As shown in Table 1, 10 mothers and their children, eight boys and two girls, aged 4–6 years, participated in our study. All the children were enrolled in preschool or in first or second grade of kindergarten (ages 5–7 years) at a public early childhood school (ages 4–7 years) in New York City (United States). The families come from a lower-middle socioeconomic level, and most of the children are Spanish–English bilingual, according to their Home Language Questionnaire and New York State Identification Test for English Language Learners scores, showing a greater command of Spanish. All children participating in this study, except one with typical development, have been diagnosed with DLD, apraxia, or autism. Of the 10 children, 7 were diagnosed with DLD, 2 with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and 1 with childhood apraxia of speech. These diagnoses were completed individually by a neurologist, a school psychologist, and an SLP, as part of the evaluations included in their individualized education plan. This information was collected during initial meetings with families who agreed to participate in the study and included in each student’s record. The study’s principal investigator works at the school as an SLP and is bilingual in Spanish and English.

Table 2 presents a summary of the students’ oral language skills at the beginning of the study, detailing their chronological age (from 4 to 5.11 years) and total scores for the subtests on the Bilingual English–Spanish Assessment (BESA) (Peña et al., 2018) manual, Scale scores range from 65 to 130, with scores between 85 and 115 considered within the average range. These scores are derived directly from the standardized BESA protocol. This evaluation was performed by the SB-SLP (who also served as the PI) at the start of the school year.

The study was conducted in six phases.

The dataset included multiple sources. A total of 10 Routines-Based Interviews (RBIs) were conducted, each lasting 45–60 min and transcribed verbatim. These were examined in an exploratory way, with attention to key phrases that recurred across the data and aligned with EVALOF results. The focus was on identifying patterns of family priorities and experiences rather than quantifying occurrences.

The EVALOF was completed by 10 mothers pre-intervention and again post-intervention. Pre-intervention results were used in a needs-assessment approach, identifying items most frequently rated with the lowest scores to guide the selection of workshop topics. Post-intervention responses were then examined descriptively to identify areas of progress as well as items still requiring support, ensuring that the intervention remained responsive to family-identified priorities.

Workshop data included five sessions (60 min each), yielding one audio recording (50 min), one video recording (50 min), and detailed field notes. These materials were reviewed in depth and interpreted intuitively to capture mothers’ reflections, challenges, and strategies, with emphasis on patterns of interaction and collaborative problem-solving.

Finally, responses from the end-of-intervention evaluation questionnaire were summarized descriptively for closed-ended items and examined qualitatively for open-ended comments, highlighting themes of satisfaction, requests for more sessions, and perceived benefits for children’s language development.

In keeping with the exploratory nature of the study, the analysis drew on an interpretive and intuitive approach (Patton, 2015; van Manen, 1990; Braun and Clarke, 2006; Creswell and Poth, 2018), where researcher sensitivity and reflection were central to identifying meaningful patterns across the data rather than applying a strictly mechanical or frequency-based coding system.

This study adhered to the established ethical principles and relevant guidance at the federal, state and local levels for research with school-aged children. Informed consent was obtained from families, ensuring they understood the study objectives, procedures, and right to withdraw at any time. Safeguards were implemented to protect the children, including confidentiality through data anonymization and secure data storage. Cultural and linguistic diversity were carefully considered to ensure interventions were appropriate and respectful. Furthermore, collaboration between families and the SB-SLP fostered an equitable exchange of knowledge. The study was reviewed and approved by the Bioethics Committee of the University of Barcelona (IRB 00003099). Local IRB approval was not required, as the study followed established guidance for minimal-risk observational and parent-intervention research in schools.

This subsection addresses Research Question 1 by examining mother’s concerns and interactions patterns, as identified through the RBIs and the EVALOF, highlighting both the strategies already in use and the areas that required strengthening.

Table 5 shows the results obtained from the analysis of the RBI transcripts using the developed coding system. This approach allowed for the identification of mothers’ concerns and perceptions about their children’s behavior and communication characteristics. It highlighted observations related to each child’s family, school, and social context, as well as specific comments from the mothers regarding their daily needs and challenges.

The results presented in Table 5 highlight that families were primarily concerned about three aspects of their children’s development: social behavior, communication difficulties, and the need for external support. Regarding social behavior, mothers were concerned about aggression, isolation, and lack of interaction with other children. Regarding communication skills, concerns centered around limited language, unclear speech, and difficulties understanding tasks. Finally, mothers expressed a need for more resources and support to help their children, especially regarding behavior management and improved communication, pointing to a search for strategies both at home and school to address these challenges.

Within the framework of our study, the cases of EB and KS were analyzed in depth; they were selected based on the vulnerability of their families in relation to language and communication difficulties, as determined through a combination of mothers’ use of the EVALOF at home, clinical assessments, teacher reports, observational measures, and the RBI. Both children faced significant barriers that affected their social, emotional, and academic interactions, raising concerns among families and teachers. Collaboration between families and professionals involved informal, day-day exchanges, including conversation about the children’s progress, sharing observations from home and school, and jointly considering strategies to support their language development. (Domeniconi et al., 2025a)

This subsection examines Research Question 2 by presenting changes in family communication practices, documented with the EVALOF over the intervention period, as well as mother’s perceptions of the collaborative workshops and their impact on children’s oral communication competence.

The trends observed in Tables 6, 7 provide an overview of changes in family communication practices over the 4 month period (February–June 2022). Because of the small sample size (10 mothers and 10 children) and the exploratory design, statistical tests were not performed. Nevertheless, clear qualitative trends emerged. Adults showed greater responsiveness to children’s communicative initiatives, included children more often in conversations, and extended topics to sustain interactions. They also clarified children’s messages and encouraged them to self-assess their communication skills. Modest improvements were seen in fostering children’s emotional awareness, recognizing others’ feelings, and verbalizing emotions. The largest gains occurred in supporting children’s self-assessment and emotional expression, suggesting notable growth in these areas. At the individual level, both A5 and A10 demonstrated progress, particularly in self-assessment and emotional expression. Overall, these results indicate meaningful improvements in family communication practices, while highlighting the need for larger studies to confirm these patterns statistically.

The results shown in Table 6 reveal the evolution of interactions in the family context from the perspective of all participating mothers. Some items show an increase, whereas three items (1, 9, and 10) show a slight decrease. Items 4, 7, 11, 13, and 14 show the greatest increase after the intervention process with the mothers was completed. The largest gains were particularly evident in items 11,13, and 14, which related to teaching children to self-assess communication skills, recognize emotions, and use words to express their own feelings. For example, A5’s score on item 11 increased from 0 to 2 and A10’s from 1 to 3, while A5’s score on item 14 increased from 1 to 2 and KS’s from 2 to 3, demonstrating considerable improvements. Items 7,9, and 10 suggested areas that may require further attention, such as aspects of the physical environment and positive assessment of children’s communication. Overall, these findings indicate that the training program had a positive measurable impact on parent-child interactions while also identifying specific areas for continued support in fostering oral language.

According to the scores in Table 7, A5’s family shows mostly stable or slightly increasing scores, indicating consistent progress. For example, scores improved for most questions (for instance, from 0 to 2 for Questions 11 and 13). By contrast, A10’s family shows more gradual progress, with a notable improvement for Question 11, but with less variation in other areas. This suggests that the strategies of A10’s family improved slowly, but with meaningful gains in certain areas.

The final assessment questionnaire, completed by the 10 mothers at the end of the training process, gathered perceptions of the usefulness and relevance of collaborative workshops and communications, as well as the impact on their children’s oral skills development. The questions explored topics such as individual and group reflection, changes observed in the children, and their assessment of the activities performed during the course.

C omments such as “It really helped me understand how to help my child” highlight the value of the training process. Additionally, once a month was suggested as an appropriate frequency for meetings.*¹ The average rating for EVALOF and the training process was 8/10, indicating a positive perception among mothers. This score reflects an overall favorable assessment of the training, although it suggests possible areas for improvement to further optimize the training experience.*² The response to Question 21 reflects mothers’ satisfaction with the program and its impact on their children’s development, as expressed in statements such as “Thank you for your advice and tools that helped us improve.”*³

Quantitative ratings also reflected a positive overall assessment. Responses showed that 55.31% of mothers strongly agreed, 44. 07% agreed, and only 0.62% remained indifferent about the effectiveness of the collaborative approach. These results underscore mother’s recognition of the workshops as valuable spaces for reflection, for strengthening their children’s oral competence, and for enriching family-school collaboration. The detailed breakdown of responses is provided in Supplementary material (Table 8).

The workshops with mothers focused on offering evidence-based strategies to support the development of their children’s language and communication skills. The content was developed using Research Based Interventions (RBI) and grounded in established guidelines for family-centered practice (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [ASHHS], 2020), as well as empirical research on parent-implemented interventions (Roberts and Kaiser, 2011; Cheng et al., 2023; Carson et al., 2024). The RBI framework guided the selection of topics, activities, and materials, ensuring that each session incorporated strategies proven to promote language development. Key topics included the role of mothers and fathers in intervention, developmental language milestones, and practical approaches to expand sentences, enrich vocabulary, and strengthen non-verbal and conversational communication.

Mothers’ perceptions of the challenges they faced, the strategies they implemented, and the outcomes observed in their children were systematically collected using the EVALOF. The most reported challenges included time constraints for practicing strategies at home (6 of 10 mothers), uncertainty about modeling complex language (4 of 10), difficulty maintaining child engagement (3 of 10), and lack of confidence in applying strategies correctly (2 of 10). To address these challenges, workshop facilitators provided guided demonstrations, role-playing exercises, reflections activities, and opportunities for peer discussion, all developed according to RBI principles. Mothers used EVALOF to document observations and reflect on their child’s progress. As a result, most mothers (8 of 10) reported increased confidence in applying the strategies, and 7 observed measurable improvements in their child’s expressive language, sentence complexity, or conversational turn-taking. Illustrative examples included children beginning to use multi-word sentences more spontaneously and showing greater responsiveness during story telling activities.

Overall, these findings suggest that a structured workshop, developed using RBI principles combined with the EVALOF tool, can effectively support parental engagement and children’s language development. These results align with previous research indicating that parent-implemented interventions improve expressive language outcomes when parents receive scaffolded guidance and instruments to monitor progress.

Domeniconi et al. (2025a) demonstrated that brief interventions with low-income families can effectively support children’s communicative development. As in the present study, the topics proposed by parents during individual sessions revealed common strategies and themes, which were then used to design a structured group intervention tailored to the actual needs of the participating families. The results obtained, linked to the RBI, allowed for the identification of the children’s initial behavior, which was characterized by intense displays of anger and aggression. This suggests difficulties in regulating emotions, which correlate with the low ratings assigned by mothers to Question 13 of the EVALOF tool. These problems could be affecting children’s social interactions and emotional development, as well as their ability to socialize during play, which is consistent with previous evidence linking parent-child interaction patterns and emotional regulation to children’s developmental outcomes (Dunst et al., 2011; Mahoney and Wheeden, 2014).

In this sense, EVALOF allows family dynamics to be observed and evaluated in their everyday context, without external interference, and also encourages self-reflection within the family environment. When used as an initial screening tool, it offers a rapid way to identify communication patterns in different families in a short period of time (Domeniconi et al., 2017). This finding highlights the importance of incorporating aspects related to emotional regulation in the design of workshops, with the additional goal of improving children’s oral expression. According to Campos Balog et al. (2022), the use of adapted practical models, such as the routines-based model, is especially effective in addressing these difficulties, particularly in diverse family and cultural contexts.

The routines-based model has been successfully implemented across various countries, demonstrating adaptability to diverse cultural and service contexts (McWilliam et al., 2020a), which provides a useful foundation for understanding the following family observations. From the initial assessment, communication challenges were evident, as mentioned by mothers in the RBIs (McWilliam et al., 2020b). Difficulties were identified in areas such as sharing, participating in collaborative play, and maintaining meaningful verbal interactions, underscoring the complexity of the social and communication skills these children require. These findings reinforce the need for targeted interventions in natural settings to improve these interactions and provide evidence of the effectiveness of collaborative intervention in bilingual settings, a relatively unexplored area in research.

These results also reflect a sociocultural-ecological view of development, in which children’s learning is supported through everyday interactions within their immediate environments. Mothers served as mediators of communication and provided scaffolding through modeling, sentence expansion, and responsive feedback helping their children participate more actively in shared routines. Through play and daily activities, families created natural contexts that nurtured both emotional and linguistic growth. This process of co-constructing meaning is consistent with sociocultural perspectives on learning and complements Gràcia and Sánchez-Cano (2022) findings on discourse and interaction management as central components of oral communicative competence (OCC). By linking their children’s emotional regulation to communication routines, mothers became active collaborators in the intervention, demonstrating the value of reflective and collaborative work with families.

In sum, these outcomes correspond to Research Question 1 by showing that families face intertwined social, emotional, and communicative challenges, highlighting the importance of culturally contextualized and family-driven approaches as a foundation for intervention (McConkey et al., 2020).

The mothers’ requests for help during the workshops reflected a genuine interest in contributing to their children’s development, as well as a need for guidance in addressing specific challenges within the family environment. This commitment highlights the importance of involving families in intervention programs, recognizing their fundamental role in children’s progress. In this sense, Domeniconi et al. (2025a) suggested that future studies could consider additional aspects, such as the emotional wellbeing of the parents and quality of family interactions, which are likely influenced by interventions such as the one in our study. As García Sánchez (2020) suggested, parents must adapt to challenges and take advantage of contextualized learning opportunities to become active agents in their children’s development. We expanded on these findings by providing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of workshops in improving parental self-awareness and the quality of communicative interactions.

Regarding the evaluation of the initial assessments of children on the BESA scale, we observed a notable variation, with scores ranging from 65 to 95. This range underscores the need for personalized analysis to better elucidate each child’s specific functional needs. Fitton et al. (2019) suggested that assessments should address the characteristics of children in bilingual contexts in great detail, which can help refine both the diagnosis and necessary interventions. Our results reinforced the importance of adapting assessment tools for diverse populations and highlighting the relevance of family context in the intervention process.

The collaborative sessions provided a setting for shared reflection and joint adaptation between the mothers and the SB-SLP, consistent with participatory and collaborative design principles (McWilliam and Garcia-Grau, 2019; Verger A. et al., 2021). This process enabled mothers to recognize their bilingual practices as resources, resonating with Li (2023) and Simon-Cereijido (2022), who advocate for interventions that treat bilingualism as an asset rather than a limitation. The mother’s reflections demonstrated how language alternation with everyday interactions supported both linguistic and emotional expression aligning with translingual perspectives (Robinson K. et al., 2020). Throughout the collaborative reflection process, our results indicated improvements in the skills of mothers and children, generating a positive effect on oral language development. This aligns with previous research showing that parent-implemented interventions, when embedded in everyday routines, can produce significant gains in children’s communication skills (Girolametto et al., 2004; Dunst et al., 2011). The close collaboration between the investigator (SB-SLP) and the mothers was crucial for sustain ing the children’s progress over time. However, we observed variations among mothers in the EVALOF scores at the end of the workshops. These differences can be explained by various factors, including adverse situations in some families or a lack of understanding of the context after the initial informational meeting. Domeniconi et al. (2025b) emphasized the importance of understanding both the potential and limitations of brief interventions, as their simplicity and scientific backing facilitate their application in schools and public settings to support families and promote children’s language development. Similar to the studies by Vázquez de Prada Belascoaín (2015) and Domeniconi et al. (2025b), these variations in our results can be attributed to contextual and personal factors. Thus, flexible and personalized strategies must be designed in future interventions.

Reflection on measures of oral competence:

The EVALOF served as the primary tool for monitoring changes in family communication practices and children’s expressive language, while the BESA provided baseline information on bilingual language performance. Together, these instruments offered complementary insights into the expressive and receptive abilities, particularly in areas such as vocabulary, sentence complexity, and turn-taking. However, they were less sensitive to pragmatic aspects of oral communicative competence (OCC), such as topic maintenance, conversational repair, or emotional prosody (Gràcia et al., 2020). This limitation highlights the need for complementary qualitative analyses, such as interactional coding to examine scaffolding processes in mother-child exchanges, conversational discourse analysis to explore pragmatic aspects like topic maintenance and repair, and thematic analysis of caregiver’s reflections to understand how families conceptualize and adapt communication strategies in their daily routines.

Reflection on outcomes measures:

The outcome measures captured meaningful improvements in parental responsiveness and children’s communicative self-awareness. Nonetheless, contextual factors such as economic stress or limited time to practice strategies affected consistency across families. This confirms (Domeniconi et al., 2025b) assertion that the effectiveness of brief interventions depends on flexibility and contextual alignment. Overall, the findings demonstrate that collaborative, mother-child driven interventions can generate measurable change in oral competence while emphasizing the importance of emotional and ecological dimensions in language development.

In conclusion, this finding aligns with Research Question 2 by demonstrating that collaborative, mother-driven workshops can strengthen family communication practices and parental empowerment, while also pointing to the need for more flexible and personalized strategies in diverse contexts.

Some limitations should be considered in the interpretation of our findings. Although this study provides valuable insights into parent-child interactions and collaborative intervention, several limitations should be noted. The sample was small, involving only 10 mother-child dyads, and therefore the finding should be interpreted with caution and cannot be generalized beyond this group. Future studies should expand to include larger and more diverse samples, incorporating fathers, other caregivers, and families from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. The absence of a control group also restricts the ability to attribute observed improvements solely on intervention. Although the study included both children with DLD and ASD, the primary focus was on strategies to strengthen oral communicative competence in bilingual children with DLD. The participation of children with ASD provided additional perspectives, but their distinct profiles should be taken into account when generalizing the findings. Incorporating comparison groups in future research would strengthen causal inferences.

In addition, the reliance on parent-reported data may have introduced subjective bias; therefore, future research should integrate parent perspectives with naturalistic and observational approaches to strengthen validity. Standardized assessments, while informative in some contexts, may overlook the pragmatic and cultural dimensions of oral communicative competence in bilingual populations. Longitudinal follow-up and the inclusion of teachers and fathers (not only mothers) in future collaborative frameworks could further enhance ecological representativeness (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Contextual factors may also have influenced outcomes. Some mothers’ lack of full understanding of the study context after the informational meeting such as the purpose and procedures of the training could have affected their active participation. This partial understanding might be explained by the fact that certain concepts introduced in the sessions were relatively distant from their prior knowledge or beliefs about language development and their educational role as mothers. For several participants, this was their first exposure to structured strategies for fostering oral communication at home, which may have made it difficult to relate the proposed activities to their everyday practices. Furthermore, adverse circumstances in some families, including financial difficulties or stress, may have limited the effectiveness of the training. Tailoring interventions more closely to the specific needs and experiences of each family could enhance the impact.

This study also underscores the importance of professionals understanding family dynamics, with interventions addressing both children’s language development and parent emotional wellbeing. Future research should examine collaborative strategies across diverse contexts, assess the long-term impact of such interventions on children’s communicative competence, and evaluate the sustainability of family-centered practices over time.

Despite these limitations, the findings provide meaningful insights into how small-scale, collaborative work with families can support children’s oral language development and strengthen parent-child interactions. The next step should involve developing culturally responsive, family–school–community models that integrate home and school collaboration, enabling sustainable improvement in OCC among bilingual children from diverse backgrounds, in line with recent work in Spanish-speaking contexts that foregrounds family–professional partnerships (Castillo Mardones and Gràcia, 2022; McConkey et al., 2020).