To date, no studies have established the relationship between early communication characteristics for young children with significant disabilities and later language development. This study characterized communication for toddlers (n = 60) fitting this profile and their parents prior to a language intervention utilizing an observational coding scheme and tested whether child and parent communication characteristics were predictive of performance on oral language measures. Language transcripts were coded for child mode and pragmatic function and parent response to the utterance child utterances. Results indicated that children used contact gestures, answering and commenting at the highest rates relative to other communication characteristics. Parents utilized a related response type for 52% of child utterances. Hierarchical regressions revealed that sophisticated gesture usage, word usage, and sophisticated function rate were predictive of expressive oral language performance. Sophisticated gesture usage, sophisticated function rate, and parent MLU were predictive of receptive oral language performance.

Inledning: Då språket är en grundläggande faktor i det psykoterapeutiska samtalet är det av intresse att få mer kunskap om dess betydelse. Syftet med studien var att undersöka upplevelsen av det verbala språkets betydelse i det psykoterapeutiska samtalet, detta framkom genom psykoterapeuternas syn på språkutveckling och eget språkanvändande, patienters språkutveckling och språkanvändande och svårigheter i psykoterapi. Metod: Studien använde en kvalitativ metod och intervjuade fem leg. psykoterapeuter med psykodynamisk inriktning. Resultatet visar att psykoterapeu-terna genomgående ser på det verbala språkanvändandet som något som har en rörelse i psykoterapeuternas användande av eget språk, utifrån teorier om patientens språkanvändande. Språkutvecklingen hos patienten anses härröra från både relationen vårdare-barn och i vilken social kontext som barnet vuxit upp. Patienter som innan psykoterapin haft svårigheter i språkanvändandet vilket försvårat deras livssituation, förbättrar sitt språkanvändande efter en fullföljd psykoterapi. Detta i sin tur resulterar i förändrade relationella och sociala färdigheter. Diskussion: Psyko-terapeuternas fokus var riktat mot patientens språkutveckling och språkanvändning och hur detta sedan påverkar hur psykoterapeuten använder sitt språk. Överlag funderade psykoterapeuternas väldigt lite över att sin egna språkutveckling och språkanvändning, kan påverka hur patienten använder språket. Resultatet påvisar således en ovana hos psykoterapeuterna att förstå och reflektera över sin egen del i språkanvändningen. / Introduction: Since language is a basic factor in the psychotherapeutic conversation, it is of interest to learn more about its significance. The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of the verbal significance of language in the psychotherapeu-tic conversation; it emerged through the psychotherapeutic approach to language development and language use, patients' language development and language usage and difficulties in psychotherapy. Method: The study used a qualitative method and interviewed five Leg. Psychotherapists with a psychodynamic orientation. The result shows that psychotherapists consistently look at the verbal language use as something that has a motion in the psychotherapeutic use of language, based on theories about the patient's language usage. Language development in the patient considered to arise from both the caregiver-child relationship and in what social context in which the child has grown up. Patients before psychotherapy had diffi-culties in the use of language, which complicated their lives, improve their language use after completion of psychotherapy. This in turn results in altered relational and social skills. Discussion: Psychotherapists focus was directed towards the patient's language development and language, and how this then affects how the psycho-therapist uses their language. Psychotherapists didn’t think the language development and language use, can affect how the patient uses language. The result demonstrates therefore a habit of psychotherapists to understand and reflect on their own part in language use.

The study focuses on the use of poetry in language teaching in the lower grades in the Swedish school. Poetry has a reputation of being an art form with such specific rules and structures that children and teachers think that it is something that they do not have the ability to work with.  The purpose of this study is to get an understanding of how poetry is used in educating children. My research is based on the following questions.  To which extent is poetry being used in schools and how is it being used? Can you as a teacher see any effects on childrens language development by using poetry? As a part of my study I have met with and interviewed four different people, who in one way or another is involved in teaching children. Two working teachers in the lower grades, one pedagogical resource and one artist that work with teachers in reaching different goals through the help of aesthetic processes. My goal with the interviews was to get a sense of the way poetry is portrayed in schools and to see if it is a genre that is incorporated in teaching the Swedish language. Poetry has not always been mentioned in the Swedish curriculum as something children has to know about. However in the most recent curriculum poetry is brought up as something every child should know and recognize by the end of the third schoolyear.

The purpose with my essay was to investigate how genre pedagogy works in a practical manor? I wanted to reach a deeper understanding for the genre pedagogy and to find out if it fits all students. To investigate this issue I have asked following questions:What is genre pedagogy?How do teachers work with different genres in the genre pedagogy?For whom is the genre pedagogy?Is the critic right that Frøydis Hertzberg is proposing about the genre pedagogy formalism? I have been using qualitative methods, to gather my empirical data. I have been using two unstructured interviews and one unsystematically observation, in a third grade class in a school south of Stockholm, with 30% second language students. I have also been watching several episodes about genre pedagogy at Utbildningsradions website and analyzed them. I have among others been using Gibbon’s book Scaffolding Language scaffolding Learning and Johansson Sandell Ring’s book (Let the language carry) I have also been using reports from the Swedish school ministry. In this way I have gathered interesting facts about how teachers educate in practice and how the interaction is. Genre pedagogy is about how the teacher together with the students finds subject knowledge and the text structure by speaking about the language with a so called Meta language and practical activities. The teacher part is to clarify the functional grammar and to give the tools so that the student will progress in his/ her writing skills and subject knowledge. The tutoring is presented so that the teachers part is to be supportive in the beginning when the students knowledge is being built up to gradually, when the student has the knowledge, to let the student do the task more and more by it self. There are critics aimed against the genre pedagogy that the student’s creativity and personal writing disappears. By my observation and analyses of the material from Utbildningsradions website, (UR.se) I have gotten a result that shows that the student text is written in the same structure as the template text, but there is space for their own imagination. One of the conclusions is that genre pedagogy fits most students, if the education is flexible and sometimes individualized.

Denna studie handlar om språkutvecklande arbetssätt i förskolan. Syftet med studien var att undersöka och få kunskap om vad ett språkutvecklande arbetssätt i förskolan innebär och vad som kännetecknar detta arbetssätt, samt på vilket sätt lek är involverat i detta. Utgångspunkten för studien var det sociokulturella perspektivet på lärande och utveckling. Den kvalitativa metoden användes genom att material samlades från intervjuer av fem förskollärare. Resultatet visar att ett språkutvecklande arbetssätt i förskolan kännetecknas av dialog, kommunikation, samlingar, lek, litteratur och Internet användning. Det framgår även att barn utvecklar den språkliga förmågan bättre om de blir språkstimulerade i förskolan. Dessutom visar resultatet, genom att observera barn ser förskolepersonalen vilka av dem som eventuellt behöver hjälp med sin språkliga utveckling. Personalen kan då planera anpassade aktiviteter samt stötta barnet i den fria leken. Resultatet har även visat att leken hela tiden är involverad i det språkutvecklande arbetssättet. Lekens roll är att motivera barnen till lärande och väcka deras intresse för de olika språkutvecklande aktiviteter som genomförs i förskolan. Slutligen kan påpekas att förskolan har en viktig roll när det gäller barns språkutveckling. / This report concerns language development work in preschool. The purpose of this study was to investigate and gain knowledge of the meaning of language development approach in preschool and the characteristics of this approach, as well as the importance of the children´s play in this matter. In this study, the socio-cultural perspective on learning and development was adopted. The qualitative method was applied by collecting material from the interviews of five preschoolteachers. The result shows that language development approach is characterised by dialogue, communication, gathering, play, literature and the use of Internet. It is also clear that children develop the linguistic ability better if they have been involved in language stimulation activities in preschool. Another result of hte study was that the deficiency in the progress of a childs languageability can easily be observed by the preschoolstaff. The teacher can plan appropriate activities and support the children in their playing in order to help them develop their language. The results also shows that the play is involved all the time in the language development approach. The meaning of the play is to motivate children to learn and the childs interest in the language development activities carried out in preschool. Finally it should be observed that preschoolactivities play an inportant role in childrens language development.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Learning words have shown to be a very crucial part of learning a second language and the one most important factor to make pupils with Swedish as a second language succeed in school. To make sure that all pupils get the right conditions to learn from all subjects and their entire content a wide vocabulary is necessary. Even so it is found that there are shortcomings regarding this kind of teaching in Swedish schools. Through interviews and observations of two teachers that teach pupils with Swedish as a second language, and also with a short reading test for the pupils, the possible strategies that these teachers use for learning words have been studied. The result shows that the teachers are using several strategies and that they are actively working with transmitting these to the pupils, but there are some areas that need developing.

The purpose of this retrospective case study is twofold: 1) to analyze the current literature regarding speech and language development and intervention in Down syndrome (DS) and 2) to investigate the experiences of a young child with DS in early intervention from birth to age three. More specifically, we are interested in understanding what a diagnosis of DS means for the developing child (clinical description), how the abilities of these children are measured prior to treatment (assessment), which strategies are commonly utilized in therapy for this population (intervention), and expected treatment outcomes for children who receive intervention (progress). By integrating data from all major areas of development, we can provide a holistic description of DS in early childhood and see how DS is manifested in a young child with this diagnosis. Furthermore, this review and case study can guide speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who are interested in evidence-based practice for clients with developmental disabilities. We interviewed the participant’s mother to gain additional perspective on the early intervention process and outcomes. After analyzing early therapeutic and educational records provided by the participant’s mother, we discovered that our participant experienced a similar pattern of speech and language development as her peers with DS; however, at age three, she appeared to be functioning at an above average level relative to expectations for children with DS. We discuss the positive indicators and environmental factors that may have contributed to her success. Our findings support the importance of providing early intervention for children with developmental disabilities. / text

Reading aloud to very young children has been described as one of the “most important activities for developing the knowledge required for eventual success in reading” (Bus, van IJzendoorn, & Pelligrini, 1995, p. 19), and it is equally as strong as phonemic awareness as a predictor of reading achievement (Bus et al.). In the dialogue around reading aloud to children, mothers are routinely envisioned as the actors. Indeed, much of the research on families and reading aloud centers on the mother’s role in this process (e.g., Ninio & Bruner, 1978; Phillips & McNaughton, 1990; Reese, Cox, Harte, & McAnally, 2003). Despite a gap in research around fathers’ roles in influencing their children’s general development (Cabrera, Shannon, & Tamis-LeMonda, 2007), some theorists indicate that fathers can play an important role in their linguistic, cognitive, and emotional development (Gadsden, Brooks, & Jackson, 1997; Nord, Brimhall, & West, 1997). An understanding of what fathers contribute to read alouds with texts written in English in general and an examination of how those contributions vary from father to father may enable teachers to recognize and address differences that exist in children’s pre-school experiences and how those differences may be manifested in classrooms. This, then, may prove beneficial to educators who work with families encompassing a variety of demographic and structural characteristics in their efforts to support literacy acquisition. The input provided by fathers in this study varies over a wide spectrum in terms of frequency and style; similarly, the invitations to think abstractly vary across multiple levels. In addition, the familiarity of the book being shared, both in terms of language and content, appears to exert a strong influence on the number of interactions and the invitations to think abstractly during read alouds. The implications of these findings suggest that we should challenge our assumptions regarding the economic and situational factors that result in the labeling of children as academically “at risk.” I outline actions for consideration by parents, educators, and stakeholders who are working with young children and their families to promote language and literacy development. / text

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This dissertation broaches the question of whether children can use this information in syntax acquisition by asking if learners can use the prosodic correlates of clauses to locate syntactic constituents. One property of certain syntactic constituents in natural languages is that they can move, so learning of constituency was inferred if participants treated prosodically-grouped words as cohesive, moveable chunks. In Experiment 1, 19-month-olds were familiarized with sentences from an artificial grammar with either 1-clause or 2-clause prosody. The infants from the 2-clause group later recognized the prosodically-marked clauses when they had moved to a new position in the sentence and had a new acoustic contour. Adults in Experiment 2 showed similar learning, although their judgments also rely on recognition of perceptually-salient words at prosodic boundaries. Subsequent experiments explored the mechanisms underlying this prosodic bootstrapping by testing Japanese-acquiring infants on English-based stimuli (Experiment 3) and English-acquiring infants on Japanese-based stimuli (Experiment 4). Infants were able to locate constituent-like groups of words with both native and non-native prosody, suggesting that the acoustic correlates of prosody are sufficiently robust across languages that they can be used in early syntax acquisition without extensive exposure to language-specific prosodic features. On the other hand, adults (Experiment 5) are less flexible, and are only able to use prosody consistent with their native language, suggesting an age- or experience-related tuning of the prosodic perceptual mechanism. This dissertation supports prosody as an important cue that allows infants and young children to break into syntax even before they understand many words, and helps explain the rapid rate of syntax acquisition.