Purpose: This tutorial is designed for speech-language pathologists who supervise speech-language pathology assistants (SLP-As) and/ or paraeducators. SLP-As and paraeducators often support young children with disabilities within early childhood settings, but do not always have access to professional development to learn and/or enhance their skill…

Building effective partnership with parents of young children with language delays has strong face value and is supported by multiple areas of research; however, building and maintaining partnerships to optimize child outcomes in practice can be difficult. This article provides a guide to teachers and speech-language pathologists who work with…

Purpose: This tutorial describes a comprehensive approach to the development of collaborative academic conversations in older students with language delays and impairments. Support materials including a link to an instructional video are provided. Conclusions: These students require systematic, explicit instruction to develop competence and to…

Approximately 228,000 children from birth to age 3 are affected by a disability. Developmental challenges may include severe, chronic disabilities that can begin at birth and last a lifetime. Delayed speech and language are the most common types of developmental delays among infants and toddlers. Many of these children are at risk for later…

When Candi Carter, a producer at "The Oprah Winfrey Show", learned that her son, Emerson, was born with chromosome 8p, which causes heart defects, mental retardation, severe speech delay, and other issues, she was immediately thrust into the world of special needs parenting. Like many in her position, she learned quickly that her child's…

The guide describes communication games--simple, noncompetitive structured activities designed to promote conversational and linguistic skills in children with language delays and language disabilities. The approach is distinguished from traditional approaches by the creation of a genuine need for talking rather than arbitrary demands, emphasis on…

A home-based interventionist effectively taught four mothers to embed the mand-model procedure in daily activities to teach expressive language skills to their young children with speech delays. During the intervention phase, parents were provided with feedback along with specific encouragement to use the individualized instructional program…

This case study describes an intervention program with a 20-month-old hearing child with deaf parents. The child was diagnosed as having a significant delay in both spoken and sign language. A home-based intervention program resulted in the child's increased use of sign and spoken vocabulary and the mother's improved interaction style. (Author/DB)

This paper describes a method of language intervention, Structured Methods in Language Education (SMILE), used with students having severe language disabilities due to such factors as autistic disorder, central auditory dysfunction, impaired hearing, or mental handicap. SMILE develops a hierarchy of skills leading from phonology to morphology to…