Few American Sign Language (ASL) assessments are readily available for educators to administer and score to document deaf students' skill levels and direct ASL instruction. Even fewer studies include deaf students with intellectual disabilities or document deaf students' ASL skills across time. The present study reports deaf school-aged students'…

GTM (Grammar Translation Method) is still the commonly utilized method in EFL classes in Turkish Education System. Based on a phenomenographic research design, this paper inquires the personal constructs of EFL state school teachers (n= 15) on the related issue. There in lies the major result in that non-native EFL teachers, who have learnt…

The article presents a framework for understanding the pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, text, and phonological aspects of language that underlie both oral and written communication. It gives suggestions for ways speech-language pathologists can assess children's language skills that are essential for success in a whole language program. (Author/JDD)

This article first reviews the research establishing the need to sample text-level discourse in assessment of language abilities and identifies issues for clinicians constructing their own language sampling protocols. It then describes two protocols for use in school- and clinic-based settings, with examples of how these protocols have been…

Techniques for stirring students' interest in writing include: (1) exposing them to eloquent language use; (2) group poetry-writing (each student writes one line of a class poem); and (3) adapting why-and-because outlines intended for teaching college writing for use by younger students. Suggestions for obtaining writing quantity and quality are…

Discusses the potential of reading aloud by students to increase their interest in and comprehension of reading materials. (SRT)

The instructional utility of employing modeling strategies to promote skill acquisition of exceptional learners in the content areas of arithmetic, spelling, reading, expressive language, and handwriting is presented vis-a-vis descriptions of several basic modeling strategies and teaching procedures in which models are integral components. (Author)

Five receptive and five expressive considerations are presented which serve as guidelines for the selection of informal evaluation tasks. The resulting procedure provides descriptive data on a student's auditory processing skills and his/her ability to use language for various purposes. (Author/CL)

This paper identifies characteristics of poor speechreaders, defines developmental dyspraxia in profoundly hearing-impaired children, and outlines the speechreading process. An active training method is described in which expressive and receptive skills are integrated, by having hearing-impaired people speechread their own speech via videotape…

A teacher describes use of a three-phase freestyle writing activity to encourage students with disabilities to develop independent expressive written language. Students develop their skills by writing for brief periods, first whatever comes to mind, then a self-selected topic, and subsequently a teacher-selected topic. (DB)

This curriculum provides a sequence of activities designed to help develop cognitive and communication skills in severely and profoundly multi-handicapped individuals who are functioning between 0 and 24 months. Based on the principles that communication begins at birth and that educational programming must begin at the point where the handicapped…

"Specific Learning Disability" is by far the largest category of conditions served in special education. Unfortunately, few parents (and educators) really understand what learning disabilities are. Many erroneously believe it is a "politically correct" term for "mildly mentally retarded" or "dull normal." Further, while most laypeople have heard…

A rationale for the importance of analyzing spontaneous language use by persons with severe disabilities is offered. Use of a continuum of cues can help evaluate language needs and serve as the basis of a training program. Three recent studies demonstrating procedures for teaching spontaneous language use are reviewed. (Author/DB)

This brief paper summarizes research on effective instruction in writing for students with learning disabilities. It finds that three components stand out as methods that reliably and consistently lead to improved outcomes in teaching expressive writing to these students. These components are: (1) adhering to a basic framework of planning,…

Sampling spontaneous expressive language through video narration is offered as a means of reducing variability among language samples over time or from different speakers. Advantages include content stability, high interest value, and high processing demands. Disadvantages include brevity of the samples, lack of information on dyadic communication…