Dana Kovarsky

A Missing Voice in the Discourse of Evidence-Based Practice.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the discourse of evidence-based practice presented in official written documents of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Documents were analyzed with respect to how language was used to convey a sense of certainty about the professions official position on evidence-based practice, what should count as evidence, and how the role of the client was constructed. Analysis revealed a missing voice—or verbal/ideological perspective (M. M. Bahktin, trans. 1981)—in the construction of evidence. This voice is characterized by observations from the lives of clients and their expressed experiences with assessment and intervention, a form of evidence whose units of analysis do not readily meet the constraints of objectivity and quantification grounded in an epistemology of traditional experimental research methods. Among other things, it will be argued that the current official version of evidence-based practice needs to be reconstructed to include the voices of clients as a form of evidence.

Rethinking the Context of Language in the Schools

When taken together, the involvement strategies that operate on sound and meaning, coupled with the historical, spatial, thematic, and relational frames that make up the human world, help form an i...

The Interactional Dimensions of Language Therapy

This article distinguishes between adult- and child-centered intervention practices according to five interrelated dimensions of therapy context: the event, the agenda, the interactional lead, evaluation, and repair. To illustrate how these five dimensions could potentially manifest themselves during interaction, clinicians were asked to engage a child of their own choosing in both adult- and child-centered intervention. The present discussion focuses on a turn-by-turn analysis of an excerpt from one of the child-centered language therapy sessions. Analysis reveals that simply doing away with three-part quiz question sequences, eliminating explicit verbal evaluations of a childs communicative performance, and changing the function of repair does not necessarily result in a more child-centered interaction. To evaluate the child-centeredness of intervention, one must understand the communicative relationships between speakers as they manifest themselves during ongoing sequences of interaction that are embe...

Contextualized Approach to Language and Literacy (Project CALL): Capitalizing on Varied Activities and Contexts to Teach Early Literacy Skills.

In a federally funded early literacy project, various instructional activities were embedded into an array of classroom contexts to provide supplemental literacy instruction and to contrast childrens engagement and participation in different contexts and participant structures. The study was conducted with English- and Spanish-speaking children from four Head Start classrooms. In a crossover project design, children were trained on similar sets of rhyme and letter targets at different times. Three-way ANOVAs with rhyme and letter difference scores as the dependent variables revealed a significant time-of-test effect for rhyming and significant Time × Order × Set interactions for rhyme and letter generation. Children performed better on trained than untrained targets. Observations of children revealed growth in performance and spontaneity of rhyme skills in classroom contexts. Qualitative analyses documented high levels of engagement, illustrating the value of varying activities and contexts for instruction. Both groups demonstrated their ability to gain from concrete instruction and interactive participation.

“Communicative Participation” as a Way of Facilitating and Ascertaining Communicative Outcomes

&NA; In this article, communicative participation is developed as a unit of analysis for gaining information about childrens communication in everyday contexts. A construct is proposed that consists of five interrelated layers: lifeworld participation, participant structure, participant stance, participant accommodation, and participant resources. Although each of these five dimensions can be pulled apart for the sake of analysis, their impact becomes evident when viewed in relation to each other as they constitute the greater communicative context. Given that communication is central to how people go about building their social worlds, managing their lives, and constructing their identities, communicative participation is a relevant framework for documenting the outcomes of language intervention.