Does Play Make a Difference? How Play Intervention Affects the Vocabulary Learning of At-Risk Preschoolers (original) (raw)

2010, American Journal of Play

Merging the literatures of how to enhance young children's vocabulary development and how to improve learning through play, this study tested two vocabularyteaching protocols on at-risk preschool children: Explicit Instructional Vocabulary Protocol (EIVP) and shortened EIVP and a play session (EIVP + Play). From a group of 118 lowest-performing students, 49 children were divided into two groups and received either EIVP or EIVP + Play twice weekly in thirty-minute tutoring sessions over the course of four months. A total of 64 words were taught. The results revealed that children who received the EVIP + Play showed more growth on both receptive-vocabulary and expressive-vocabulary measures and that more children who received EIVP + Play met the benchmark on the receptive vocabulary, measured by their performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT III). Additionally, children in the EIVP + Play group showed a steeper growth trajectory on the curriculum-based measurement tool. The premise and importance of guided play in literacy learning is discussed, and further research is suggested. "Vocabulary learning is an essential component of early literacy achievement" (Roskos et al. 2008, 49), one at the heart of oral language mastery and of reading comprehension (Hirsch 2003). Researchers find that children who enter school with poor vocabularies often experience difficulties in learning to read. They also report that the size of a child's early vocabulary predicts the child's later academic achievement (Walker et al. 1994). Similarly, Hart and Risley (1995) write that vocabulary at age three is strongly associated with reading comprehension at the end of third grade. Data suggest early mastery of vocabulary is important. Children may differ by several thousand basic word meanings (Biemiller and Slonim 2001) by the time they enter school. When children begin school with such large differences in vocabulary, the gap usually never closes and, in fact, it often widens. Although we have a good idea of the importance of developing a wide vocabulary early, we are less clear about how to best teach vocabulary to young children. Most current vocabulary teaching strategies focus on developing the vocabulary of children in kindergarten through eighth grade. Few vocabulary teaching strategies are aimed at children under five years old, mainly because we think of vocabulary growth in children of this age as only one component in their developing language skills (Yang 2006). We need studies that explore the efficacy of teaching vocabulary to young children to make sure our earlychildhood programs are research based. To develop effective strategies, researchers must consider not only the vocabulary literature but also the literature on early-childhood development. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC 2009a), any instruction for young children ought to consider the children's ages and their developmental progress. NAEYC recognizes that play is a central component of developmentally appropriate practice (Bredekamp and Copple 1997) and a vehicle for developing language, cognition, and social competence. Thus, the literature on play has the potential to provide guidance for early vocabulary instruction. Play is critical for developing the oral language skills children need to learn how to read (Bergen and Mauer 2000). Researchers discovered that children at play often use higher forms of language than normal (Bruner 1982; Wells 1983; Johnson, Christies, and Wardle 2005). For example, Bruner (1983) found that "the most complicated grammatical and pragmatic forms of language appear first in play activity" (65). Other researchers have shown that when children learn through play, it stimulates their language development (Bransford,