Ilsa E. Schwarz

Social Skills in School-Age Children and Youth: Issues and Best Practices in Assessment and Intervention.

Social skills allow individuals to develop positive relationships with others; cope successfully with the behavioral demands of specific settings; and communicate desires, needs, and preferences effectively. They also provide a foundation for competent performance in a range of academic, personal, vocational, and community contexts, Effective communication is an essential component of appropriate social behavior. This article provides definitions and conceptualizations of social skills and social competence within academic contexts. It also describes social skills assessment and intervention procedures for school-age children and youth with and without disabilities.

Narrative ability in school-age stuttering boys: A preliminary investigation

Abstract In a preliminary investigation, narrative ability was compared in stuttering and nonstuttering school-age boys using tasks known to be sensitive to narrative deficits. The groups were also compared on the broader domains of receptive and expressive language development using the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Revised (CELF-R). The results did not support the popular view that stutterers, as a group, are more vulnerable to language disorders than their nonstuttering peers. A recent hypothesis that stuttering behavior might be a causal factor in delayed expressive language development was also not supported. The importance of examining individual differences in stuttering children is emphasized for both clinical and research purposes.

Do children recover from specific language impairment

Natural recovery from stuttering is well documented for preschool-age children. If natural recovery from developmental language disorders is equally possible, speech-language pathologists could develop predictive measures for language disorders to save treatment time and money and alleviate parental concern. This article reviews the research literature on recovery from developmental language disorders with particular attention to specific language impairment (SLI). Additional attention is directed to the research describing late talkers and the probability of their recovery. Results of the literature review indicate that recovery is unlikely and that, even with treatment, preschool children with identified language disorders are likely to present with reading and writing disorders during the school-age and adolescent years.

The Removable R-Appliance as a Practice Device to Facilitate Correct Production of /r/

The remediation of /r/articulation errors in school-age children often poses a challenge for speech-language pathologists. This study was designed to investigate whether an appliance placed in the ...

Treatment Effectiveness of Large Group Basic Concept Instruction With Head Start Students

The ability to understand and use basic concepts is a key to academic success. This study demonstrated that short-term, large-group basic concept instruction significantly improved the basic concep...

Reading disorders in stuttering children

Abstract Reading ability in stuttering children has been the focus of research for over 60 years. This article presents a critical review of the literature on this topic. While it is clear that some stutterers experience difficulty learning to read, the contention that stuttering children, as a group, are more likely to have reading problems than their nonstuttering peers is neither supported nor refuted by the literature. This inconclusiveness may be the result of subject selection procedures used in research and the tremendous heterogeneity that exists among children who stutter. Suggestions for future investigations are discussed, emphasizing the relationship between language and reading and the examination of subgroups of stutterers.

Assessing Response to Basic Concept Instruction: Preliminary Evidence with Children Who Are Deaf.

Research has demonstrated that academic success is significantly related to word knowledge. Basic concept words are important because of their use in classroom directions and assessment instructions. It is important that educators assess a child’s understanding of basic concept vocabulary at school entry. For children who demonstrate basic concept deficits, progress monitoring is needed to make certain that they acquire these vocabulary items through instruction. This preliminary study used a single-participant design to determine whether an experimental basic concept–curriculum based measure (BC-CBM) was able to accurately assess and monitor progress in basic concept acquisition as a result of instruction. Four children who were deaf or hard of hearing (M age = 4 years 6 months) participated in the experiment. Results revealed that the BC-CBM scores improved during intervention. The results of this experiment provide evidence to support the development of additional larger scale field-testing of the BC-CBM.

Analyzing the Potential Benefit of Microcomputer Use for Teaching Figurative Language

Microcomputers offer the potential for increasing the effectiveness of language intervention for school-age children and adolescents who have language-learning disabilities. One promising application is in the treatment of students who experience difficulty comprehending figurative expressions, an aspect of language that occurs frequently in both spoken and written contexts. Although software is available to teach figurative language to children and adolescents, it is our feeling that improvements are needed in the existing programs. Software should be reviewed carefully before it is used with students, just as standardized tests and other clinical and educational materials are routinely scrutinized before use. In this article, four microcomputer programs are described and evaluated. Suggestions are then offered for the development of new types of software to teach figurative language.

An Analysis of Deaf Students’ Spelling Skills during a Year Long Instructional Writing Approach

Numerous studies have shown that spelling presents unique challenges for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/hh), and most do not develop age appropriate spelling skills. Spelling errors from 29 middle school d/hh students were analyzed from writing samples that were gathered at the beginning, middle, and end of a year-long writing instructional approach. A linguistic analysis of spelling errors was used to assess each child’s understanding of the phonological, morphological, orthographic, semantic, and visual imagery rules that apply to written words. Our results provide a descriptive analysis of the types of spelling errors made by middle school d/hh students. Results indicate that spelling should be directly targeted during writing lessons. The results provide important information on the acquisition of spelling skills with this unique population and the use of narrative samples to assess spelling.

Comparing proverb comprehension in Korean and American youth

Studies have shown that proverb comprehension is related to the ability to establish mental imagery for proverbs, described by dual-coding theory, and exposure to proverbs, described by the language experience hypothesis. This investigation examined cultural differences in the development of mental imagery, proverb comprehension in isolation, and proverb comprehension with contextual support across Grade 5, Grade 8, and College in Korea and the United States. In general, and consistent with previous studies, mental imagery and proverb comprehension showed improvements with age across cultures. The exception was the finding of no differences between Grade 5 and Grade 8 in Korea on the proverb comprehension tasks. In Korea, mental imagery was significantly correlated with proverb comprehension for all groups except for proverb comprehension in isolation for the college students. In contrast, students in the United States did not show significant correlations with mental imagery except for proverb comprehension in isolation at Grade 8. Overall, the Korean students outperformed the American students, with significantly better scores on all tasks at Grade 5, on proverb comprehension in context at Grade 8, and on mental imagery at the college level. Scores across cultures were equivalent on the other tasks. Results lend support for both dual-coding theory and the language experience hypothesis. However, future studies are needed that control for socio-economic status, which may have influenced the results in this investigation.