It has been well documented that oral language skills are precursors of the development of written abilities, meaning that improving oral language skills, e.g. vocabulary, listening comprehension, could have positive effects reading comprehension. The main aim of the present study was to analyze the effect of a training program focused on four…

Professional broadcasting of future medical foreign workers in the medical sector is a compulsory component of their professional readiness. The diversity of professional broadcasting functions of foreign students, the skillful use of the entire range of speech functionality, its external expressive attributability of speech; these are the most…

In an increasingly multilingual world, it is important to examine methods that may lead to more efficient second language learning, as well as to analyze the mechanisms by which successful learning occurs. The purpose of the current study was to investigate how different learning contexts can impact the learning of Mandarin Chinese as a second…

With increased demand for improved early childhood education services, it is important to better understand the essential professional development resources that have the greatest impact on both teacher and child outcomes. This study compared the effectiveness of two teacher-training models in bilingual Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Head…

This article describes how a research-practice partnership has informed the iterative development of a web-mediated early childhood language and literacy professional development (PD) intervention. Funded through the Investing in Innovation (i3) program, this new PD model is based on an effective in-situ intervention. As we translated the…

Two children (ages four and five) with word-finding deficits characterized largely by semantic substitutions participated in a treatment involving phonological information about target words. Treatment resulted in reduction not only of occasional phonological word-finding substitutions but also of the large number of semantic word-finding…

A correction procedure, including interruption, physical guidance, verbal instruction, and repetition, was used to train five students with severe/profound mental retardation to reject unmatching referents to their gesture mands. Trainers are urged to assess student response when items not matching the referent of a prior request are offered.…

Two experiments with a total of 17 adolescents or adults with severe mental retardation evaluated the potential of exclusion procedures (selection of an undefined object in comparison with a defined object) as a means of training basic naming skills. Reliable exclusion and naming performance were demonstrated in nearly all subjects. (DB)

This case study evaluated the usefulness of compact language drills (CLDs) with a 12-year-old deaf child to improve his ability to use four irregular verbs. Results indicated that the daily five-minute drills requiring immediate recall of irregular verb forms significantly improved the child's ability to use the verbs correctly both immediately…

An augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention was designed to increase vocabulary acquisition in five mild to moderately handicapped children (ages seven to nine) in a self-contained class. The intervention resulted in high rates of vocabulary and sentence selection for all the children, an improvement which persisted after…

Examined were the effects of reversing the color of stimulus materials used to teach survival vocabulary to 16 spastic cerebral palsied and 16 other multihandicapped adolescents with mental retardation. Compared to black-on-white cards, white-on-black cards improved the acquisition performance of both groups, but did not affect retention.…

Consequences were withheld for high-rate gesture requests of 6 mentally handicapped individuals (ages 12-40), to increase the proportion of gestures used spontaneously. Results suggest that the teacher's nonresponding to high-rate spontaneous gesture requests increased individuals' use of previously taught but unused gesture requests. (Author/JDD)

Four students (ages seven to nine) with moderate mental retardation were successfully taught to name photographs of foods using a progressive time delay procedure. Presentation of the supermarket grocery department as part of the discriminative stimulus was effective in increasing the percentage of correct responding. Some generalization occurred…

Three employees with moderate mental retardation who were nonreaders were taught to use sight words to self-initiate job tasks in competitive employment settings. Training resulted in the ability to read job-specific sight words, to use verbalized self-instruction, to use a self-monitoring checklist, to self-initiate work tasks, and increased…

Comparison of three training conditions for Spanish-vocabulary development with 30 deaf undergraduates found no significant differences for short-term memory. However, long-term-memory scores under the repeated writing condition were significantly higher than scores under the fingerspelling or silent-reading conditions. (Author/DB)