ABSTRACT
Purpose: School-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have been asked to be contributors to the educational curriculum (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2010). The aim of this tutorial is to provide elementary school-based SLPs with a guide to explore curriculum-based language interventions (CBLIs) in their practices. Method: In this tutorial, the authors (a) describe CBLI, (b) review the existing literature available to guide this type of practice in elementary school, (c) provide examples of how we have explored CBLIs, and (d) discuss the existing barriers for implementing CBLIs in schools. Conclusion: SLPs have language and literacy expertise qualifying us to be well-suited for playing an important role in supporting CBLI. The information presented in this article provides school-based SLPs with support to implement CBLIs in early elementary school and illustrates the need for additional evidence to support CBLIs.
Subject(s)
Curriculum , Language Therapy/methods , School Health Services/organization & administration , Speech-Language Pathology/methods , Child , Child Language , Delivery of Health Care/organization & administration , Humans , Language Development , Speech-Language Pathology/organization & administrationABSTRACT
UNLABELLED: This study reports the effects of training six adult caregivers to use an interactive reading routine, termed Complete Reading Cycle (CRC), during storybook reading with their preschool children, aged 3;2 to 3;5, who exhibited language impairment. Caregivers were taught to be more responsive to their children's communicative attempts during reading and to more actively engage the children in reading the story. Measures of child change included communicative participation and lexical diversity of utterances during adult-child shared reading. Children significantly increased the frequency of communicative turns, total number of words, and number of different words produced during shared storybook reading as a result of caregiver training. Five of the six children had higher mean frequencies for story initiations during training. However, increases in initiations were not statistically significant, with considerable variability across children for this measure. LEARNING OUTCOMES: (1) As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to discuss positive communicative changes in children with language impairment during adult-child storybook reading. (2) As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to use the storybook reading procedures with parents of preschool children exhibiting language impairment.
Subject(s)
Caregivers/education , Language Disorders/therapy , Reading , Teaching , Adult , Child, Preschool , Communication , Female , Humans , Male , Speech Production MeasurementABSTRACT
Recent intervention studies have demonstrated that adult-provided expansions of child utterances during storybook reading can result in preschool children's development of two-word utterances that describe characters and their actions as well as grammatical morphemes that are targeted for development via expansions. The present study used an alternating-treatments experimental design to compare the effects of two styles of storybook reading on the production of interpretations by two preschool children experiencing delayed language development. One reading style used a combination of expansions and cloze procedures; the other provided questions followed by modeling of appropriate answers. The children produced more answers to questions regarding the storybook, more interpretations, and syntactically more complex utterances in the condition using expansions and cloze procedures. Results are discussed with respect to the use of these techniques in naturalistic intervention and the relationship between their use and the discourse context of the intervention sessions.
