The NELI intervention follows a structured timeline to help you fit delivery within the school year. After assessing children using LanguageScreen in the Autumn term, the intervention is then delivered over 20 weeks.
The NELI intervention involves a member of school staff (usually a teaching assistant or early years educator) delivering small group and individual sessions each week to a targeted group of around 3-6 pupils. The NELI intervention develops children’s vocabulary, listening and narrative (or storytelling) skills. In the last 10 weeks it also involves activities to develop phonological awareness and early letter-sound knowledge as these are important foundations for learning to read.
Three group sessions take place each week, each taking around 30 minutes to deliver. The content for each session is provided in the Teacher Handbook with a step-by-step guide to delivery. Each session involves an introduction where children take part in a listening activity, introducing new vocabulary in the form of special words, revising vocabulary from previous sessions, a narrative activity and a session summary.
Individual sessions provide a valuable opportunity to consolidate learning from the group sessions, focus on developing children’s narrative skills and enable schools to adapt the level of the session to meet the needs of each child. We recommend two sessions each week of 15 minutes. These sessions are an opportunity to really develop the children’s oral language ability, whatever their current level and to revisit and reinforce the information learned during the group sessions.
