No description available.

No description available.

This study explores the social and communicative interactions among children and young people in special schools who have severe learning difficulties. It considers the concept ofphatic communion or 'small talk' and its importance as a social and cultural practice. The study focuses on the actual communication of the children and young people and investigates the functions, patterns and strategies they employ. It considers the development of language and communication from birth onwards, particularly the processes involved in the progress of increasing skills in socially interactive communication. The study reviews literature concerning the development of communication in proto-conversations to the talk of children of typical development and children and adults with learning difficulties. It also investigates the role of non-verbal communication and context and how these can affect and support the social interaction process. The study employed an observational approach to data collection,recording predominantly by field notes, but also utilising some video and audio recording. The data were transcribed and analysed to provide examples of the range and variety of socio-communicative interactions between the children and young people. The findings demonstrate the multiplexity of skill involved in creating and perpetuating the social dynamics of amicable interaction. Finally conclusions are drawn to provide some significance of the impact that this study may offer to professionals working in the special educational sector, particularly with children and young people with severe learning difficulties.

This thesis explored the interaction between oral language and reading skills in children with Down syndrome. Study 1 looked at the longitudinal relationship between reading accuracy, reading comprehension and oral language across three time-points. Study 2 taught new spoken words with or without the orthographic form present and Study 3 examined the effect of phonological pre-training on orthographic learning. In all three studies, typically developing children matched for reading accuracy also participated. The effect of phonological and non-phonological oral language skills on reading accuracy was examined in Studies 1 and 3. In Study 1, phoneme awareness and vocabulary were evaluated as predictors of reading accuracy. Neither were longitudinal predictors in either group due to the strength of the autoregressor. However, vocabulary was a concurrent predictor for the children with Down syndrome. In Study 3, children with Down syndrome showed poorer orthographic learning than typically developing children. However when equated for decoding skill, the level of orthographic learning and the benefit from phonological pre-training were equivalent in the two groups. The proposed benefit of learning to read on oral language development was tested in Studies 1 and 2. In Study 1, reading accuracy had a moderate effect on vocabulary development for children with Down syndrome and typically developing children. In Study 2, children with Down syndrome and typically developing children showed similar levels of phonological learning, which was facilitated by orthographic support to the same extent. The relative contribution of reading accuracy and oral language to reading comprehension was evaluated in Study 1. Reading accuracy predicted concurrent reading comprehension for the children with Down syndrome and typically developing children, whereas oral language did not. However, only oral language was a longitudinal predictor in the children with Down syndrome. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings from all three studies are considered.

This research focuses on the language environment of children with Down syndrome (DS) in primary and secondary classrooms. In contrast to much of the previous work in this area, the study takes both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection. In particular, it highlights teachers’ speech rates and speech strategies in relation to children’s individual listening comprehension. Previous research shows that the listening comprehension of children with DS may be limited by deficits in phonological loop capacity and hearing loss. However, most of this previous research has used quantitative measures to compare the memory performances of children with DS with their typically developing or mental agematched peers. This has tended to result in conclusions that regard children with DS as a homogeneous group. This study, however, aims to consider each child with DS as an individual and to explore in depth the relationship between their listening comprehension and teachers’ speech rates and speech strategies in classroom settings. The study was conducted in 2 stages, both using case-study approach to investigate individual children’s interactions with their class teachers (CTs) and teaching assistants (TAs). The Stage 1 research was conducted with three case-study children in four distinct phases and used an inductive approach to collect data. Phase one observed each child in their classroom environment, involving the interactions between teaching staff and the case-study child. Phase two identified the child’s language ability by using standardised language assessments. Phase three then assessed the impact of speech rates on children’s understandings and, finally, Phase four tested the research validity by representing the stories with a counter-balanced design. The results of the Stage 1 research suggested that the use of the slow speech rate improves the children’s listening comprehension although there were clear indications that there would be more significant benefit if they could be given more time to process information. The Stage 2 research focused on speech strategies, with an emphasis on clustered speech and a deductive approach was adopted. Six additional children with DS were assessed by the BPVS and WISC-IV to investigate further speech rate but also in the context of speech strategies. This further examined whether clustered speech could be beneficial to improving the children’s listening comprehension. The findings show that the clustered speech strategy can improve the listening comprehension of all of the children in this phase, particularly at the slow normal speech rate. The key benefit of this strategy is that it can be used to offset problems in processing information that the children experience because of their limited memory capacity. The outcome of my research can provide teaching staff with knowledge that will enable them to enhance the listening comprehension of children with DS.