Orðaforðakennsla með sögulestri fyrir börn með málþroskaröskun

Children diagnosed with developmental language disorders (DLD) have difficulty learning language. This affects both language comprehension and expression and occurs without any obvious explanation. Many children with DLD have coexisting conditions, such as attentional or emotional problems. Children with DLD can have different types of difficulties learning language and the severity varies. The symptoms are numerous, including problems with learning and applying the rules of grammar, sentence construction, and language use. One common symptom is limited vocabulary. Children with DLD have smaller receptive and expressive vocabularies than their peers. They learn new words at slower rate and forget newly acquired words more rapidly. They know fewer words and have weaker semantic connections within their lexical system. This deficit is visible in their expressive language as they often use simple, high frequency vocabulary. This lack of vocabulary diversity can affect their future reading comprehension and academic performance. Research have shown that DLD is common, with approximately 9% of children displaying signs of language impairment without other coexisting difficulties. Considered in the context of the population of Iceland, this means that approximately 400 children in every year-based age group could be affected by DLD. The aim of this project was to examine the effect of an intervention which aimed to increase the vocabulary of two children diagnosed with DLD. Both attended the same preschool and were in their last year in the preschool where the training took place. The training involved reading a story book where two different methods of teaching target words were compared. The words were either (a) explained explicitly and directly when they occurred in the text, or (b) indirectly when the children were exposed to the words in the text but without explicit teaching. A multiple baseline design was employed by comparing the intervention methods between the children. The intervention took place four times a week for six weeks. Child A received indirect teaching in the first week, then two weeks of direct teaching, followed by three weeks of indirect teaching. As regards Child B, indirect teaching occurred in the first four weeks, followed by direct teaching during the last two weeks. The effect of the intervention was measured by testing how well the children could define the target words and by language samples of spontaneous speech. Measurements were made before, during, and immediately following training, as well as a month after training ended. Expanding vocabulary by direct teaching was found to be a more powerful method than indirect teaching. Vocabulary training using direct teaching had a positive effect with regard to the words taught. Measurements showed that when direct teaching was conducted the children in this study knew the words and were able to explain them, whereas their vocabulary improved only slightly when indirect teaching methods were applied. Measurements taken a month after intervention showed that the children did not fully retain the newly gained vocabulary. It is clear, however, that to maintain the newly gained vocabulary repeated reading, including discussion of target words, is necessary for children with DLD. Reading storybooks with or without direct teaching of target words did not affect the children’s spontaneous vocabulary use as measured by language samples; that is, they did not begin to use more complex and different words when speaking spontaneously. However, on average the children produced more grammatically correct sentences and made fewer morphemic errors. The findings of this study show the importance of reading story books to children during their preschool years. The findings demonstrate that for learning new words children with poor language skills need direct teaching and repeated intensive instruction. It is not enough merely to read the stories without explaining unknown new words. Furthermore, repeated measurements showed that during and after the intervention the children spoke with fewer grammatical errors. This is probably because the researcher made intensive use of the method of recasting during the intervention. Recasting has been shown to be an effective way of correcting syntactic and grammatical errors. The study also demonstrated the importance of supporting children with poor language skills and facilitating their language acquisition. These results can be used for the benefit of parents, teachers and speech pathologists alike.