GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE TASKS

The partners from VMU, Tallinn University and ZAS have prepared the methodological guide with instructions as to how the materials for speech therapy in the 4 languages can be used to develop children's language skills in different areas.

The basic output and result of this project is interactive and multi-functional intervention resources for speech therapy in 4 languages, i.e. German and 3 lesser-used languages: Lithuanian, Estonian and Slovenian. Some of the resources have been published, others are available on the internet so that teachers and children's parents/caretakers could easily access and use them.

The resources serve multiple purposes as they can be applied to develop different language skills at different ages of the child (from 5 to 8 years of age). The resources include drag-and-drop games, puzzles, picture stories, odd-one-out tasks, and colouring activities. They are with five invented animated creatures that are expected to encourage children with language impairments (LI) to overcome their communication barriers, which may arise due to their linguistic incompetence. The games are located in 5 different territories to make the interface of the games more attractive and dynamic.

The materials developed so far can be used for practicing comprehension and production of different language skills: grammar, vocabulary, phonology, narration and reading. The on-line tasks focus primarily on comprehension, but the narration activities also target language production. In most of the tasks, targeted forms are not taught in isolation (e.g. tasks for practicing lexis involve some phonologically difficult words, and narration tasks involve children's competence of lexis). A strict line between different linguistic competences is not made deliberately since it is argued that different language skills are best acquired when taught in specific pragmatically felicitous contexts and in combination with various other linguistic aspects (Fey et al 2003).

The resources are equally suitable for individual and group work; they can be done individually or with the help of the teacher, parent, caretaker or some other guiding person. Being available on-line, they can be accessed at any time the child wants to play the game, so this enhances the chances that children with LI will practice more.

Language therapy often requires repeating certain linguistic items, e.g. phonetic sounds or words, which can be tedious and lead children to quickly lose interest. The tasks designed for this project can make this therapy more entertaining since computer games (and also the printed materials allow children to practice their language skills without it seeming monotonous. This way the child is involved as an active participant in therapy, on the basis that language learning is dynamic, interactive, and both personal and interpersonal.

Having this type of resources at hand, the therapist can easily combine several components: (1) family education; (2) production and perception procedures; (3) multifunctional tasks for different purposes; and (4) homework activities.

The tasks are of different degrees of complexity, some being rather easy and elementary. It was very important to not to make the tasks too challenging (therefore, there is no limitation on the time spent on completing the activities) since in therapy the first step is to provide a sense of accomplishment for the child. Simple sounds, grammatical categories and words can be practiced until the child masters clarity. Thus such materials provide more stimulation to LI children, which is an important advantage since such children need more exposure to language input.

References

Fey, Marc E., S. H. Long, L. H. Finestack. 2003. "Ten Principles of Grammar Facilitation for Children With Specific Language Impairments". American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol.12 (3): 1044-1058.

Grammar

According to the analysis of needs in the field of materials for developing the acquisition of grammar, there is a need for tasks for mainly three areas: local relations, agreement and category of number in nouns (in subject and object position).
For example, for the training of the comprehension of local relations, the game named Treasure Hunt was developed. The goal of the game for the child is to collect treasures. The child hears (or can read - for those, who can read already) a command to guide her to go somewhere and seek for the treasure. The local case form or the noun with local preposition is used for expressing the local relation. When the child is in the right place, s/he hears a sentence with a description of the place where the treasure is. S/he must find the treasure by clicking on the right place on the picture, after that the treasure will be visible for the child.

Linguistically, there are three kinds of local relations involved in the first version of the game - directional, static, and separative: directional and separative are used for commands, and static for describing the location of the treasure.

The order of the acquisition of local morphemes is considered to be similar in different languages and begins with the notions of containment (in), support and contiguity (on) and occlusion (under), then following with notions of proximity (next to, beside, between) and finally relationships involving projective order (in front of, behind) (Bowermann 1999: 388). Different means of expressing local relations (local case forms, adverbs or postpositions with the genitive form of the noun in Estonian) develop, for example, in Finno Ugric languages, in the same direction, from interior to exterior and from goal-oriented (directional) to source-oriented (separative) (Argus 2009a: 131).

Different local relations can be acquired at a different age by different children (see, for example, Argus 2009: 131). More complex local prepositions have been registered to be acquired later than those which have fewer features of different local dimensions (Anert et al. 1980: 226). Therefore, the items with different complexity were used also in the Treasure Hunt game: notions of containment (in) and contiguity (on) alternate with relationships involving projective order (behind, in front of); in the last levels there are some extra items adding complexity (left-right etc). In all three groups of local relations (directional, static and separative) both exterior (on, above, under) and interior (into, in, out of) local relations have been used.

The colouring game Colors was designed for the training of morphosyntactic skills: comprehension of agreement of adjectives and nouns and the category of number. Although children start to acquire agreement early, from the age of two, they may make a lot of errors (Clark et al. 2004: 1799). According to Berman, the agreement of adjectives comparing with agreement of verbs, is acquired quite late (Berman 1997: 299).

The task of the game is to find the correct object or objects with the right color. There is a non-colored picture on the screen, the sentence consisting of a noun and an adjective (sometimes in singular, and sometimes in plural) is presented to a child; thereafter the child has to click on the correct object on the picture. Every object on the picture occurs both in singular and in plural.

The puzzle game Few or a lot? concentrates also on the comprehension of the category of number, but the main focus of the game is on the number of nouns emerging as subjects and objects.

Nominal number is one of the central noun phrase categories, and one of the most commonly encountered grammatical categories in the languages of the world (Lucy 1992: 23). Results of comprehension experiment carried out within the COST A33 project "Cross-linguistically Robust Stages of Children's Linguistic Performance" have still demonstrated that among others Estonian children cannot distinguish singular and plural nouns in wh-questions correctly and may make a lot of errors even at age five. Interestingly, there were more errors in sentences where the target noun was in the object position than in sentences where the target noun was in the subject position (see also Argus 2009b: 42).

While the morphophonotactics is not important in other languages but is highly problematic for Estonian, plural formation and especially plural partitive case (the case for the direct object) the choice of object nous is important for the Estonian language. Therefore, the nouns in the object position were chosen in consideration of different morphophonotactic patterns of plural partitive in Estonian.

The goal of the game is to find a missing puzzle piece with the correct number of the subject or object. The Slovenian version of the game has two number distractors - one for singular/plural and another for dual; other languages have one number distractor and a semantic distractor.

References

Ahnert, Liselotte; Klix, F.; Schmidt, H.-D. 1980. The acquisition of local prepositions in early childhood. - Zeitschrift für Psychologie 188/2: 226-234.

Argus, Reili 2009a. The early development of case and number in Estonian. - Voeikova, Stephany (Eds.) Acquisition of Case and Number in Typological Perspective (Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter), 111-152.

Argus, Reili 2009b. Psühholingvistiline katse eesti keele objekti käändevahelduse omandamise uurimise meetodina [The psycholinguistic experiment in the research of object case alternation in Estonian]. - Emakeele Seltsi aastaraamat 54. (Tallinn: Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus), 22-43.

Bowermann, Melissa 1999. Learning How to Structure Space for Language. - Bloom, Peterson, Nadels, Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (Massachusetts: MIT Press), 385-462.

Clark, Eve; Berman, Ruth 2004. First Language Acquisition. - Booij, Lehmann, Mugdan, Skopeteas (Eds.) Morphology: an International Handbook on Inflection and Word-Formation. (Berlin: Walter de Gryter) 1795-1805.

Lucy, John A. 1992. Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Berman, Ruth 1997. Acquisition of Hebrew. - Slobin (ed.) Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Volume I (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 255-371.

Vocabulary

Lexis: Teaching Lexical Categories

Children with LI (e.g. SLI) usually have problems learning new vocabulary: they have problems both in comprehension and production (Bishop 1997, Reed 2003). Therefore, several of the tasks focus on lexis ( mainly including lexical categories such as edible and non-edible items, and food categories. Computer games are mostly suitable for practicing receptive vocabulary.

In the games, the words that have to be categorised are visualised by pictures so that they are accessible to non-reading children, they appear in capital letters in a box above the picture of the game, and are voiced (the voice can be repeated by clicking on the audio icon). This multiple representation of the words helps the child to identify the phonological string, the written form, and the concept the word expresses, and to match them all at the same time. We decided to have audio representations of all the practiced items in all the games since it is very important for LI children to learn to map the phonological form on to the conceptual form (Bishop 1997).

The games for practicing lexis are of varied difficulty, but they all try to cover the main semantic difficulties of LI children: size of the lexicon (incl. lexical diversity), robustness of word meaning, new word learning (more exposures to a new word may facilitate acquisition), and word finding (retrieving words from the cognitive store) (Reed 2003: 107).

References

Bishop, D.V.M. 1997. Uncommon Understanding. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

Reed, V.A. 2003. An Introduction to Children with Language Disorders. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson.

 

Phonology

Teaching sounds

Some FREPY tasks focus on reading and sounds. In these games the child has to match syllables in different positions to one target syllable, to put letters together to form a word, or to recognize whole words. For example in the game Lighting Bugs, initial syllables have to be matched to the final syllable. The reverse version with the initial syllable being the target is a focus in the game Fish Tails. This is another production-oriented game, but in face-to-face therapy sessions there is a possibility to combine auditory and conceptual activities with production activities.

Since the tasks have all the target words voiced, they can be used by a therapist as repetitive games. Children can hear the same sound over and over again, which gives the child a proper example of pronunciation as well as the opportunity to practice making that sound.

On-line phonology tasks focus on perception and discrimination of different sounds, whereas printed materials will be designed with the primary focus on speech production. Perception is just important as production, as 'in many children with SLI, there is a relationship between deficits is speech perception and poor speech production' (Bishop 1997: 51).
In the pilot tasks as well as other tasks the selected words are used to develop the child's ability to differentiate initial sounds and word-medial sounds, individual sounds and consonant clusters (the last being especially difficult for LI children (Stackhouse and Wells 1997)).

References

Bishop, D.V.M. 1997. Uncommon Understanding. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

Stackhouse, J. And B. Wells. 1997. Children's Speech and Literacy Difficulties. London: Whurr.

 

Narration

Narrative Tasks / Rationale

Nathalie Topaj & Natalia Gagarina
General description of narrative tasks:

Principle: in order to tell a coherent and understandable story, a child should know how a story is constructed. Our aim is to teach (to help) a child how to do this using the Scaffolding method (cf. Wood, Bruner, and Ross 1976; Cazden 1983; Saye and Brush 2002, inter al.).

Picture stories have been approved by many researchers and speech therapists; they are suitable for young children and are multi-functional.

Studies on narrative skills intervention provided evidence that "directly teaching narrative skills results in improved comprehension and production of oral narratives and improved reading comprehension (Hayward & Schneider, 2000; Swanson & Fey 2005)" (cited from Franke). It had been shown that certain narrative skills are relevant for reading (Norris & Bruning, 1988; Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2002). Moreover, "narrative discourse plays a crucial role in the development of discourse, literacy and social abilities" (Bliss et al., 1998; McCabe, 1996) and, in its turn, the ability "to read and comprehend is critical not only for lifelong learning but also for adequate functioning in the society" (Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2007, 2009).

All narrative tasks are performed with regard to 2 global domains:

1. Macrostructure: The adaptation of the story Grammar elements (cf. Stein & Glenn, 1979) towards the story structure (Gagarina et al., in press)

As described in Becker (2010), "explicit instruction in story grammar impacts information units, episode levels, story type, oral narrative comprehension, and other measures of narrative quality" (cf. Davies, Shanks, & Davies, 2004; Hayward & Schneider, 2000; Schneider & Vis Dube, 2005; Swanson, Fey, Mills, & Hood, 2005; Westerveld & Gillon, 2008). Further she stated that "pictography and story mapping result in longer narratives, increased use of action sequences and temporal conjunctions, and higher levels of story grammar knowledge" (Boulineau, Fore, Hagan-Burke, & Burke, 2004; Ukrainetz McFadden, 1998).

2. Microstructure: discourse coherence and cohesion (reference, connectors, sentence complexity, e.g. subordinate clauses), fluency. Additional areas that could be affected (as side-effects): syntax, vocabulary, Wh-questions, etc.

Tasks can be performed in different ways: creating an own description/story, repeating a story (sentence by sentence) told by an adult, retelling a story (as a whole) told by an adult, telling a story in a group (one child/one sentence), etc. Subtasks can be used in order to practice discourse connectors and referential devices. Additional tasks can be used for group narrations.

Materials:

For single objects/characters pictures were available from other tasks; for story sequences (3-6 pictures) pictures were drawn, but themes were available from other tasks / territories.

Complexity:

Narrative tasks can be performed on 3 levels of complexity: low, middle, high (before starting to tell complex stories, picture/characters description should be practiced)

Low level of complexity:

1) Character/object description (one character/object at a time); can be used in any territory, in between other tasks, or as a separate task.

Procedure: the experimenter says to a child: "Please, look at this character/object and tell me something about her/him/it. What does it look like? What size has it? What color has it? What is s/he doing?"

Motivate a child to use sentences, not just pointing on the character/object and saying who/what it is. Motivate a child to introduce the character/object.

A child should describe the character/object in few sentences.

For example:

It is a horse. It is big and black. Right now it is eating. Horses live at the farm. They are nice animals.
It is a cloud. It is white. It can be small or big. It can have different forms. Sometimes it looks like an animal or a tree.

2) Picture description (one picture at a time), can be used in any territory, in between of other tasks, or as a separate task.
The experimenter says to a child: "Please, look at the picture and tell me what happens there?"
Two steps should be done by a child: a) introduction of the character/s (if several) and b) describing what happens between them.

For example (picture with one character): a) this is a bird / here is a bird / I see a bird / etc.; it is big/small, it is red/blue/etc. ...; b) it is sitting on the tree /it is looking for food /etc.

Middle level of complexity (Goals-Attempt-Outcome):

2 stories in three pictures:

Procedure: a child should look at the pictures first before starting to tell a story in order to know how long the story is and how it is developed. Then the child is asked to tell a story. If the child doesn't know how to start, motivate her/him to introduce the characters first, then to tell what happens.

1) Characters are introduced one after another in the first two pictures, and with one major event (in interaction) on the second one and "happy end" on the third one. E.g. 1st picture: Here is a girl. She is playing on the playground with hew toys. 2nd picture: Then a boy comes. He wants to take the toys away to play by himself. The girl starts crying. 3rd picture: The boy gives her the toys back. The girl invites him to play together.

2) Introduction and interaction of characters from the very beginning (so that already at the first picture there is an event to describe (e.g. Here is a boy and a girl. They go to the zoo./They play together.), the major event is on the second picture (e.g. The zoo is closed! The girl is sad. / A toy gets broken. The girl starts crying.). On the third picture there is "happy end" (e.g. The children go to eat ice-cream instead. / The boy helps the girl to fix the toy.).

High level of complexity:

Procedure: the same as above. The story should be designed in such a way that the same story could be extended to 4, 5, or 6 pictures.

2 stories in more than three pictures (up to six):

1) Characters are introduced one after another, and then interact, major event on the third/fourth picture (depending on the number of pictures), secondary events in between, "happy end" at the end.

2) Characters are introduced right away (in the first picture), and then interact in different combinations (depending on the number of pictures).

References

Becker, P. (2010). Who, Did What, Where, When: Facilitating Personal Narrative and Storytelling Skills. Presentation on WSHA 2010. Retrieved from http://www.wisha.org/convention/con_10/handouts/Session%2055.pdf

Bliss, L. S., McCabe, A. and Mirenda, A. E. (1998). 'Narrative Assessement Profile: discourse analysis for school-age children', Journal of Communication Disorders 31, 347-62.

Boulineau, T., Fore, C., Hagan-Burke, S., Burke, M.D. (2004). Use of story-mapping to increase story-grammar text comprehension of elementary students with learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 27, 105-121.

Cazden, C. B. (1983). Adult assistance to language development: Scaffolds, models, and direct instruction. In R. P. Parker & F. A. Davis (Eds.), Developing literacy: Young children's use of language, (pp. 3-17). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Davies, P., Shanks, B., & Davies, K. (2004). Improving narrative skills in young children with delayed language development; Educational Review, 56(3), 271-286.

Fiestas, C. E., & Pena, E. D. (2004). Narrative discourse in bilingual children: Language and task effects; Language, Speech & Hearing Services in the Schools, 35(2), 155-168.

Franke, Lauren. What did you do at school today? Strategies for teaching story retelling and personal narratives to children with complicated language problems. Retrieved from http://www.animatedspeech.com/pdf/OCDE_Autism_News.pdf

Gagarina et al. (in press). Narrative Screening Protocol for bilingual children. ZAS Papers in Linguistics.

Gutiérrez-Clellen V. F. (2002). Narratives in two languages: assessing performance of bilingual children. Linguistics and Education 13(2), 175-197.

Hayward, D. and Schneider, P. (2000). Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to pre school children with language impairment: an exploratory study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 16(3), 255-284.

Kendeou, P., van den Broek, P., White, M., & Lynch, J. (2007). Preschool and early elementary comprehension: Skill development and strategy interventions. In D. S. McNamara (Ed.) Reading comprehension strategies: Theories, interventions, and technologies, (pp.27-45). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Kendeou, P., van den Broek, P., White, M. J., & Lynch, J. (2009). Predicting Reading Comprehension in Early Elementary School: The Independent Contributions of Oral Language and Decoding Skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 101, No. 4, 765-778.

McCabe, A. (1996). Evaluating narrative discourse skills. In K. Cole, P. Dale, & D. Thal (Eds.). Assessment of communication and language. (pp. 121-142) Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.

Norris, J. & Bruning, R. (1988). Cohesion in the narratives of good and poor readers. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 53, 416-424.

Saye, J., & Brush, T. (2002). Scaffolding critical reasoning about history and social issues in multimedia-supported learning environments. Educational Technology Research & Development, 50(3), 77-96.

Simons, Krista D., and Klein, James D. (2007). The impact of scaffolding and student achievement levels in a problem-based learning environment. Instructional Science, 35, 41-72.

Schneider, P. & Vis Dube, R. (2005). Story presentation effects on children's retell content. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14, 52-60.

Stein, N., & Glenn, C. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. Freedle (Ed.), New directions in discourse processing (Vol. 2, pp. 53-120). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Swanson, L.A., Fey, M.E., Mills, C.E., & Hood, L.S. (2005). Use of narrative-based language intervention with children who have specific language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14, 131-143.

Ukrainetz-McFadden, T. (1998). The immediate effects of pictographic representation on children's narratives. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 14(1), 51-67.

Westerveld, M. F., & Gillon, G. T. (2008a). Oral narrative intervention for children with mixed reading disability. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 24(1), 31-54.

Wood, D. J., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, 17(2), 89-100.

Reading

Teaching Reading

Reading activities (combine reading skills with phonology. Syllables or words that have to be matched are often phonologically confusing or they contain a confusing letter shape.

For example, the aimof the task in Clouds is to discriminate words in a set of confusing, phonologically similar words (with voiced vs. voiceless sounds, long vs. short vowels, etc.); 5 words are used in one set, 4 of them being distracters. Children have to match identical words. Aims of the task are to develop visual perception, general perceptiveness, and reading skills: (1) recognize the graphic representation of a word, (2) analyze/ differentiate sounds, and (3) read.

The game Fish Tail aims at developing the child's ability to match syllables to produce meaningful words. Initial syllables are matched with the final target syllable. Simple disyllabic words are used for the game. FREPY reading tasks, thus, combine two approaches to reading instruction: whole language approach and reading as decoding (Ely 2001).

Reading skills are indirectly targeted in all the games as all of them have the written word(s) at the top of the picture. The incorporation of text into treatment materials can serve as additional cuing for children, children are constantly exposed to the text medium, which may intrigue or raise curiosity in them about how the form can be deciphered (Weiss 2001: 136). Such a juxtaposition between the sound-symbol-picture relationship may help the child establish the relationship between the auditory and written forms.

Tasks that have been designed primarily to raise phonological awareness also teach letter-sound correlations. This way the child is engaged to reflect how the sound system is organized and represented in writing.

References

Ely, R. 2001. Language and Literacy in the School Years. In Gleason, J.B. (ed.) The Development of Language. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 409-454.

Weiss, A.L. 2001. Preschool Language Disorders: Resource Guide. Singular.