High level thinking abilities extend beyond just command of facts and concepts. More crucial is idea use and refinement through discourse encounters. Thinking in classrooms is served by dialogic teachers who understand and use the right discourse tactics and designs. Effective discourse will usually be accompanied by: (1) extended idea exchanges;…

A battery of assessments to determine the potential contribution of tactual aids to the acoustic perception and speech identification of young deaf children was developed. The tasks were developed so that they could be implemented with standard audiometric equipment and applied to subjects of varying age and to different types of tactual aids.…

Fiesta Project provides a classic example of action anthropology in broadcasting. The project involved the research and production of a Spanish language public television series designed to attract, retain, and realistically help a Mexican American audience in southern Arizona. The project used anthropological research in initial program…

Receptive fingerspelling performance for words in isolation and context was measured at 10-foot interval distances from 10 feet through 60 feet in 83 hearing-impaired college students. (Author/PHR)

Partially hearing (N=16), deaf (N=20), and normal hearing (N=10) children's ability to say, write, and comprehend the same sentences were compared. Among results were that the partially hearing made more errors in both the spoken and written conditions than hearing subjects who were two years younger. (Author/DB)

The article describes development in Illinois of the Department of Rehabilitation Services Sign Language Assessment Tool. The instrument is designed to evaluate the level of receptive and expressive sign language proficiency of rehabilitation personnel serving the deaf. (DB)

Two social factors and their interactive effects were examined as possible influences on children's detection and reporting of inconsistent statements. Factors were the stated intention and the age of the speaker. (PCB)

Studies indicated that a single experience of retelling a story after listening produced a small improvement in kindergarten children's comprehension and that this effect could be increased by frequent practice and guidance in retelling. Appended are a story reading and retelling guidesheet for students and directions for guiding retellings for…

Reasons that students have trouble developing their reading skills in Russian include: (1) reading comprehension is regarded as unimportant; (2) teachers discourage the surmising of meaning; and, (3) it is difficult to remember Russian words unless their elements (roots, prefixes, and suffixes) are recognized. (SED)

Effects of receptive vs. expressive training of category labels on acquisition of generalized referential labels by six prelinguistic severely mentally retarded children (5-19 years old) were investigated. Data indicated that receptive training resulted in more accurate generalization to novel category members than did expressive training.…

The article describes the use of the Dynamic Audio Video Instructional Device (DAVID), designed to provide receptive sign language practice via interactive television for the staff at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Examples of lessons are presented to illustrate principles of interactive computer assisted video instructional…

Analysis of the data showed no significant correlation between scores from the two modalities, indicating that knowledge of a person's ability to understand speech in one system provides little information about the same person's ability to understand speech in the other. (Author/CL)

Data on speech, language, performance IQ, school placement, and behavior are presented on 18 subjects diagnosed in childhood as "aphasic" and followed through adolescence. Results revealed slow but steady growth in language with expressive skills showing more rapid progress than comprehension. Performance IQ was highly correlated with language…

The construct validity of the Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language Scale (REEL) was investigated with 60 mentally retarded children (1-3 years old). Results indicated that REEL language ages were generally consistent with samples of communicative behavior and were also related significantly to indices of children's cognitive functioning.…