Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools最新文献

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder frequently have difficulty with both academic success and language learning and use. This clinical focus article describes core principles derived from a larger program of research (National Science Foundation 1748298) on language intervention combined with science instruction for preschoolers. It serves as an illustration of a model for integrating language intervention with curricular content delivery.

Method: We present a five-step model for a speech-language pathologist and other school professionals to follow to (a) understand the grade-level core curriculum objectives; (b) align intervention targets with the curriculum; (c) select a therapy approach that aligns with both goals and curricular content, and (d) methods for implementing the intervention; and (e) verify that both the intervention and the curriculum have been provided in accordance with best practices. We apply this model to the Next Generation Science Standards, a science curriculum popular in the United States, and to grammar and vocabulary interventions, two areas of difficulty for children with developmental language disorders, though it would be possible to extend the steps to other curricular areas and intervention targets.

Conclusions: We conclude by discussing the barriers and benefits to adopting this model. We recognize that both speech-language pathologists and teachers may have limited time to implement language intervention within a general education curriculum, but we suggest that the long-term benefits outweigh the barriers.

Purpose: We investigated and compared the outcomes from two standardized, norm-referenced screening assessments of language (i.e., Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool-Second Edition [CELFP-2], Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test [DELV-ST]) with African American preschoolers whose spoken dialect differed from that of General American English (GAE). We (a) described preschoolers' performance on the CELFP-2 Core Language Index (CLI) and its subtests with consideration of degree of dialect variation (DVAR) observed, (b) investigated how the application of dialect-sensitive scoring modifications to the expressive morphology and syntax Word Structure (WS) subtest affected CELFP-2 CLI scores, and (c) evaluated the screening classification agreement rates between the DELV-ST and the CELFP-2 CLI.

Method: African American preschoolers (N = 284) completed the CELFP-2 CLI subtests (i.e., Sentence Structure, WS, Expressive Vocabulary) and the DELV-ST. Density of spoken dialect use was estimated with the DELV-ST Part I Language Variation Status, and percentage of DVAR was calculated. The CELFP-2 WS subtest was scored with and without dialect-sensitive scoring modifications.

Results: Planned comparisons of CELFP-2 CLI performance indicated statistically significant differences in performance based on DELV-ST-determined degree of language variation groupings. Scoring modifications applied to the WS subtest increased subtest scaled scores and CLI composite standard scores. However, preschoolers who demonstrated strong variation from GAE continued to demonstrate significantly lower performance than preschoolers who demonstrated little to no language variation. Affected-status agreement rates between assessments (modified and unmodified CELFP-2 CLI scores and DELV-ST Part II Diagnostic Risk Status) were extremely low.

Conclusions: The application of dialect-specific scoring modifications to standardized, norm-referenced assessments of language must be simultaneously viewed through the lenses of equity, practicality, and psychometry. The results of our multistage study reiterate the need for reliable methods of identifying risk for developmental language disorder within children who speak American English dialects other than GAE.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26017978.

Purpose: Emerging literature suggests caregiver self-efficacy is an important factor related to caregivers' shared reading practices with their children. Reduced shared reading has been documented among families of caregiver(s) with language-based learning disabilities (LBLD). Yet, it remains unclear whether caregivers' history of language and reading difficulties is associated with caregiver self-efficacy. The purpose of this study was to examine whether self-efficacy in language- and reading-related caregiver activities related to caregiver history of language and reading difficulties and shared reading practices.

Method: One hundred seventy-six caregivers of children aged 18-60 months completed a custom self-efficacy in language- and reading-related caregiver activities questionnaire, as well as demographic, history of language and reading difficulties (used both as a continuous measure and to dichotomize caregivers with and without LBLD history), and shared reading measures in a one-time survey.

Results: Caregivers with a history of LBLD reported an overall lower self-efficacy and a reduced amount of time reading with their children per week than caregivers without LBLD history. Examining caregiver history of language and reading difficulties continuously across the whole group, self-efficacy mediated the relationship between caregiver difficulties and shared reading practices, even when caregiver education was incorporated as an additional mediator in models.

Conclusions: Findings indicate that self-efficacy and caregiver education mediate the relationship between caregiver history of language and reading difficulties and shared reading practices. Consideration of self-efficacy by clinicians and educators is warranted when promoting shared reading practices to caregivers of young children. There is a need for future research to examine relationships between self-efficacy and shared reading among caregivers with LBLD of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25901590.

Purpose: Self-reported listening-related fatigue in adolescents with hearing loss (HL) was investigated. Specifically, the extent to which listening-related fatigue is associated with school accommodations, audiologic characteristics, and listening breaks was examined.

Method: Participants were 144 adolescents with HL ages 12-19 years. Data were collected online via Qualtrics. The Vanderbilt Fatigue Scale-Child was used to measure listening-related fatigue. Participants also reported on their use of listening breaks and school accommodations, including an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 plan, remote microphone systems, closed captioning, preferential seating, sign language interpreters, live transcriptions, and notetakers.

Results: After controlling for age, HL laterality, and self-perceived listening difficulty, adolescents with an IEP or a 504 plan reported lower listening-related fatigue compared to adolescents without an IEP or a 504 plan. Adolescents who more frequently used remote microphone systems or notetakers reported higher listening-related fatigue compared to adolescents who used these accommodations less frequently, whereas increased use of a sign language interpreter was associated with decreased listening-related fatigue. Among adolescents with unilateral HL, higher age was associated with lower listening-related fatigue; no effect of age was found among adolescents with bilateral HL. Listening-related fatigue did not differ based on hearing device configuration.

Conclusions: Adolescents with HL should be considered at risk for listening-related fatigue regardless of the type of hearing devices used or the degree of HL. The individualized support provided by an IEP or 504 plan may help alleviate listening-related fatigue, especially by empowering adolescents with HL to be self-advocates in terms of their listening needs and accommodations in school. Additional research is needed to better understand the role of specific school accommodations and listening breaks in addressing listening-related fatigue.

Purpose: According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), prevention, identification, assessment, and intervention of children who are learning to read and write are within the scope of practice for school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Furthermore, for SLPs who work in the school setting, it is not uncommon to have struggling readers and poor spellers on their caseloads. Importantly, for students who have difficulty in spelling, their spelling errors are among the early indicators of dyslexia and can provide a means for identifying readers who may benefit from early intervention. SLPs can both assess spelling skills and implement evidence-based spelling and literacy diagnosis and instruction. Spelling instruction in kindergarten through the high school grades that is heavily grounded in metalinguistic activities can provide access to mental representations of word spellings, pronunciations, and meanings; links between whole-word and phonics approaches to reading instruction; and a foundation for reading fluency and comprehension.

Conclusions: Learning to spell is essential for learning to read. Accordingly, this tutorial aims to elucidate how to (a) assess and identify phases of spelling development and (b) teach spelling to facilitate reading through a listening-first approach.

Purpose: Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents' language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are task-related differences across the elicitation tasks.

Method: Forty-four typically developing adolescents with ages ranging from 12;2 to 17;11 (years;months; M = 15;2; 21 boys and 23 girls) participated in the study. They completed four spoken discourse tasks: (a) story generation using a wordless picture book, (b) fable retell, (c) six personal narratives in response to emotion-based prompts, and (d) monologic response to two stories that contained a moral dilemma. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for four language performance measures tapping into language productivity, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility.

Results: Despite individual variability in performance, mean scores were close to median scores for most measures, suggesting a symmetrical distribution. As expected, all four language performance measures were significantly different across the four elicitation tasks. The personal narrative task elicited the longest samples, with the highest verbal fluency. In contrast, both lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were the strongest in response to the fable retell and the moral dilemma tasks.

Conclusions: This investigation provides speech-language pathologists with an overview of how task-related factors may impact adolescent language performance. These findings may be used to support their clinical decision-making processes in choosing a suitable discourse task when conducting a comprehensive spoken language assessment. Three hypothetical case examples are used to illustrate the decision-making process.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25761768.

Purpose: Oral language skills provide a critical foundation for formal education and especially for the development of children's literacy (reading and spelling) skills. It is therefore important for teachers to be able to assess children's language skills, especially if they are concerned about their learning. We report the development and standardization of a mobile app-LanguageScreen-that can be used by education professionals to assess children's language ability.

Method: The standardization sample included data from approximately 350,000 children aged 3;06 (years;months) to 8;11 who were screened for receptive and expressive language skills using LanguageScreen. Rasch scaling was used to select items of appropriate difficulty on a single unidimensional scale.

Results: LanguageScreen has excellent psychometric properties, including high reliability, good fit to the Rasch model, and minimal differential item functioning across key student groups. Girls outperformed boys, and children with English as an additional language scored less well compared to monolingual English speakers.

Conclusions: LanguageScreen provides an easy-to-use, reliable, child-friendly means of identifying children with language difficulties. Its use in schools may serve to raise teachers' awareness of variations in language skills and their importance for educational practice.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between speechreading ability, phonological skills, and word reading ability in typically developing children.

Method: Sixty-six typically developing children (6-7 years old) completed tasks measuring word reading, speechreading (words, sentences, and short stories), alliteration awareness, rhyme awareness, nonword reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN).

Results: Speechreading ability was significantly correlated with rhyme and alliteration awareness, phonological error rate, nonword reading, and reading ability (medium effect sizes) and RAN (small effect size). Multiple regression analyses showed that speechreading was not a unique predictor of word reading ability beyond the contribution of phonological skills. A speechreading error analysis revealed that children tended to use a phonological strategy when speechreading, and in particular, this strategy was used by skilled speechreaders.

Conclusions: The current study provides converging evidence that speechreading and phonological skills are positively related in typically developing children. These skills are likely to have a reciprocal relationship, and children may benefit from having their attention drawn to visual information available on the lips while learning letter sounds or learning to read, as this could augment and strengthen underlying phonological representations.

Purpose: Dialogic reading (DR) is an evidence-based method for reading with young children that is associated with improvements in children's oral language skills. There is, however, a lack of consensus on (a) how to train educators to deliver the intervention and (b) methods for assessing implementation fidelity. We designed this study to provide preliminary data about the viability of online video modules as an initial training option within a future tiered training model.

Method: We employed a within-subject repeated-measures group design to evaluate educators' (N = 20) implementation of DR after viewing training videos. Educators filmed themselves reading three storybooks with a child "as they would typically" to establish pretest reading behaviors. After being given access to a series of DR training videos, the educators recorded themselves reading three storybooks with the child using DR strategies as a posttest measure.

Results: Educators improved their use of individual strategies included in the DR instructional sequence at posttest; however, most participants did not consistently follow the entire instructional sequence as designed. Only one educator delivered the complete DR instructional sequence in > 80% of opportunities at posttest.

Conclusion: Modifications to video training modules and additional coaching support may be warranted for many educators to achieve the level of implementation fidelity needed to improve the child's oral language skills from the intervention.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25749387.

Purpose: In the current age of greater digital delivery of services, it is important to examine the validity and differences between spoken and digital delivery of materials. The current study is a practice-based research partnership between school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and researchers, evaluating presentation effects and validity of a narrative retell assessment tool created by SLPs.

Method: Fifty-one children across kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 completed the narrative retell task, retelling One Frog Too Many and Frog Goes to Dinner in three in-person story presentation conditions administered 1 week apart: spoken, iPad with audio-recorded natural rate of speech, and iPad with slow rate of speech. This was followed by 10 comprehension questions related to story events. Children also completed the Story Retelling subtests from the Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills (TILLS).

Results: Children recalled significantly fewer events in the spoken condition compared to audio-recorded iPad conditions. No significant effect of speaking rate was found. Presentation condition and rate did not affect performance on comprehension questions. Correlations among retell measures and corresponding subtests on a standardized language test ranged from weak to strong, providing some evidence of concurrent validity.

Conclusions: This practice-based research partnership provided valuable insight into differences in delivery modality as well as the validity of a school-based SLP created narrative retell assessment tool. This study found that rate did not impact recall of events or performance on comprehension questions. Additionally, children performed better on narrative retell measures when stories were told using an iPad. This highlights the potential for iPad delivery as an option in narrative retell tasks. Finally, this study provided an initial examination of the Narrative Evaluation Tool's validity, finding the tool captures ability to recall narrative events; however, future studies are needed to examine the tool's validity as a measure of narrative comprehension.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25260910.