Ouders, Taal en Interactie in Opstap Opnieuw

Home-based intervention programs should not only offer all those qualities that are required for every intervention program for youngsters, but also have to take care that they can be used by low-educated, sometimes illiterate parents. A fact that must also be taken into account is that parent-child interaction in many families of ethnic minorities take place in other languages than the dominant language of education at school. For these reasons, the Dutch home-based program Opstap Opnieuw (Step-up Anew) has tried to combine rich contents with simple procedures and has been developed in four different languages, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, and Papiamentu. The focus in this article is on the criteria behind the combined requirements of high-quality interaction, suitability for low-educated parents, and versions in four different languages, especially for language development and emergent literacy. In addition, some outcomes of the first evaluations are presented.