The 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 usually delivered over 20 weeks in spring and summer.
The intervention involves a member of school staff (usually a teaching assistant or early years educator) delivering three small group sessions and two individual sessions each week to a targeted group of around 3-6 pupils. NELI aims to develop children’s vocabulary, listening and narrative skills and in the last 10 weeks also involves activities to develop phonological awareness and early letter-sound knowledge as foundations for learning to read.
“I’ve just finished the first 10 weeks of NELI sessions and am currently assessing the children. They have made phenomenal progress, especially in their narrative element, and have increased their vocabulary hugely. Many of our children are also EAL and they have benefitted from the modelling and repetition within the programme. Their sentences are more grammatically correct and their confidence in communicating has grown. What an amazing intervention that made a big difference in such a short amount of time!” Jayaben P
“We have the course up and running and I am really pleased with how it is going. The manual makes it really simple to follow and the results are amazing. I have just 4 pupils in my group and all of them have made significant progress. I am really enjoying the sessions especially the individual ones.” Mariana G
“We have six children in our group. The children who now attend all enjoy the sessions. One really inspiring achievement so far is that one of our SEN children who has speech and language difficulties loves coming to the sessions and is so excited to say all of the rules every day. He still needs a familiar adult to help understand what he is saying but his participation in general class discussions has increased dramatically as his confidence has grown.” Sharon R
“I have 6 children in my group and they are loving it. Particularly one little boy who was reluctant to begin a conversation, asks everyday “Are we seeing Ted today?”. All of the children are doing great with retaining the new vocabulary, one of the little girls is EAL and has been going home and teaching her mum the new vocabulary so much so that the mum is enrolling on an English course so that she can support her child further.” Laura F
The content for each group session is provided in a handbook and each takes around 30 minutes to deliver. Each session involves and introduction where children take part in a listening activity, key vocabulary from previous sessions being revised and new vocabulary introduced, 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. These sessions usually last 15 minutes. These sessions should be an opportunity to really develop the children’s language ability, whatever their current level and to revisit and reinforce the information learned during the group sessions.
