Research is reviewed on the Makaton Vocabulary, a sign lexicon used with severely communicatively handicapped pupils. It is concluded that the lack of published teaching strategies tends to perpetuate an oversimplified teaching formula. (CL)

A format was developed at Meyer Children's Rehabilitation Institute (Omaha, Nebraska) to help the parents, teachers, and others become sensitive to the specific vocabulary needs of the nonspeaking child. (Author)

The literature regarding cognitive prerequisites to communication development for nondisabled and disabled children is reviewed. Issues related to providing communication teaching programs for severely disabled children are discussed, and specific intervention strategies related to introduction of augmentative and alternative communication systems…

Intervention planning for limited-English-proficient students calls for an experiential approach which compares and contrasts the students' home culture with mainstream United States culture. Methods are presented for incorporating student culture in intervention activities (building a multicultural calendar, studying folk tales) and for…

This guide to Asperger syndrome for teachers describes the underlying impairments of the condition, explains how these may lead to problems in school, and offers practical management suggestions. The first part gives an overview of Asperger syndrome and outlines the three core areas of impairment--social interaction, communication, and lack of…

This report describes using Environmental Communication Teaching (ECT) to assist students with autism spectrum disorder. The paper compares several key points of the ECT approach with other common intervention methods for students with autism and identifies the features of intervention programs or approaches that should be considered when planning…

Teachers can deal with language disordered children through discourse analysis, a conversational teaching process aimed at getting children to talk. Steps include selecting a topic to talk about during the remedial language session, having teacher and child take turns talking about the topic, using requests to constrain the child's responses so…

Characteristics of students with communication apprehension are described, and four teaching strategies are discussed: teaching the functions of silence, developing alternative means for obtaining students' responses, setting routines for students to indicate their participation, and developing collaborations and communities of learning among…

This examination of the impact of the head-injured student's cognitive-communicative deficits upon school performance and interpersonal relationships focuses on: the educator's perspective regarding the head-injured student, specific cognitive-communicative deficits, typical classroom behaviors of the student, teaching strategies, useful…

This resource manual has been compiled to facilitate collaboration between teachers and speech-language pathologists (SLPs), to describe types of communication disorders that SLPs work with, to identify practical pre-referral techniques for classroom implementation, and to outline goals and objectives used in remediating speech and language…

This paper discusses the historical context of communication and language intervention and critiques three widely used interventions. It advocates a cross-paradigmatic approach because its inherent flexibility fits with what is known about language acquisition, the nature of different intervention approaches, and human development. This approach…

Guidelines are presented for assisting classroom teachers in using the strengths of learning-disabled students to help them learn content area material. Specific suggestions are offered for various disabilities, including attention deficits, organizational deficits, auditory processing deficits, visual and visual-motor deficits, language…

This paper discusses ideas for teachers to increase successful comprehension of their questions by language delayed students. Three kinds of questioning techniques are described. Most often used by teachers are "WH-words" (e.g., who, what, how). Noun-verb reversal (e.g., Can you come to the group?) follows in amount of usage. The least used…

Summarizes progress made in meeting the communication needs of individuals with severe disabilities. Evidence is presented that supports best practices in the selection of: communicative functions, communicative modes and symbols, and instructional formats. The importance of social motivations for behavior and use of advances in augmentative…

Through interactive-observation, the strengths of the video recorder (actual viewing experience) and the strengths of the computer (capability for feedback, record keeping, and problem analysis) can be combined and used in the preparation of personnel to educate handicapped children and youth. In the area of communicative disorders, accurate…