Outlined are devices to educate parents about composition concepts," i.e., what there is to learn in learning to write well. (RY)

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…

Adaptations of simultaneous and successive processing and language tests were administered to 88 institutionalized moderately mentally retarded adolescents and adults. Results revealed a relationship between language and coding processing and demonstrated the involvement of serial processing in the comprehension of speech flow and language…

Four specific perspectives on narrative structure are briefly reviewed, and a case study is used to illustrate how these perspectives can provide useful insights into the language behavior of a language-disordered child. (Author/SW)

Argues that reading and sharing poetry fosters richness in languages and encourages understanding of ideas presented through a beautiful form of expression. Offers a poetry guide for encouraging basic language skills. (FL)

A project designed to study the feasibility of utilizing the eight components of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf Communication Performance Profile for evaluating the receptive and expressive communication skills of deaf secondary level students was conducted on 420 students (ages 11 to 21) at two residential schools for the deaf.…

The study examined language/thought, abstract/concrete, and divergent thinking abilities of 77 hearing impaired students (8 to 12 years old), with emphasis on the relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities and creativity. (Author/SBH)

The purposes of the study involving four severely handicapped students (11 to 16 years old) were to examine whether the acquisition of instruction- following behavior is facilitated by the presentation of manual signs with verbal instructions and whether manual and verbal expressive abilities are acquired as an indirect result of receptive…

Age 3 follow-up data are presented for sample of 34 toddlers diagnosed between ages of 24 and 31 months with expressive specific language impairment. Late talkers made more rapid progress in lexical development and in descriptive, explanatory, and definitive use of language than in syntactic and morphological language. Toddlers who'd been more…

This longitudinal study assessed the narrative language development of primary grade children with slow expressive language development (SELD) as toddlers who either had or had not moved into the normal range of expressive language by early school age. Deficits in narrative skills tended to disappear in children with a history of SELD, though…

Reviews the language basis of reading disabilities and provides a checklist of language deficits frequently associated with reading disabilities. Areas assessed include: word retrieval, verbal memory, speech production, comprehension, expressive language, and speech sound awareness. The checklist is designed for early identification of reading…