Grammar is an important goal area for children with language impairment. The current article considers the use of General Language Performance Measures (GLPMs) to assess outcomes for this basic goal area and for 3 intermediate grammar goals that contribute to children's developing ability to construct increasingly longer and more complex…

Oral narratives are a commonly used, meaningful means of communication that reflects academic language. New state curriculum standards include narrative-related language expectations for young school-age children, including story grammar and complex language. This article provides a review of preschool narrative-based language intervention…

Children with language impairment (LI) show an overall immaturity in grammatical structure. This includes difficulties with basic sentence constituents, pronouns, verb form elaboration, negative and interrogative sentences, noun phrase elaboration, and complex sentences. This article describes explicit instruction and scaffolding strategies, based…

Disciplinary literacy is defined here as the ability to engage in social, semiotic, and cognitive practices consistent with those of content experts. Characterizing literacy development as a process of braiding 3 language strands of everyday language, abstract language, and metaphoric language, this article describes the lexical and grammatical…

Purpose: Script training for aphasia involves repeated practice of relevant phrases and sentences that, when mastered, can potentially be used in other communicative situations. Although an increasingly popular approach, script development can be time-consuming. We provide a detailed summary of the evidence supporting this approach. We then…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe the nature of informational (expository) language in terms of unique grammatical characteristics and discuss applications for assessment and intervention for older school-aged children and adolescents with language impairments. Methods: Information presented is based on a selected literature…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

This study was conducted as a follow-up analysis to two prior studies using existing data gathered in those original studies. In the current study, we focus on those preschoolers who received one of two interventions that varied in terms of the level of visual supports for grammatical elements (n = 22 of the original 34 participants). Utilizing…

Purpose: To gain a better understanding of the cognitive processes supporting verbal abilities, the underlying structure and interrelationships between common verbal measures were investigated. Methods: An epidemiological sample (n = 374) of school-aged children completed standardized tests of language, intelligence, and short-term and working…

Discusses grammatical morpheme omissions in the phrase productions of children with language impairments. Clinical procedures are described whereby the salience of grammatical morpheme models is increased and the difficulty of production of grammatical morphemes is controlled via manipulation of prosodic contexts to enhance learning of grammatical…

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 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 authors describe the development and role of story grammars and note the implications for assessment of story production and retelling, scrambled stories, and the macrocloze technique (testing the child's ability to predict or infer missing information). Remediation procedures for improving prediction skills and training story grammar…

A study assessed whether two children (ages 4-6) with autism could be taught a child-initiated query as a pivotal response to facilitate the use of grammatical morphemes. Children learned the strategy and acquired and generalized the targeted morpheme. Children also showed increases in mean length of utterance and verb acquisition. (Contains…

Inexperienced writers, including both basic writers and learning disabled, commit errors that often follow a discernible pattern due to applying erroneous or incomplete rules. Techniques for teaching editing skills are described, including textual analyses of students' writing, interviews with students, structuring the editing task, and providing…