Current research indicates that children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) often are not given opportunities to participate in supportive early storybook-reading experiences in home environments. This investigation employed a single-subject, multiple-baseline-across-subjects design to investigate the effects of a parent…

The Council for Exceptional Children and the Council on the Education of the Deaf have worked together for over a decade to maintain mutually agreed on standards for teachers of children who are deaf or hard of hearing. This article presents the updated and revalidated standards of knowledge and skills for teachers in their initial preparation…

The Council for Exceptional Children and the Council on Education of the Deaf have worked together for over a decade to maintain mutually agreed upon standards for teachers of children who are deaf and hard of hearing. This article presents the newly developed and validated standards of knowledge and skills for teachers who are working on advanced…

An observational study of reading instruction, using the MS-CISSAR protocol, was conducted in general education classrooms, resource classrooms, and self-contained special education/deaf education classrooms in Grades 1 through 4 in public schools within the tri-state area of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Participants were 24 students who…

This study explored the language skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) compared to normal hearing (NH) peers. Standardized speech and language measures, including speech articulation, receptive and expressive vocabulary, syntax and morphology, and metalinguistics, were administered to 39 congenitally deaf children, ages 5 to 14, and a…

Self-contained classrooms and resource rooms have been an important component of the continuum of placements available to students who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, these specialized classrooms have been closing in recent years. A variety of factors are contributing to this, most notably the impact of cochlear implants. This article…

In April 2007, at the annual Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Convention in Louisville, the author had the pleasure of meeting and then dining with Dr. Karen Dilka, executive director of the Council on Education of the Deaf (CED). Dilka also contributed as the on-site liaison and local arrangements chairperson for the Division for…

For more than 5-years, the U.S. Department of Education has been developing and implementing a new data system, ED"Facts", designed to contain all the educational data it collects from states. This article provides a summary of the development of the new federal system and describes some of the benefits and challenges it poses for states,…

This article addresses the acquisition of meaning of words and phrases that refer to aspects of the world that are not directly perceivable. It examines the patterns of semantic input that are available in the linguistic environment that provide clues to allow a child to construct a lexicon that is both broad and deep. These patterns are…

This study attempted to elicit distal gestures within dynamic assessment structured sampling events from six children with moderate to severe intellectual disability (ages 8-13). Using four communication temptations and a least-to-most prompting hierarchy across three sessions, three participants who had both pre-symbolic and preintentional…

Children with disabilities are reported to experience a high degree of directive parent interaction compared to typically developing children because of poor communicative or task skills. This study examines relationships between parent behaviors (directiveness and contingency) and child skills (language and motor) for children with physical or…

In response to the need for family-centered follow-up, this study examined parents' experiences with deafness after early identification. Qualitative inquiry methods were used to explore and describe the perceptions and experiences of nine parents of children identified with severe to profound deafness. Parents participated in face-to-face…

Purpose: The current study presents preliminary nonword repetition data from Spanish-speaking preschool children using a new set of stimuli. Method: Twenty nonwords were constructed to be phonotactically possible in Spanish and to conform to published guidelines for nonword repetition stimuli. Fourteen Spanish-speaking typically developing…

The purpose of this study was to identify potential general outcome indicators (GOIs) of language proficiency. Brief narratives were elicited from 45 kindergarten, first-grade, and third-grade children using single-picture scenes and a standardized protocol. Measures of language productivity, verbal fluency, and grammaticality were examined for…

This article reviews the concept of intelligence from different cultural perspectives and explains why the traditional approach to determining "who is smart" is inappropriate for students from culturally/linguistically diverse backgrounds and inadequate even for determining if mainstream students will be successful in daily living. The concept of…