Talk for Literacy is a program to strengthen narrative and oral comprehension skills for first-year secondary school students with language and communication difficulties. It is divided into two complementary subprograms: The Vocabulary Enrichment Intervention Program (VEIP), and the Narrative Intervention Program (NIP).

The initiative was developed by Victoria Joffe, a lecturer at the University of London, who carried out a first cycle of pilot projects in 2006 in 21 secondary schools in the capital. In order to deepen the experience and its results, Greenford High School decided to test the methodology on its students. Talk for Literacy has two learning goals: to promote the complex use of language (narration), and to promote reading comprehension (vocabulary enrichment).

Pedagogy is child-centred, meaning that it adapts to the child’s abilities and progress. In VEIP, techniques are taught to recognize word structure (prefix, suffix, roots) so that students can understand and learn new terms independently. The NIP program, on the other hand, focuses on the reading techniques (tone) and the different narrative registers. The VEIP and the NIP were developed to be complementary, considering, for example, that in the NIP sessions the concepts studied in the VEIP are reviewed. Both the VEIP and the NIP are implemented in two weekly sessions of between 45 and 60 minutes respectively, which are developed as follows: review of the fundamentals of the previous session, presentation of the tasks carried out (the “missions to be achieved”), presentation and summary of the content of the session and definition of the “missions to be achieved” for the following week.

Sessions are given in small groups, by an assisted tutor, a pedagogical assistant and language therapists. All of them were trained at the beginning of the program on methodology and, specifically, on the concept of “facilitating and getting answers”. It requires a series of practical techniques to encourage children to find the answers by themselves, without being asked by the teacher.