The goal of prompting a child is to prevent him or her from making errors while learning a new skill, and to decrease the amount of time it takes to learn the new skill. As a child shows improvement in performing the skill, adults can fade the amount of assistance provided until the child reaches his or her level of independence. Several prompting…

Children come to school with the language of their families and communities. For many children, this means that they speak a nonstandard dialect, an English dialect not used as the primary means of instruction in schools. Examples of dialects include African American English (AAE; i.e., Ebonics), Hawaiian Creole, Hispanic English, and Southern…

The purpose of this article is to describe what could happen in the classroom when parents and teachers have differing expectations of children's behaviors. It also describes strategies designed to accommodate these differences. Differences in acquiring classroom skills can occur because of differing expectations based on children's individual…

This article provides an overview of the family information gathering process in early intervention and the effect of cultural and linguistic diversity on family information gathering. Practical strategies that early intervention providers can use in interviews, surveys, and observations are discussed, as well as implications for personnel…

This article reviews literature on the use of interpreters and offers recommendations that will promote effective communication among family members, service providers, and interpreters who speak the family's language, but have not been trained formally as interpreters or special educators. The complexity of the interpretation process is…