Play-Based Intervention Supporting Kindergarten Children’s Language in a Northern Ontario First Nations Community

This research explores prompts that elicit children’s language in play-based contexts, with the goal of providing additional support to children who are linguistically developing as expected for their age, but encounter specific language difficulties. The participants are a Speech Language Pathologist (S-LP), an Indigenous early childhood educator, Kari, and 3 kindergarten children in a northern Ontario First Nations community. The S-LP and Kari planned activities that included free play and structured play geared toward eliciting children’s use of target grammatical markers. Inductive analysis of two videos of play interactions revealed that Kari’s affirmations and questions about children’s lives outside school were most likely to elicit children’s language, including their use of target grammatical markers