e delivery is complete, and their views sought on acceptability and ease of use.
(b) Children’s views on E-PLAYS
The children’s view will be solicited using the Fun Toolkit  (which has been designed to measure children’s views of technology) by an RA immediately after each of two sessions.
(c) Fidelity evaluation
On-line recording of the number of intervention sessions completed for each child and their content and duration in minutes will be automatically logged by the E-PLAYS software. For the E-PLAYS computer game, each child will have their own unique login, which will record the number of sessions undertaken, the time that they lasted and which parts of the programme were completed.
E-PLAYS sessions will be observed live by RAs to assess how faithfully teaching assistants actually use it in practice.
We will also explore fidelity issues in the focus groups described above.
(d) Training and instructions
Shortly after receiving the instruction pack and manual, SLTs will be asked to complete a short, open-ended questionnaire giving their impressions of its utility and clarity. Teaching assistants will receive a similar questionnaire after they have received the manual and instruction from SLTs (Fig. 2).
Recruitment data analysis
The number of children recruited and the rate of attrition will be reported by allocation and in total. The number of E-PLAYS sessions completed and their duration will be summarised descriptively for children in the intervention arm.
Analysis of outcome measures
A detailed analysis plan will be produced prior to the final analysis and will be reviewed by the independent trial steering committee. Analyses will follow intention to treat principles, with all data analysed as randomised. Analyses will be entirely descriptive with scores on the TPS, CCC-2, CELF-5 Recalling Sentences Subscale and Magformers® construction task presented unadjusted at each time point.
For the Magformers® construction task, video-recordings will be professionally transcribed and video-coding will comprise observation and categorisation of communicative (e.g. questions, directives, clarifications) and affective (e.g. positive and negative behaviours) items. The coding system is based on micro-analytic theory [52, 53] and was developed by the team specifically to analyse children’s collaborative interaction and has been shown in our studies to successfully detect changes in talk [29, 39, 54, 55]. The coding system incorporates elements from research into collaborative learning, conversation analysis and language impairment [29, 39, 53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60]. Video interaction will be coded by blinded RAs trained to fidelity by the Chief Investigator who has used this coding system extensively. RAs will train by watching and practice-coding training videos until they reach inter-rater reliability with these previously coded video-recordings. Areas of disagreement with the training videos will be discussed and explained by the Chief Investigator. Inter-rater reliability will further be tested between all RAs taking part in the study using a sample of 15% of all video-recordings.
The analysis of all measures will not be concerned with the effectiveness of the study intervention, but instead will seek to inform the feasibility objectives. In particular, this data will be used to characterise the groups at baseline, assess the proportion of analysable data at follow up and provide estimates of key population parameters, all of which will inform the design of a future full scale trial. The analysis of the health economic data will be principally concerned with the completeness and quality of this data. This will be reported together with a calculated estimate of the costs of running E-PLAYS within the NHS and schools and costs of a possible future full-scale RCT.
Process evaluation analysis
(a) Speech and language therapists’ and teaching assistants’ views
The focus groups (a) will last around 1 h and will be audio-recorded and subsequently professionally transcribed. Nvivo 9 software will be used to aid a thematic analysis whi