What is it about?
This systematic review highlights interventions that are effective for students with language-related disabilities (language, reading, writing) at the discourse level. Fidelity of implementation, research quality of the original studies, outcomes of the studies and their impact on student performance, and the potential for SLPs or other professionals to be effective with the intervention are discussed. These are important factors to consider when reading research related to treatment efficacy, especially when SLPs are serving students in the "middle grades" (i.e., 4-8) where there is a relative dearth of research supported treatments, especially at the discourse level.
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Why is it important?
This review is important for clinicians trying to decide what interventions to use with students who continually struggle with language or related (i.e., reading, writing) issues in the later grades. Much research on language development and disoeders focuses on early intervention with little focused on treatment effectiveness and efficacy for older students. This review highlights 7 high quality studies in a way that clinicians in the schools can understand.
Perspectives
This review is important to me because when I was a clinician in the schools, I felt like it was hard to find a place to support students who were struggling after the "reading to learn" switch in perspective for older grades. These students continued to struggle with reading, writing, and speaking about narrative language (e.g., stories) and struggled even more with expository language found in most academic texts. This review highlights how little research is done on the middle grades and why I was left "wanting more" and struggling to meet the expansive needs of my students the way I wanted to.
Amy Peterson
Utah State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Systematic Review of Academic Discourse Interventions for School-Aged Children With Language-Related Learning Disabilities, Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, July 2020, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2020_lshss-19-00039.
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