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Oral Language (oral + language)
Selected AbstractsLanguage-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers: a longitudinal study of dyslexia in New ZealandDYSLEXIA, Issue 1 2007William E. Tunmer Abstract Language-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers were examined in a three-year longitudinal study that began at school entry. The discrepancy-defined (dyslexic) poor readers (n = 19) were identified in terms of poor reading comprehension and average or above average listening comprehension performance, and the non-discrepancy-defined (non-dyslexic) poor readers (n = 19) in terms of both poor reading and listening comprehension performance. The two poor reader groups and a group of normally developing readers (n = 55) were given several oral language, phonological processing, and reading performance measures at six testing occasions. Results indicated that in addition to expected differences on the oral language measures, the non-discrepancy-defined poor readers also showed greater phonological processing deficits than the dyslexic poor readers. The results are discussed in terms of the lack of official recognition of dyslexia in New Zealand, the whole language orientation of classroom reading instruction, and the inadequacy of Reading Recovery for minimizing reading problems. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] A Bridge Too Far?ENGLISH IN EDUCATION, Issue 2 2001Floppy Fail the Apprentice Reader, How Biff, Kipper Abstract This article is the result of a re-examination of reading scheme books. Taking a literary perspective, the implied reader was investigated in the most popular scheme, The Oxford Reading nee, in order to ascertain how the reader is constructed by the text. It is argued that such texts covertly construct a passive, struggling reader. As such, this has important implications for the National Literacy Strategy, particularly in the selection of texts for Guided Reading. Summary Reading scheme books are designed to bridge the gap between the oral language of the child and the literary language of the book. What is considered important is a recognisable primary world. There is little dialogue yet the language is supposed to reflect that of the child. Short simple sentences devoid of cohesive devices are considered easier to read because the apprentice reader is deemed not to have stamina. Key words such as nouns and verbs are emphasised and little attention is paid to rhythm, hence few elisions and much repetition. As such the reading scheme does not reflect the language of the child for there is little colloquial expression and the lack of literary features actually makes the text very difficult to read. Implied is a reader who is going to find the whole process difficult and has little to bring to the text. On the other hand the children's literature analysed enjoys a variety of narratives and subject matter yet all support the apprentice reader. Such literary texts employ cohesive devices, the third person has a sense of telling with echoes of the oral tradition while those in first person offer a sense of a teller close to the reader. Direct speech is used, which acts as a bridge from the oral to the literary world. The reader is being guided and helped and not left to struggle. Ironically, it is the literary text that offers more support than the supposedly carefully constructed reading scheme. Furthermore, it can be seen that the reading scheme examined constructs a passive reader to whom things happen. The construction of childhood itself is without joy, excitement and wonder. There is a dullness in the text and a dullness in the characters and the plot that constructs a negative view of reading and a negative construction of the child. The model in Figure 1 summarises the difference between the two types of text: Clearly this has implications for texts selected for pupils to read in the National Literacy Strategy, particularly for Guided Reading. There is no shortage in the UK of appropriate, well-written and superbly illustrated children's books that challenge, support and create an interest in literature. It remains a mystery why the dull reading scheme still has such a strong place in the primary classroom. [source] Shyness as a continuous dimension and emergent literacy in young children: is there a relation?INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2009Katherine Spere Abstract The present study assessed 89 children in a short-term longitudinal study from Junior Kindergarten (age 4,5 years) through Grade 1 (age 6,7 years) using a variety of tests of emergent literacy. Children were assessed for reading skill (a composite of word recognition, decoding, and letter-sound knowledge), phonological awareness, and oral language (i.e. both receptive and expressive vocabulary as well as syntax and fluency). Shyness was treated as a continuous variable rather than contrasting extreme groups of shy and non-shy children. Shyness was modestly related to vocabulary, verbal fluency, and phonological awareness. Results suggest that among young children the association of greater shyness with compromised skill development potentially extends beyond the vocabulary domain to include emergent literacy more broadly. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Long-term outcome of oral language and phonological awareness intervention with socially disadvantaged preschoolers: the impact on language and literacyJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 3 2010Caroline Henning Early intervention aims to prevent poor literacy outcomes associated with social disadvantage. This study examined whether the short-term positive effect of a preschool classroom-based oral language and phonological awareness (PA) programme was maintained and transferred to literacy 2 years later. The vocabulary knowledge, grammatical skill, auditory comprehension and reading comprehension of 54 6,7-year-old Australian children who attended school in a low-socioeconomic area were measured. Children's PA abilities were also assessed and are reported elsewhere. There were no significant differences between children who had received intervention in preschool and those who had not, with the entire cohort performing below the average range of the general population. The findings indicated that while generating short-term positive effects, intervention in preschool did not enhance socially disadvantaged children's language and literacy achievement in the long term. [source] Acquisition of Literacy in Bilingual Children: A Framework for ResearchLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2007Ellen Bialystok Much of the research that contributes to understanding how bilingual children become literate is not able to isolate the contribution of bilingualism to the discussion of literacy acquisition for these children. This article begins by identifying three areas of research that are relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explaining the contribution of each, and associating each type of research with a skill required by monolingual children in becoming literate. Three prerequisite skills for the acquisition of literacy are competence with the oral language, understanding of symbolic concepts of print, and establishment of metalinguistic awareness. A review of the literature explores the extent to which these skills that influence literacy acquisition in monolinguals develop differently for bilingual children. The conclusion is that the relation between bilingualism and the development of each of the three skills is different, sometimes indicating an advantage (concepts of print), sometimes a disadvantage (oral language competence), and sometimes little difference (metalinguistic concepts) for bilingual children. Therefore, bilingualism is clearly a factor in children's development of literacy, but the effect of that factor is neither simple nor unitary. Since the publication of this article, our research has continued to explore the themes set out in this framework and provided more detail for the description of how bilingualism affects the acquisition of literacy. Two important advances in this research are the finding that some aspects of reading ability, notably phonological awareness, are rooted in general cognitive mechanisms and transfer easily across languages, whereas others, such as decoding, are more language dependent and language-specific and need to be relearned with each new writing system (Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005). Second, writing systems and the differences between them have a greater impact on children's acquisition of literacy than previously believed. Not surprisingly, this relation has been found for emerging ability with phonological awareness (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, & Luk, 2005) but, more surprisingly, has recently been shown to have a subtle influence on children's emerging concepts of print (Bialystok & Luk, in press). The interpretation that bilingualism must be considered in terms of both advantages and disadvantages has also been pursued in studies of cognitive and linguistic processing in adults. Recent research has shown that adult bilinguals display disadvantages on tasks measuring lexical retrieval and fluency (Michael & Gollan, 2005) but advantages on tasks assessing cognitive control of attention (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004). This approach leads to a more detailed and, ultimately, more accurate description of how bilingualism affects cognitive performance. [source] Chronological progression of a language deficit appearing to be postictally reversible in a patient with symptomatic localization-related epilepsyPSYCHIATRY AND CLINICAL NEUROSCIENCES, Issue 2 2000Tatsuya Kudo Abstract A language deficit occurring interictally, with chronological progression, and postictally in a patient with symptomatic localization-related epilepsy, which began at 1.6 years of age, is reported. The patient was a 30-year-old right-handed man whose seizures seemed to originate from the left frontal lobe and to involve the left temporal lobe. The deficit in oral language consisted mainly of features of motor aphasia, including delayed initiation of speech with great effort, echolalic and palilalic tendencies, and word-finding difficulty, but he also showed features of sensory aphasia. Written language had agraphia observed in sensory aphasia, including well-formed letters, paraphasias, neologisms, and paragrammatism. Postictally, the language deficit appeared to be superficially reversible, and evolved from mutism through non-fluent jargon to the interictal level of language. Analysis of the patient's diaries from 10 to 26 years of age disclosed chronologically progressive deterioration of language with paragrammatism, showing an increase of grammatical errors, neologismus, literal and verbal paraphasias and misconstruction of sentences. The results suggest that localization-related epilepsy of presumably left frontal lobe origin causes not only a postictal language deficit but also a slowly progressive deficit of language function. [source] Comprehensive reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities: Findings from the first three years of a longitudinal study,PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SCHOOLS, Issue 5 2010Jill H. Allor This longitudinal experimental study investigated the reading progress of students with IQs ranging from 40 to 69 (i.e., range for students with mild or moderate mental retardation or intellectual disabilities [ID]) across at least two academic years, as well as the effectiveness of a comprehensive reading intervention for these students across the same period of time. Participants were 59 elementary students who were randomly placed into treatment and contrast groups. Students in the treatment condition received daily, comprehensive reading instruction in small groups of 1,4 students for 40,50 minutes per session across two or three academic years. Measures of phonemic awareness, phonics, word recognition, comprehension, and oral language were included. Findings indicate that students with IQs in the ID range made significant progress on multiple standardized measures of reading. Furthermore, significant differences between the treatment group and contrast group were found on several measures, including progress-monitoring measures of phoneme segmentation, phonics, and oral reading fluency. Results demonstrate that, on average, students with ID, even those with IQs in the moderate range, learn basic reading skills given consistent, explicit, and comprehensive reading instruction across an extended period of time. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Specificity and characteristics of learning disabilitiesTHE JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY AND ALLIED DISCIPLINES, Issue 10 2005Natasha Eisenmajer Background:, The specificity of impairments in specific reading disabilities (SRD) and specific language impairments (SLI) has recently been questioned, with many children recruited for studies of SRD and SLI demonstrating impairments in both reading and oral language development. This has implications for the results of SRD and SLI studies where both reading and oral language skills are not assessed. Thus there is a need to compare the profiles of children with both oral language and reading impairments to groups of children with SRD and SLI. Methods:, The reading, oral language, short-term auditory memory, phonological processing, spelling, and maths abilities of 151 children (aged between 7 and 12 years) drawn from a Learning Disabilities Clinic were assessed. Results:, Five groups were identified, including children who demonstrated either a specific reading disability or a specific language impairment and children who showed evidence of both reading and oral language impairments. Differences were found between the groups on maths, phonological processing, short-term auditory memory, and spelling measures, with the children displaying both language and reading deficits generally performing at a lower level than the children with specific reading or language deficits. Conclusions:, It was concluded that more careful screening needs to be conducted in both clinical and research settings to accurately identify the nature of deficits in children with reading and oral language difficulties. Furthermore, a third and separate category of children with a mixed pattern of impairments needs to be considered. [source] The graphemic/motor frontal area Exner's area revisited,ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY, Issue 4 2009Franck-Emmanuel Roux MD Objective In 1881, Exner first described a "graphic motor image center" in the middle frontal gyrus. Current psycholinguistic models of handwriting involve the conversion of abstract, orthographic representations into motor representations before a sequence of appropriate hand movements is produced. Direct cortical stimulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were used to study the human frontal areas involved in writing. Methods Cortical electrical stimulation mapping was used intraoperatively in 12 patients during the removal of brain tumors to identify the areas involved in oral language (sentence reading and naming) and writing, and to spare them during surgery. The fMRI activation experiment involved 12 right-handed and 12 left-handed healthy volunteers using word dictation (without visual control) and 2 control tasks. Results Direct cortical electrical stimulation of restricted areas rostral to the primary motor hand area (Brodmann area [BA] 6) impaired handwriting in 6 patients, without disturbing hand movements or oral language tasks. In 6 other patients, stimulation of lower frontal regions showed deficits combining handwriting with other language tasks. fMRI also revealed selective activation during word handwriting in left versus right BA6 depending on handedness. This area was anatomically matched to those areas that affected handwriting on electrical stimulation. Interpretation An area in middle frontal gyrus (BA6) that we have termed the graphemic/motor frontal area supports bridging between orthography and motor programs specific to handwriting. Ann Neurol 2009;66:537,545 [source] | |||||||||||||||||||