Newcastle University

Final Review

COST Action IS1406 Enhancing children's oral language skills across Europe and beyond - a collaboration focusing on interventions for children with difficulties learning their first languagethat has been the focus of interest and work of many dedicated researchers across Europe and beyond since 2015, ended successfully in April 2019. This blog is a brief overview of its goals and achievements.

It is always nice (but at the same time quite challenging) to reflect on the things from the past, especially when the past is intense and when it involves many people, but exactly this has been done recently in the Final Report of the Action. The Report was submitted by the Action Rapporteur after the fulfillment of the requirements of the rules for COST Action Management, Monitoring and Final Assessment and is confidential to the COST Association and the Management Committee of the Action in October 2019, and it was assessed as highly successful in achieving most of the aims, goals and objectives.

As we both contributed to the Action in a passionate and devoted way (through research papers, short term scientific missions and visits, working group meetings, material development etc.), we were happy and excited to take a look at the Report and to see all good things in one place. Indeed, when one reflects on the goals achieved, the efforts behind them get materialised, real and present. In this same way they became real for us and made us feel good. As we would love all of you who participated to experience the same delight, we are summarising some of the segments of the Final Review in this blog (to ECHO the good).

The Report consists of several segments: Main goal and summary of the objectives, deliverables and additional outputs; General assessments and impacts; Disseminations and Action’s general success.

To sum up, the main objective of the Action was to increase the effectiveness of intervention for children with Language Impairment and to improve understanding of the contexts in which interventions take place. According to the Rapporteur, the level of ambition of the entire project was assessed as High but overall, the Action did achieve most of its Objectives and Deliverables.

The Document clearly states that The Action has admirably met the goals set out and if certain parts hadn’t been entirely delivered, they are foreseen to be delivered within the next two years. This is, according to us, very good, as it shows that the work should be continued and that it has a decent and highly important perspective.

The Action has also greatly enhanced international cooperation in the field. The Volume prepared over the course of the Action (Managing Children with Developmental Language Disorders: Theory and Practice Across Europe and Beyond; Law, McKean, Murphy and Thordadottir, 2019), provides a resource for researchers involved in language impairment. This Action has set down the foundations for continuing cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research and for mapping out the issues for the future.

Above all that, additional small projects on interventions were performed, and some relevant publications are either still being prepared or have already been published. It is recognised that some of these publications will be of clear long-term use to researchers, practitioners, as well as policy makers and stake holders. Plenty of these projects have involved early carrier researchers who got the opportunity to learn new methodologies and gather the experience of cross-cultural cooperation, indispensable for their future scientific carrier. 

Dissemination activities are marked as Excellent. The Report stated that there were indeed many highly effective Action activities focusing on dissemination of Action results. The Action web page is also considered good and is recognised for its appropriate content, openness and user-friendliness.

For this Action dissemination was of high interest: one of the primary goals of the Action was increasing awareness about language disorder and communicating to the public, in terms of discussing research findings, best practices and experiences. Thus, disseminating the results was a one of the key points during this journey. On the other and, since the Action gathered researchers and practitioners from almost entire Europe and beyond, the dissemination activities provided an insight into the activities of different Action members, and served as a platform for new ideas and future goals.

What stands out for us (as we like looking at the future), are the long-term impacts that this Action has: reducing the theory-practice gap, making research applicable across languages and cultures and creating the conditions for sustainable and meaningful research in child language intervention.

It is clear from the Report that many things have been done, many goals achieved, and many questions answered. As it is the case with good questions and aims, they not only make one settle with the answer – they provoke and bring out new ones. Therefore, all who participated are eager to keep contributing, keep gathering data and disseminating relevant research and clinical findings to both the research public and to the broader, general public.

The two of us would personally be happy to do so. Thank you all and stay well. 

Ana Matić, MA, SLP, Research Assistant, University of Zagreb & Maja Kelić, PhD, SLP, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Rijeka

Last modified: Mon, 09 Dec 2019 10:38:12 GMT