Purpose: This article reviews the literature on students' developing skills in summarizing expository texts and describes strategies for evaluating students' expository summaries. Evaluation outcomes are presented for a professional development project aimed at helping teachers develop new techniques for teaching summarization. Methods: Strategies…

Academic success depends heavily on students' ability to acquire information, but expository texts are difficult to process and comprehend, particularly for students with language difficulties. Support can be provided through instructional discourse, the interactive adult-student conversations that scaffold comprehension and content learning. This…

Purpose: This pilot project implemented and evaluated a theme-based unit designed to teach expository comprehension skills to young children in four preschool classrooms. Method: The program and the unit were collaborative efforts of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and early childhood educators. Within topically related units, 71 children ages…

This case study follows Casey, a child with significant speech and language deficits, from age 4 years 2 months until 9 years 9 months. It focuses on a 9-month period starting at age 5 years 9 months during which a meaning-based phonological intervention was used to improve his intelligibility and language skills. Clinicians evoked frequent word…

This article develops the concept of communicative participation as a means of analyzing the outcomes of language intervention with young children, including those with disabilities, in everyday contexts such as preschool. The construct's five interrelated layers are identified: (1) life-world participation, (2) participant structure, (3)…