Purpose: This nonrandomized feasibility study was designed to provide a preliminary assessment of the impact of a narrative and vocabulary instruction program provided by a speech-language pathologist (SLP) in a regular classroom setting. Method: Forty-three children attending 2 first-grade classrooms participated in the study. Children in each…

Purpose: This article is a response to Alan Kamhi's treatise on improving clinical practices for children with language and learning disorders by focusing on what is known about learning (see Kamhi, 2014, article in this issue). Method: Descriptive methods are used to discuss general learning principles and the fact that they do not always…

Purpose: This study was designed to (a) compare the speech fluency of school-age children who do and do not stutter (CWS and CWNS, respectively) within 2 standard diagnostic speaking contexts (conversation and narration) while also controlling for speaking topic, and (b) examine the extent to which children's performance on such discourse tasks is…

Purpose: The purpose of this early efficacy study (Fey & Finestack, 2009) was to determine whether a new contextualized language intervention (CLI) or an existing decontextualized language intervention (DLI) resulted in greater changes in children's language and narration in comparison to a no-treatment condition (CON). Method: Sixteen children…

Purpose: The results of recent survey studies suggest that speech-language pathologists base most of their clinical decisions on information they were taught during their graduate programs, their clinical experience, and the opinions of colleagues (T. Wolf & J. Balderson, 2005; R. Zipoli & M. Kennedy, 2005). This is contrary to the principles of…

A study analyzed the narratives of 24 predominately English-speaking Latino children (ages 3-5) enrolled in a federally subsidized preschool. The length of narrative did not differ significantly by age. However, older children produced stories that contained longer sentences, a higher proportion of grammatically acceptable sentences, and more…

This article critiques the theoretical basis of the Fast ForWord program, a computer-assisted language intervention program for children with language-learning impairments. It notes undocumented treatment outcomes and questions the clinical methods associated with the procedures. Fifteen cautionary statements are provided that clinicians may want…

The oral reading ability and story retelling abilities of 12 students (ages 8-11) with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to abilities of 12 students (ages 6-9) matched for single-word reading ability. Results found the children with SLI had a greater percentage of oral reading discrepancies between printed and read words. (Author/CR)

A holistic scoring procedure was used to rate spoken and written narratives produced by 10 students (ages 9-11) with language disorder and 30 matched peers. Correlations between holistic scores and structural measures of language revealed that quality judgements were moderately related to textual-level measures of form and content but were…