Action Plan notes

   During my meeting with Jill I wrote some notes and information about what I need to do an to look for within my coursework. I've included them below so you will have an idea of what I need to do in order to analyse my data:


Data collection:

• It's likely that I will use the 'Oxford Reading Tree' as my reading scheme.
• 1st formal year at school: Year 1 – start to finish
• 3/5 books at 3/5 different levels
• How many colours will children progress through

What I'll look for:

• Complexity
• Grammar
• Vocabulary
• Complexity of vocabulary
• Sentence length
• Phonics
• Recognise consonant clusters (BR – brick, brown, broken)

Data location:

• Allied reading for pleasure books – library
• Borrow books from first schools – can photocopy books at college

 Secondary research:

• Research development of children’s literacy
• How are children taught to read through teachers and the reading scheme
• How are skills scaffolded
• East Norfolk English Language Blog
• Secondary research – theory behind the books to help me analyse them more intelligently

Another meeting with Jill

   I went home and had a look through my 'Beginning the Language Coursework Task' booklet and saw an idea about children's reading schemes which made me think.
   For the past 18 months I have been involved in local libraries with the summer Reading Challenge and with Bounce and Rhyme, singing and reading to children. I also volunteered at an infant school and have strong links there. I am also involved in Girlguiding and for my Queens Guide Award, I did a research project into children's literacy at a national level.
   Therefore I thought, reading schemes seems an interesting topic to learn about. I could use my links with schools, nurseries and Norfolk County Council to gain information as well as order reading scheme books to read at home.


   I spoke to Jill again this afternoon and I have decided on a topic which has been approved :)

• A comparison between the developing language complexity within a children's reading scheme.

Meeting with Jill

Today I had a meeting with Jill to discuss and hopefully decide upon a topic for my coursework so I can get started. However, the meeting brought up more issues and questions than it solved so at the moment I still don't have a clarified title and plan! My three ideas were as follows:

• Explore and compare the language of a 2yr old and a 4yr old. (For my GCSE Child Development I studied a 2yr olds language development and I thought I could revisit her and recreate the project.)
• When do gender differences appear in children's language? (I'm not really that interested in gender - I would rather focus on child language acquisition)
• How do parents read to children? (I thought I could explore how the tone, pitch and pace of voice changes when reading to children of different ages)

Then we came up with another idea:

• To what extent are language stage theories true? (For this I would study the development of 3 boys aged 1-3)

However due to the fact I don't really know the children or their parents that well and I have a weekend job it would be very difficult for us to meet up.
   Lots more ideas were thrown about but none really made me think "yeah, I'm really interested in that." So... I will be meeting with Jill again this afternoon to hopefully sort it out and begin an action plan!

Pre-interview thoughts

   I'm yet to have my interview with Jill to discuss my thoughts for my English Language Coursework investigation and I'm not sure on what I was planning to do. In early July, I had a meeting with my previous AS Language teacher we came up with 3 ideas based on Children's Language Acquisition (CLA) however I can't remember what these were! I remember one was to do with parents reading to children though!