My PhD thesis was entitled:

“An exploration of the factors in the play and learning environment for the quality of utterances made by young children and what constitutes a high-quality environment for speech and language development”

The focus of the research was on speech and language development for children aged 3 – 5 years old and the impact of the play and learning environments, within an English context, on this aspect of development.  

Previous personal studies had highlighted that the environment in which a child plays and learns can impact on the quality of their speech (Richardson, 2014; Richardson and Murray, 2016) and it was therefore necessary that a more in-depth study be undertaken to establish whether there was a correlation between the quality of the environment and the quality of a child’s speech.  No other literature appeared to exist within this area at the time.

In order to ascertain this, it was necessary to adopt a phased approach.  Firstly, it was necessary to establish what a high-quality environment was, with regards to speech and language.  Previous personal study had found that no such quality assessment tool existed, that was able to be transferred between different environments (Richardson and Murray, 2016) and the second phase of the research was therefore to use the findings from phase one, to establish, and pilot, a rating tool that could be used to assess the quality of different environments.  Phase three, the final phase, then compared the quality of the speech of young children with the quality ratings of the environments in which they were playing and learning, with the overall aim of discovering if there was a correlation between the two.

A presentation exploring this research can be found here:

A universal and transferable quality rating scale: is it possible? (northampton.ac.uk)

References:

Richardson, T.  (2014)  Speech and language development in a forest school environment: an action research project.  London: SAGE Research Methods Cases.  [online]  Available from: http://srmo.sagepub.com/view/methods-case-studies-2013/n342.xml  

Richardson, T. and Murray, J.  (2016)  Are young children’s utterances affected by characteristics of their learning environments? A multiple case study. Early child development and care.  187(3-4), pp.457-468.