Fey, Long & Finestack, 2003

1. To help the child achieve greater facility in the comprehension & use of syntax and morphology in the service of conversation, narration, and text in both written and oral modalities 2. Grammatical form should rarely be the only aspect of language intervention & communication that is targeted 3. Stimulate the child’s language acquisition processes rather than teach specific language forms 4. Specific goals should be based on the child’s readiness and need for the targeted forms

 Improvements in grammar will have a positive influence on communication or other areas of development  Contexts arise naturally  Whole language  Success is demonstrated by use of targets in meaningful oral or written communication activities 1. To help the child achieve greater facility in the comprehension & use of syntax and morphology in the service of conversation, narration, and text in both written and oral modalities

 Other linguistic & non-linguistic areas likely require attention  Focus on grammar alone does not necessarily generalize to other areas  Phonology, pragmatics, semantics, narration, literacy 2. Grammatical form should rarely be the only aspect of language intervention & communication that is targeted

 Leads to more efficient and rapid learning throughout their environment  Target grammatical categories (e.g., all subjective pronouns), principles (e.g., SVO), and operations (interrogative reversal)  Use child’s existing resources (e.g. take advantage of S-W predispositon)  Seek ways in which system-wide change can occur

 Focus on partially mastered and unused forms for which the child demonstrates cognitive and linguistic readiness and functional need Highest Priority:  Forms & functions used with 10% - 50% accuracy High Priority:  Forms & functions used with 1% - 10% accuracy Lower Priority:  Forms & functions used with 50% - 90% accuracy  Forms not understood or used at all

5. Manipulate the social, physical, and linguistic context to create more frequent opportunities 6. Exploit different textual genres & written modality to develop appropriate contexts 7. Manipulate the discourse so targets are rendered more salient in pragmatically felicitous contexts 8. Systematically contrast the child’s forms with the adult form using recasts 9. Avoid telegraphic speech: provide models in well-formed phrases and sentences 10. Use elicited imitation to make tragets more salients and to provide practice with phonological patterns that are difficult to access or produce

 Increase opportunities for recasts and models  Violation of routine events  Withhold objects and turns  Violate object function or manipulation  Intentionally misplace objects  Become less cooperative  Misname items, actions, or events

 Doing well in conversation with a cooperative partner does not necessarily generalize to other contexts  Obligatory contexts occur more frequently in some genres and modalities than others (e.g., passives; 3 rd person singular)

 Make targets:  Longer, louder, with dynamic pitch changes  Use pragmatically appropriate contexts  Ellipsis in sentence- or phrase-final position  Contrast between one assertion and another  Disagree or tease  Songs

 Clarify the relationship between target form and their semantic/pragmatic/grammatical functions  Recasts:  Maintain meaning, but modify (correct) structure  Provide additional processing time  Focus attention on the contrast  Used in naturally occurring, pragmatically relevant contexts

Because:  Comprehension often > expressions  Sensitive to grammatical morphemes in the speech stream before they produce them  Less opportunity to hear morphemes in the S-W pattern  English is a morphologically sparse language, so there are already fewer opportunities to associate meaning to morphemes  Grammatical functors are used as cues to grammatical class

 Use imitation as a mechanism to focus attention  Use imitation to contrast forms and highlight meaning  Imitation alone is not sufficient to establish learning

Active Ingredients/Teaching Episodes: The techniques we use to teach or enhance new learning and behavior (Warren, Fey, & Yoder, 2007)

 Time- delay/slowing  Models  Recasts  Expansions  Mands  Questions  For Imitation  Direct Instruction

 Environmental arrangement  WAIT  Why Am I Talking ?  As long as you can…then count to 5  PACE  Play rate  Attentional focus  Communication rate  Energy level  Alter the auditory characteristics of the input  Slow the rate of input  Highlight targets with slight lengthening and emphasis  Pause between phrases

 Presentation of language target with or without requiring a child response  Use well-formed phrases & sentences  Include contrasts  Increase saliency through stress and position Who is mooing? The pig isn’t. The horse isn’t. The cow is. The cow is mooing. Uhoh! The horse is mooing. Silly horse.

 Immediate adult response to child utterance  Repeats some or all of the child’s words  Maintains the child’s central meaning Corrective:  Corrects child error(s) C: The cow mooing. A: The cow is mooing. Non-corrective:  Provides an alternate form C: The cow is mooing. A: Is the cow mooing?

 Immediate adult response to child utterance  Repeats some or all of the child’s words  May or may not correct a child error  May or may not provide an alternate form  Adds semantic content that changes the focus or shifts the child’s meaning C: The cow is mooing. A: That mama cow is mooing for her baby.

The adult requests a response from the child Questions A: What is the cow doing? Requests for Imitation. A: Say - The cow is mooing.

 Explicit instruction about the conditions for use of target forms.  Adult: When there is only one animal say is. Here is one cow. When there are more animals, say are. Here are lots of cows.

 Imitation > Models (Connell & Stone, 1992)  Models > Imitation (Courtright & Courtright, 1976, 1979)  Recasts > Imitation (Camarata & Nelson, 1992; Camarata et al., 1994; Nelson et al., 1996)  Recasts = Models (Morgan et al., 1995; Farrar, 1990; Proctor-Williams et al., 2001)  Recasts > Models (Farrar, 1992; Proctor-Williams et al., 2001, 2007; Saxton, 1997a; Saxton, 2000; Saxton et al., 1997)  Models = Direct Instruction  (Swisher et al., 1995)  Conversational models & recasts work well for forms that frequently occur naturally  Recasts must be used at least twice as often as in normal conversation  Therapy models and imitation work well for forms that are rare  Imitation leads quickly to first use but not to generalization

 How the most effective use of one technique compares to the most effective use of another technique  Whether techniques are more effective when used in combination than in isolation  If combinations of techniques are more effective, which ones presented in which order?

ModelRecastExpansion Mand Question Mand Imitation Direct Instruction Time Delay

When techniques are combined, they become procedures! 3 possible outcomes: 1. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts 2. Effects are additive 3. Use of one technique negates the effectiveness of another

Child-Centered  Naturalistic, daily interactions  Involves caregivers  Particularly helpful for children who :  Are responsive but with their own agendas  Rarely initiate  Strong generalization  Valuable during initial stages of language development Hybrid  Clinician controls choice of activities and materials  Child controls play and conversational topics  Strong generalization  Valuable for increasing exposure to rarely occurring forms  Useful for early- and later-developing forms Clinician-Directed  Clinician controls all aspects of the treatment  Rapidly elicits accurate task-specific productions  Must build in generalization tasks  Valuable for increasing exposure to rarely occurring forms  Useful for early- and later-developing forms

Child-Centered Hybrid Clinician-Directed Hanen ProgramsPrelinguistic Milieu FastForWord Treatment Milieu TreatmentEnhanced Milieu Drill/Drill-play Treatment Dialogic ReadingFocused Stimulation Direct Instruction Conversational Recast Treatment Story Grammar

 Target first words when children produce 2 communicative acts / min  Target early morphemes and simple sentences when children are combining 3 words  Target complex sentences when simple sentences are mostly grammatically correct  20% of children’s sentences should be complex before kindergarten entry  Target stories when children use complete simple sentences and begin to string them together  Children should be telling personal event and retell stories that are mostly understandable before kindergarten entry  Retell and stories will still often end-at-the- high point.

Techniques  Models  Mands: Questions  Recasts  Expansions CROWD Questions  Completion /Cloze Statements  Recall Questions  Open-Ended Questions  Wh-questions  Distancing Prompts/ Questions

 C: He rolls to the right. He...  R: Can you tell me something that Ollie does?  O: What do you think he does inside his egg?  W: What do Gossie & Gertie do to try and get Ollie out?  D: I see ducks on the lake. Do you ever see any ducks?

Techniques  Slowing  Models  Mands: Imitation  Mands: Questions  Recasts Hierarchy  Imitation  Model-Mand  Spontaneous  Generalization

Imitation Practice  I need sugar AND I need butter.  I need flour AND I need eggs.  I need eggs BUT I don’t need rotten eggs  I need peanut butter BUT I don’t need chocolate chips Play the Game (Matching) For Generalization: Make cookies

Techniques  Direct Instruction  Mand: Question  Recast  Expansion Approach  Multisensory  Literature-based  Metalinguistic  Metacognitive

 Characters  Setting  Kick-off/ Initiating Event  Actions/Attempt  Consequence GREEN construction paper for Character, Setting, Kick-off YELLOW Construction for the attempts RED construction paper for the direct consequence / resolution

What We Know  Children with LI require more exposures to specific forms that they are ready to learn than are available in typical conversation to acquire morphosyntactic forms at the same rate as children with TL What We Don’t Know  The optimal frequency for using techniques  The optimal techniques and their frequencies for different morphosyntactic structures  The optimal techniques and their frequencies for children with different etiologies

What We Know  Expressive language outcomes are very similar for clinician- and parent- delivered intervention (Law, Garrett & Nye; 2004; Fey et al., 1993, 1997)  This is as likely attributable to total frequency and distribution as it is to dose rates  We can teach parents a wide variety of techniques and procedures (Girolametto et al., 1998; Hemmeter & Kaiser, 1994; Kaiser & Hancock, 2003; Kott & Law,1995; Wilcox 1992) What We Don’t Know  What is the dose frequency and distribution that caregivers use in the home/classroom and can we measure this?  How can we help caregivers sustain and adjust their dose frequency as the child’s performance changes?  The impact on children and their families when parents become intervention agents

What We Know  Children more accurately produced and generalized a complex syntactic construction (e.g., It was the cup that the frog took ) when exposed to it over 5 or 10 days than when exposed to it for 1 day (Ambridge, Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello, 2006)  Children with TL (but not SLI) more accurately produced novel verbs when recasts were distributed across 5 sessions than when recasts were massed within 3 sessions (Proctor-Williams & Fey, 2007) What We Don’t Know  The optimal distribution of dose frequency within and across sessions for:  different morphological forms and syntactic frames  for children with different etiologies  Whether principles of distribution can be applied to techniques and procedures as well as specific targets

What We Know  Intervention of more than 8 weeks seems more effective than those of less than 8 weeks (Law et al., 2004)  Intervention of 4-12 weeks seems optimal (Nye, & Seaman, 1987)  Intervention in the first 4.5 months resulted in greater gains than in the second 4.5 months (Fey et al., 1997)  Children who attended a Head Start preschool more regularly produced more complex utterances and benefited more from LFC and LST (Justice, Mashburn, Pence & Wiggins, 2008) What We Don’t Know  The outcomes we can expect based on length of intervention  The optimal length of treatment for different techniques and procedures  The effects of classroom- based curricula and programs on child language outcomes - immediate and long-term  The consistency of attendance on individual treatment outcomes

 Early intervention works  We have powerful techniques available  We have many procedures that work  We need to continue to monitor children with early language difficulties to ensure catch-up language growth continues into acquisition of early literacy skills  We need clinicians to work with researchers to answer what we don’t know