Children with Speech or language impairment
Speech or language impairment
A communication disorder, such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance.
https://sites.ed.gov/idea/regs/b/a/300.8 Links to an external site.
Towson,J.A.,Green, K. B., & Abarca, D. L. (2020). Reading Beyond the Book: Educating Paraprofessionals to Implement Dialogic Reading for Preschool Children With Language Impairments. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 40(2), 68–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0271121418821167 Links to an external site.
Participants:
Eight preschool children, four paraprofessionals
Strategies:
Dialogic Reading (DR) = a specific type of shared interactive reading, is an evidence-based practice with a strong research base and practical foundation in assisting children who are typically developing and those considered at-risk to increase their expressive vocabulary and oral language skills
- engaging children through techniques such as child-centeredness, elaborations of children’s utterances, active responding, and evaluation of children’s responses
DR is a four-step instructional sequence that is represented by the acronym PEER
- prompt the child using one of the five strategies (i.e CROWD :The first type is completion, where the adult provides a blank for the child to fill in at the end of a sentence. Recall involves asking questions about the events or main idea in the story. Next, adults can ask open-ended questions to encourage the child to describe what is happening in a picture. Adults can use wh-questions (e.g., what, where, why) to ask the child about pictures in the book. Finally, distancing engages the child in relating pictures and words in the book to their own experiences).Prompt refers specifically to the request of a response.
- The adult evaluates what the child said,
- expands on that response, and then
- repeats the prompt to allow the child an opportunity to produce the expanded language.
Justice,L.M., Chen, J., Jiang, H., Tambyraja, S., & Logan, J. (2020). Early-Literacy Intervention Conducted by Caregivers of Children with Language Impairment: Implementation Patterns Using Survival Analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(5), 1668–1682. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-03925-1 Links to an external site.
Participants:
128 child-caregiver dyads
Participating children were required to meet three criteria: (1) be between the ages of 4 and 5:11 years; (2) have a diagnosis of primary language impairment (i.e., language difficulties in the absence of severe cognitive impairment, autism, Down syndrome, etc.); and (3) have at least one parent who would be willing to read to their child in English (regardless of the primary home language).
Strategies:
- 15-week Sit Together and Read (STAR) home-based book-reading intervention, which involves conducting and recording one-on-one reading sessions with their children four times a week using a newly provided book each week.
-embed print-focused discussions designed to increase children’s knowledge about print concepts and the alphabet
-asking questions about print and pointing to print, within the context of adult-child read-aloud to elicit their children’s attention to the forms and functions of print in the book.
-15 specific concepts about print: print directionality, concept of word, and page order when reading.
-‘STAR card’ that discussed the strategies with examples and identified specific print concepts to target in the selected book.
Breit-Smith,A., Olszewski, A., Swoboda, C., Guo, Y., & Prendeville, J.-A. (2017). Sequence text structure intervention during interactive book reading of expository picture books with preschool children with language impairment. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 33(3), 287–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265659017702206 Links to an external site.
Participants:
Four practitioners and six children identified with language impairment
Strategies:
During both the interactive book reading and interactive extension activities practitioners were required to talk about and define the following targets
- text structure (e.g. the book is organized to tell the steps of how plants grow, compare–contrast plants, causes–effects of too much/not enough water for plants),
- signal words (e.g. first, next, then, last, different, but, because, so),
- academic vocabulary words (e.g. seeds, bud), and
- topic knowledge (e.g. plants need water, sunlight, and air to grow).
Practitioners talked about these targets using primarily two language facilitation strategies:
- asking questions that focused children’s attention on the expository structure (e.g. for text structure and signal words; ‘First you plant the seed. Then what happens?’) or asking children to make inferences (e.g. for topic knowledge; ‘If it doesn’t rain, what will happen to a plant?’)
- providing support to children through extending utterances and helping children construct responses to questions.
Procedurally, each session included the practitioners setting the purpose for reading first (e.g. ‘This book tells the steps for growing plants. The steps are called a sequence. We will learn the steps or sequence’), interactively reading the expository picture book next (e.g. engaging children in conversation during the book reading), and finally engaging the children in interactive extension activities based on the book after reading.
Use target technique cards each week