Chapter 12 Readers of this chapter will be able to do the following: 1. List the elements needed in a plan for communication intervention at the elementary school level. 2. Name the required elements in an Individualized Educational Plan. 3. Define and describe appropriate intervention goals at the elementary school level. 4. List a variety of intervention activities at the elementary school level. 5. Describe several service delivery models at the elementary school level. 6. Discuss the role of various intervention agents at the elementary school level and the ways in which they structure collaboration. 7. Carry out language analysis procedures for conversation and narratives. 8. Apply concepts discussed to the education of students with autism spectrum disorders and severe disabilities in elementary schools. Students being seen for language intervention in the L4L period usually require transdisciplinary planning, which, you’ll remember, means that specialists and teachers work together, not just within but across their disciplines, to design an effective intervention program. Services need to be coordinated among the specialists, in consultation with the regular or special education teacher, to ensure that the student’s program is coherent and addresses all aspects of the student’s needs and includes the family’s perspective (Prelock, Beatson, Contompasis, & Kirk, 1999), since family involvement predicts academic achievement, social and emotional development, and a variety of other positive school outcomes for all children, including those with special needs (Howland et al., 2006). In transdisciplinary intervention, specialists don’t work independently on separate intervention agendas. Instead they decide with the classroom teacher what Willie’s most immediate needs are and divide up the responsibilities according to the strengths of each professional. Monitoring his hearing and managing his audiometric equipment would fall to the audiologist. Work on basic reading and writing skills would obviously be under the direction of the reading specialist. The learning-disability (LD) teacher might work with Willie or in consultation with the classroom teacher to develop better organizational and study skills and help with mastering classroom content. The SLP might work with the classroom teacher to give Willie some listening strategies in the classroom and might help the teacher to modify some of the classroom procedures to make it easier for Willie to succeed. The speech-language pathologist also might consult with the full team about some of the higher level oral language skills that Willie needs to work on to succeed in the other areas of the curriculum. The SLP could address these skills in oral language activities, developing comprehension-monitoring and metacognitive strategies for Willie to use in focusing on these higher level targets. The SLP might share these strategies with the classroom teacher, who would encourage Willie to use them in the classroom. The reading and LD specialist also might encourage Willie to use the same comprehension monitoring and metacognitive strategies in their work with him. In this way, a focused and coherent program might be developed in which the work of each specialist would contribute interactively to fostering Willie’s development (Silliman, Ford, Beasman, & Evans, 1999). IEP goals at the L4L stage may include targets in traditional oral language areas, such as increasing sentence length, expanding vocabulary, and increasing use of appropriate request forms. They also can include goals directed at improving classroom performance and integrating oral language and literacy. Sample IEP goals for these kinds of targets might include following classroom directions, demonstrating comprehension of classroom textbooks, producing a cohesive story, or explaining the meaning of technical terms in the curriculum. Nelson (2010) and Simon (1999) provided some examples of ways to design curriculum-based goals for the IEP. They suggested, for example, that objectives be embedded into larger goals based on the curriculum. An IEP goal might state “Willie will be able to define target vocabulary with 80% accuracy when discussing key vocabulary items from classroom lessons,” or “Willie will demonstrate understanding of –ing and –ed morphemes by correctly spelling words with these endings on weekly spelling tests.” Farber, Denenberg, Klyman, and Lachman (1992); Nelson (1988, 2010); and Prelock, Miller and Reed (1993) also provided extensive examples of IEP goals that can be written to address classroom performance and literacy development in students with language-learning disorders (LLDs). Justifying a placement as least restrictive is also important in this age range. Any placement that moves the student away from the regular classroom or neighborhood school must be justified on the basis of an inability to provide appropriate education in the mainstream setting. Particularly for students with mild to moderate disabilities, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) gives strong support for inclusion, or integrated education within the general classroom. Silliman, Ford, Beasman, and Evans (1999) provide one model for achieving this inclusion for students with LLD. Appendix 12-1 provides a model of what an IEP form might look like. Each educational agency must develop its own form, so the one your school uses may not look just like this. Although there are no mandatory forms for use in creating IEPs, the 2004 reauthorization of the IDEA provides for the development of model IEP forms. However, as of this writing, these models have not yet been disseminated. Whatever form is used, however, it must contain the components we’ve discussed.
Intervening at the language-for-learning stage
Planning intervention in the L4L stage
Planning intervention with the IEP
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Willie had been late to begin talking when he was a toddler. His parents were concerned about him and asked their pediatrician about it. The pediatrician had Willie’s hearing tested and found that he had a mild sensorineural loss in the right ear and a moderate loss in the left. He began wearing hearing aids and was enrolled in an early intervention program. His oral language skills began to improve, and by the time he reached kindergarten, he was able to pass a screening for entrance into a mainstream program. The regular kindergarten teacher referred him for additional speech and language intervention midway through the year, though, because of some mild problems with the intelligibility of his speech and a concern about “immature language.” He worked with a speech-language pathologist (SLP), Ms. Johnson, during kindergarten and first grade on basic oral language skills, including increasing intelligibility, use of auxiliary verbs and verb marking, increasing vocabulary, and other skills at the developing language level. Ms. Johnson helped his teachers set up and use a classroom amplification system to improve Willie’s reception of the teacher’s language input. His first grade classroom included an responsiveness to intervention (RTI) program for reading development, and Willie was placed in Tier II instruction for one marking period when he began to struggle with early reading achievement. By the end of first grade, though, he had mastered most of the basic oral language skills his Tier II group had targeted, and he moved back into Tier I. Language analysis showed he was functioning at or above Brown’s stage V in most areas of productive language. He scored within the normal range, although at the low end, on receptive language and vocabulary assessments. Ms. Johnson put Willie on monitoring status at the end of first grade, and Willie went on to second grade.
