Child Language Teaching and Therapy

A principled account of preschool language intervention can be derived from the nature of language learning in general and from our under standing of the needs of language-disordered children in particular. This essay attempts to explicate these relationships. The guiding concepts of FIT, FOCUS, and FUNCTIONALITY are used to generate ten instructional strategies for language disordered children in all settings.

Recent research in social cognition and discourse has led to a reexamina tion of how young children interpret instructions in language compre hension tests. This paper reviews some of the ways in which test presenta tion can influence children's understanding of what is being talked about and what they are being asked to do.

The normal child's linguistic experiences at home and school have received much attention in recent comparative studies, but little research has been carried out on the experiences of handicapped children in interaction with parents and teachers. The study focuses on a videorecorded book-reading situation, and compares the styles of mothers and teachers with young deaf children, examining how different adult styles affect child contributions in interaction. The results suggest that the children experience longer and more elaborate dialogues in book-reading with teachers, but with their mothers are able to exert more control in initiating and sustaining con versations. These findings are related to goals which mothers and teachers profess in such situations.

The nature and development of children's conversation skills has attracted considerable attention in recent research. By the time they reach school age, children have acquired a basic ability to converse, involving the integration of various cognitive, social and linguistic skills. Some examples of these skills and of conversational disabilities are outlined. As conversation is an interactional activity, it is appropriate to focus on the interactional contexts of children's conversational activity. The nature of talk in classrooms and clinical settings is considered in this respect.

A language school provides a total remedial and learning environment for the language disordered child, in which the speech therapist can ficnction most effectively by participating in a staff team. Team members from different disciplines make separate but complementary contributions to the remedial programme, but productive fusion of these approaches is not achieved without effort and good will. The therapist's role can be defined (1) with other professionals as communicator, both giving and receiving information, and coordinator of language programmes, (2) with parents as informant, listener and developer of skills, (3) with the children as diagnostician, therapist and - constantly - learner.

Recent approaches to the identification and evaluation of language disorders in children have moved from reliance on tests and elicitation procedures to examination of the child's actual linguistic production in a conversational setting. The purpose of this paper is to present 14 clinical procedures that are available for use as language sample analyses, and to review and evaluate several of these procedures in detail.

This paper argues for a new behavioural model of language facilitation. Current behavioural language programmes are critically analysed in terms of their poor generalizability to the natural language environment. More cognitively oriented developmental language research is cited as providing a relevant data base upon which to build behavioural language facilitation procedures. Such methods, which exploit the natural language environ ment and which emphasize child-initiated conversations, are more likely to facilitate appropriate language use which, in turn, is more likely to generalize. Practical examples of such methods are described. Finally, tentative implications of this for a behavioural theory of language teaching are proposed for consideration.

An Infant Language Unit was set up in a well established special school for a seven-month pilot period. All aspects of the Unit organization were evaluated. The basis of speech therapy provision in the Infant Department was examined in order to provide the most effective treatment for the children in the broad areas of phonology, syntax and comprehension. The progress of twelve children aged 5 to 7 years was measured, and the relevance of the assessments discussed. The results of the pilot study led to the long-term continuation of the Language Unit. Points for further discussion arising from the pilot study are set out.