Teresa A. Ukrainetz

An investigation into teaching phonemic awareness through shared reading and writing

This study examined teaching phonemic awareness by embedding sound talk within meaningful literacy experiences of shared reading and writing. Small groups of 5 and 6-year-old children were seen three times a week for seven weeks. Four phonemic awareness tasks ‐ first and last sound identification, sound segmentation and deletion ‐ were targeted in each session, with scaffolding fitting task difficulty and individual child ability. Results showed that such naturalistic instruction lead to gains in phonemic awareness compared to a no-treatment control group for both the treatment group as a whole and for a subgroup of children with lower literacy levels. Treatment-specific improvement was evident in three of the four phonemic awareness tasks: first sound identification, last sound identification, and sound segmentation. Additional observations of language and literacy benefits for this emergent literacy approach were also identified. Phonemic awareness, or the awareness of the sound structure of words, is a metalinguistic skill important to the successful acquisition of reading and writing. Controlled studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of phonemic awareness training in individual and classroom situations for typically developing children and children with language impairments (for example, Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991; Fox & Routh, 1975, 1983; Gillon, 2000; van Kleeck, Gillam, & McFadden, 1998). Training procedures have followed developmentally sequenced mastery of skills in contrived activities apart from reading and writing contexts. While there has been strong support for explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness (NICHD, 2000), there has been little investi

A Preliminary Investigation of Dynamic Assessment With Native American Kindergartners

PURPOSE This study examined dynamic assessment as a lessbiased evaluation procedure for assessing the languagelearning ability of Native American children. METHOD Twenty-three Arapahoe/Shoshone kindergartners were identified as stronger (n = 15) or weaker (n = 8) language learners through teacher report and examiner classroom observation. Through a test-teach-test protocol, participants were briefly taught the principles of categorization. Participant responses to learning were measured in terms of an index of modifiability and post-test categorization scores. The modifiability index, determined during the teaching phase, was a combined score reflecting the childs learning strategies, such as ability to attend, plan, and self-regulate, and the childs responses to the learning situation. Post-test scores consisted of performance on expressive and receptive subtests from a standardized categorization test after partialling out pretest score differences. Effect sizes and confidence intervals were also determined. RESULTS Group and individual results indicated that modifiability and post-test scores were significantly greater for stronger than for weaker language learners. The response to modifiability components was a better discriminator than was the learner strategies components. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS These results provide support for the further development of dynamic assessment as a valid measure of language learning ability in minority children.

The criterion validity of four vocabulary tests compared with a language sample

This study provided empirical evidence of the validity of four vocabulary tests: Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III (PPVT-3), Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT), Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT), and Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (EOWPVT-R) against a 150- utterance language sample for 28 normally-developing pre-school children. Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) standard scores on number of different words, total number of words, and mean length of utterance were used to provide evidence of convergent and discriminant criterion validity. Performance on the vocabulary tests showed significant weak to moderate correlations with the semantic measure, and the predicted lower relationship with the non-semantic measures. Despite this, individual score analysis showed considerable variation, indicating caution predicting conversational language performance from standardized tests.

Stickwriting StoriesA Quick and Easy Narrative Representation Strategy

Narrative is an important target of language intervention. However, oral narratives are difficult to remember, review, and revise because of their length and complexity. Writing is an option, but is often frustrating for both student and clinician. This article introduces a notational system called pictography that can be useful for temporarily preserving story content. Children represent the characters, settings, and sequences of actions with simple, chronologically or episodically organized stick-figure drawings. As a quick and easy representational strategy, pictography is applicable to both individual language intervention and inclusive classroom settings. This article describes benefits observed in narrative intervention, including facilitation of a time sequence, increased length and quality, and a greater focus on narrative content rather than on the mechanics of writing.

Systematic Individualized Narrative Language Intervention on the Personal Narratives of Children With Autism

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of an individualized, systematic language intervention on the personal narratives of children with autism. METHOD A single-subject, multiple-baseline design across participants and behaviors was used to examine the effect of the intervention on language features of personal narratives. Three 6- to 8-year-old boys with autism participated in 12 individual intervention sessions that targeted 2-3 story grammar elements (e.g., problem, plan) and 3-4 linguistic complexity elements (e.g., causal subordination, adverbs) selected from each participants baseline performance. Intervention involved repeated retellings of customized model narratives and the generation of personal narratives with a systematic reduction of visual and verbal scaffolding. Independent personal narratives generated at the end of each baseline, intervention, and maintenance session were analyzed for presence and sophistication of targeted features. RESULTS Graphical and statistical results showed immediate improvement in targeted language features as a function of intervention. There was mixed evidence of maintenance 2 and 7 weeks after intervention. CONCLUSION Children with autism can benefit from an individualized, systematic intervention targeting specific narrative language features. Greater intensity of intervention may be needed to gain enduring effects for some language features.

School-Age Children's Self-Assessment of Oral Narrative Production

This study examined aspects of self-assessment, a metacognitive ability, and oral narrative production in 401 children between 5 and 12 years of age. Oral narrative production was evaluated through the administration of the Test of Narrative Language (TNL). Self-assessment of narrative performance was determined by asking children to self-evaluate their ability to “tell a good story” by pointing to one of five pictures from a “very happy face” (rating of 5) to a “very sad face” (rating of 1). Analysis of the data demonstrated that (a) older children (≥ 10 years of age) were more accurate than younger children in their ability to self-evaluate narrative performance; (b) there was a significant difference in narrative production skills between children who rated themselves as poor performers (self-rating of 1 or 2) and children who were high self-raters (≥ 3); (c) narrative self-evaluation varied in relation to gender, with males tending to more frequently overestimate their narrative ability; and (d) children with poor narrative ability were more likely to overestimate the quality of their narrative production than good narrators were. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.

From Old to NewExamining Score Increases on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III (PPVT-III, Dunn & Dunn, 1997) is a relatively recent revision of the old standby, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R, Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Although the new vocabulary test appears to be improved in several aspects, there is one change that warrants serious attention. Data indicate that children from 4 to 10 years of age are scoring, on average, 10 standard score points higher on the PPVT-III than on the PPVT-R (Williams, 1998). This article investigates possible reasons for this change and discusses implications for clinical practice.

Phonemic Awareness: How Much Is Enough within a Changing Picture of Reading Instruction?.

This article reviews the evidence pertaining to intensity for phonemic awareness intervention for preschoolers and kindergartners with language impairment. The nature of phonemic awareness instruction is considered, including which phonemic awareness skills should be explicitly taught, how to structure these skills into teaching episodes, and how treatment dosage can be determined. Findings pertaining to intensity were extracted from controlled treatment studies on children with typical achievement, low achievement, and language impairment. The state of evidence for treatment intensity has significant gaps, but a tentative conclusion is that 10–20 hr of instruction, delivered as a combination of classroom lessons and supplementary intervention, can enable children with language impairment to achieve the phonemic awareness skills needed for reading and spelling.

Improving text comprehension: scaffolding adolescents into strategic reading.

Understanding and learning from academic texts involves purposeful, strategic reading. Adolescent readers, particularly poor readers, benefit from explicit instruction in text comprehension strategies, such as text preview, summarization, and comprehension monitoring, as part of a comprehensive reading program. However, strategies are difficult to teach within subject area lessons where content instruction must take primacy. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have the expertise and service delivery options to support middle and high school students in learning to use comprehension strategies in their academic reading and learning. This article presents the research evidence on what strategies to teach and how best to teach them, including the use of explicit instruction, spoken interactions around text, cognitive modeling, peer learning, classroom connections, and disciplinary literacy. The article focuses on how to move comprehension strategies from being teaching tools of the SLP to becoming learning tools of the student. SLPs can provide the instruction and support needed for students to learn and apply of this important component of academic reading.

Dynamic Assessment of Narratives: Efficient, Accurate Identification of Language Impairment in Bilingual Students

Purpose This study investigated the classification accuracy of a concentrated English narrative dynamic assessment (DA) for identifying language impairment (LI). Method Forty-two Spanish-English bilingual kindergarten to third-grade children (10 LI and 32 with no LI) were administered two 25-min DA test-teach-test sessions. Pre- and posttest narrative retells were scored in real time. Using a structured intervention approach, examiners taught children missing story grammar elements and subordination. A posttest was administered using a parallel story. Results Four classification predictors were analyzed: posttest scores, gain scores, modifiability ratings, and teaching duration. Discriminant function analysis indicated that an overall modifiability rating was the best classifier, with 100% sensitivity and 88% specificity after 1 DA session and 100% sensitivity and specificity after 2 sessions. Any 2 combinations of posttest scores, modifiability ratings, and teaching duration for just 1 session resulted in sensitivity and specificity rates over 90%. Receiver operating characteristic analyses were used to identify clinically usable cutoff points. Post hoc exploration indicated that similar results could be obtained after only one 5-10-min teaching cycle, potentially further abbreviating the DA process. Conclusion Concentrated English narrative DA results in high classification accuracy for bilingual children with and without LI. This efficient version of DA is amenable to clinical use.