When considering what makes a high quality environment in order to assist speech and language development, I sought the views of Early Years practitioners, parents, children, speech and language therapists, Ofsted inspectors and renowned authors.  Through in depth analysis of their perspectives, it was found that they thought the following aspects of a play and learning environment are important to support children’s speech and language skills:

Resources:

Environmental aspects:

Atmosphere:

By assessing the quality of the 27 elements above it is asserted that this can help to improve the quality of the play and learning environment which in turn can improve the quality of young children’s speech and language skills.

Although this has been robustly trialed in various play and learning environments, I continue to collect empirical evidence in this area and intend to publish more details of this when I have stronger evidence to support the claim that the higher quality the environment, then the higher quality the language utilised.