A review of the literature regarding the training of parents as language facilitators for young language-handicapped children includes a description of the University of South Carolina Parent Training Program, which offers short-term training in desirable interactive styles, elicitation of appropriate language, and language facilitative…

The Regional Intervention Program (RIP) for Parents and Preschools is a language intervention program that encourages parent participation. Parents serve as language trainers for other parents, as language interventionists in the classroom, and as collectors of assessment and evaluation data, as well as communicative interactants with their own…

The article describes components of writing competence for instructors of basic writers (e.g., remedial, disadvantaged, language/learning disabled) emphasizing fluency, clarity, and appropriateness. Implications of research for the teaching of writing (such as the significance of errors) and assessment of writing competence are noted. (DB)

The research on metalinguistics in language-impaired children is reviewed indicating that deficits are not all-pervasive but focus on tasks that require sophisticated linguistic abilities or explicit judgments about language form. Such deficits may result from basic encoding problems of cognitive material. (DB)

To better understand language-disordered children, the article describes prelinguistic development in normal children including such precursors to literacy as literacy socialization, a life filled with literacy events and functions, language awareness, word consciousness, ability to segment sentences into words, phonological awareness, and…

The need to teach precursors to literacy as part of preschool language therapy with language-disordered children is stressed. Assessment and intervention approaches include developing the child's ability to use language in instructional contexts and facilitating language awareness (such as word and phonological consciousness). (DB)

The article reviews the literature on metacomprehension, offers a model of the process of comprehension monitoring, and suggests guidelines for assessment and intervention with language-disordered children such as controlling the complexity of monitoring tasks by manipulating message and listener variables. (DB)

Metapragmatic skills of elementary-grade children in the classroom are discussed in relation to remediation with language-disordered children. Of particular importance in the classroom is children's metapragmatic knowledge of requests and responses. Therapy of classroom interactions should incorporate actual academic material of gradually…

An approach to treating mild to moderately severe cases of the speech disturbance, apraxia, focuses on helping the patient establish a conscious knowledge of how an accurate response is produced through a five-phase training program. (DB)

The article reviews the development of action words in the language of young children, provides a rationale and basis for the choice of action forms to include in an early vocabulary, and suggests strategies for facilitating action-word development in language impaired and normal children. (DB)

The acquisition of spatial terms in the language development of young children is examined. Two primary theories of word meaning and concept acquisition are reviewed, followed by a summary of current developmental research on spatial terms and factors influencing acquisition. Finally, guidelines for the assessment and teaching of spatial terms are…

The article looks at syntactic deficiencies involving simple clause structures and grammatical morphology in young children. A framework for understanding the development of simple clause structures is presented followed by a discussion of the correlates of early syntactic development. Procedures to assess and remediate syntactic deficiencies are…

The article examines the child's ability to produce complex sentences with sections on a structural framework for complex language (clausal and nonclausal complexity), a developmental perspective (coordination of clauses, subordination of nominal, adverbial, and relative clauses), and applied considerations (evaluating and teaching complex…

The article examines children's requests for clarification (RQCLs) in sections on the development of RQCL behaviors in normally developing children, the use of RQCL behaviors by language-impaired children, evaluation of language-impaired children's use of RQCL behaviors, and facilitation of language impaired children's use of and response to…

Children with language disorders experience problems in three dimensions of semantics: (1) content of content (reference, referents, concepts); (2) form of content (structural units of meaning); (3) use of content (functional variation in meaning). Teacher intervention strategies in each area (e.g., for problems of reference, sentence meaning,…