Child Language Teaching and Therapy

This paper presents a case study of a 7-year-old girl with severe language disorder. It explores her input language processing skills using theoretically motivated questions derived from a psycholinguistic framework. It compares her performance on experimental tasks to age matched controls (n = 28). This exploration revealed multiple processing deficits, including auditory discrimination problems. The second phase of the study was a treatment period targeting auditory discrimination. The child’s auditory discrimination improved but these gains did not generalize to other language processes. The paper discusses the results with reference to a developing system.

This paper addresses and analyses changing notions of professionalism arising from recent Scottish policy documents. Attention is given to the concepts of ‘policy’ and ‘professional’. It is argued that the effects of statements in the documents are differentiated and should be set within a complex model of the interplay of the individual professional’s responses with government policy. It is suggested that individual practitioners should seek to make personal sense of policy.

Word and print awareness comprise key elements of young children’s emergent literacy development. There are currently few assessment instruments for examining preschool children’s skills in these areas. This article describes two informal measures that may be used to examine word and print awareness in preschool children. Results of administering these measures, referred to as the Preschool Word and Print Awareness assessment, to 30 typically developing preschool children are presented. This protocol as well as the developmental observations presented may be useful to early childhood educators and speech-language pathologists who wish to examine young children’s emergent literacy knowledge.

Research has shown that children with emotional and behavioural difficul-ties are likely to have additional special needs including undetected communication problems. This study considers the background factors associated with complex emotional, learning, and language difficulties in one individual. It also set out to investigate the effectiveness of an integrated approach, where professionals worked together to identify this student’s special needs, to help him learn and in particular, to develop his communication skills. While the results of a single case study must be treated with caution, this study suggests that integrated work had a positive effect on this student’s ability to interact and to learn.