The TWiTCH programme takes place in story time sessions and is based on well-known fairy tales with simple story lines. In addition, it draws on the principles of dialogic pedagogy (teaching through dialogue) by using the dilemmas and moral concepts in these stories as the basis for discussion.
In TWiTCH sessions, the adult uses facilitative rather than directive questioning approaches to develop children’s language and thinking skills. For example: practitioners might ask children to discuss “Do you need to have superpowers to be a hero?” Over time, this means children develop more advanced language skills as they give (and justify) their reasons for what happens in the stories.
Why dialogic reading?
Young children entering school with poor oral vocabulary skills may be “doubly disadvantaged.” Their poor oral vocabulary skills will likely impede their attempts to become proficient readers while also possibly increasing the frequency of their problem behaviours. Dialogic Reading is a scientifically validated shared storybook reading intervention that is known to boost at risk children’s oral vocabulary skills. As such, use of Dialogic Reading is one potential way to help children avoid both later reading failure and the negative outcomes associated with poor behaviour.’
(Morgan & Meier, 2018).
Case Studies
Case Study 1
“Child A has selective mutism and only talks at home with her dad. At present we are looking at ways to develop her confidence in communication skills within the setting. During the Twitch programme, child A really started to get involved with the actions as well as the extensions, such as role play set up in the classroom on week 3. During the story sessions, child A benefited in seeing intonation of the new words introduced and started to copy their peers. From this, it helped her confidence in joining in with those around her, as she could take what she had learnt expressively and use it to initiate the set play around the story.”
Case Study 2
“At the start of the programme we had a staff member who was not overly enthusiastic about delivering the programme due to confidence and having the roleplay. To help several more confident practitioners did a master class on each section and then encouraged the staff member to try various ideas herself. Our TWiTCH Coach also came and provided a demonstration, which provided valuable insight. From this, the staff member’s delivery has improved overall.”
Testimonials
“Since accessing TWiTCH every day, he can hold a full conversation with staff and other children within the setting and expresses his wants and needs throughout the day.”
“When she started with speech it wasn’t clear but now, she speaks freely and clearly, and gives a reason.”
“She initially had low confidence and was really quiet but after listening to practitioner’s model language she has become more confident.”
“I am really pleased how their speech has progressed and given them confidence to speak their minds.”
