Suggests practical ways of teaching functional communication on the elementary level. This approach provided opportunities for students to practice communication skills in exercise settings. Recommends a sequence of activities for teachers: observe patterns of child communication, isolate communication functions, design instructional objectives,…

Describes ERIC resources that present research on children's language usage and development and that suggest activities for the promotion of language development. (ET)

A classroom-oriented therapeutic program was devised for four pragmatically impaired preschoolers who showed little spontaneous language use within the classroom. Intervention strategies focused on facilitating interactions during free play and were based on four principles for practitioners: be child-oriented; engineer the environment; use…

This sequential analysis tested the relative extent to which several adult utterance types elicited conversational replies from eight developmentally delayed children (mean age 53 months). Among findings were that child replies of any length were elicited by adult topic continuations more than by any other adult utterance type. (Author/DB)