Increasing the number of conversational turns children experience is important. However, this isn’t sufficient to ensure that all children become confident and capable talkers and learners.

Research evidence suggests that the quality of conversation matters most, not just the quantity. High-quality language approaches include:

• Shared or interactive reading, where the book is a focus for conversation between educators and children.
• Discussions which go ‘beyond the here and now’. These might include discussing what happened in the past, or what might happen in the future. Or they might be imagination-rich discussions during pretend play.
• Conversations where educators introduce new words to children in a natural way (teaching and modelling vocabulary). This enables them to expand their vocabulary.
• Promoting talk about learning: educators use talk to help children plan, monitor and reflect on their thinking and learning.
• Sustained shared thinking (SST): an approach described in the REPEY Project, which found that episodes of SST were a common characteristic of practice in high-quality early years settings. The REPEY report defines SST as:
  • ‘An episode in which two or more individuals “work together” in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, extend a narrative etc. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend.’

You can find out more about these approaches for children aged three to five years old in our Preparing for Literacy Guidance Report.