INTERVENTION FOR

THE DEVELOPING
LANGUAGE STAGE
PRINCIPLES OF GRAMMAR
FACILITATION IN
INTERVENTION
Fey, Long & Finestack, 2003
Principles Related to Goal Selection

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
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

 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
2. Grammatical form should rarely be the only aspect of
language intervention & communication that is targeted

 Other linguistic & non-linguistic areas likely

require attention
 Focus on grammar alone does not necessarily
generalize to other areas
 Phonology, pragmatics,
semantics, narration, literacy
3. Stimulate the child’s language acquisition
processes rather than teach specific language forms

 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
4. Specific goals should be based on the child’s
readiness and need for the targeted forms

 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
 Principles Related to Intervention
Procedures & Activities
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
5. Manipulate the social, physical, and linguistic context to
create more frequent opportunities

 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
6. Exploit different textual genres & written modality to
develop appropriate contexts

 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; 3rd person singular)
7. Manipulate the discourse so targets are rendered
more salient in pragmatically felicitous contexts

 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
8. Systematically contrast the child’s forms with the adult
form using recasts

 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
9. Avoid telegraphic speech: provide models
in well-formed phrases and sentences

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
10. Use elicited imitation to make targets more salient & to provide practice
with phonological patterns that are difficult to access or produce

 Use imitation as a mechanism to focus

attention
 Use imitation to contrast forms and
highlight meaning
 Imitation alone is not sufficient to
establish learning
Techniques: The Power Tools You
Always Have with You
Active Ingredients/Teaching
Episodes:
The techniques we use
to teach or enhance
new learning and
behavior
(Warren, Fey, & Yoder, 2007)
Techniques
 Time-  Mands
delay/slowing Questions
 Models  For
 Recasts Imitation
 Expansions  Direct
Instruction
Time Delay/Slowing
 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
Models

 Presentation of language Who is mooing?

target with or without The pig isn’t.
requiring a child response The horse isn’t.
 Use well-formed phrases The cow is. The cow is
& sentences
mooing.
 Include contrasts
Uhoh! The horse is
 Increase saliency through mooing. Silly horse.
stress and position
 Recasts
 Immediate adult response to child utterance
 Repeats some or all of the child’s words
 Maintains the child’s central meaning

Corrective: Non-corrective:
 Corrects child  Provides an

error(s) alternate form

C: The cow is mooing.
C: The cow mooing. A: Is the cow mooing?
A: The cow is mooing.
 Expansions
 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.
Mands

The adult requests a response

from the child
Questions
A: What is the cow doing?
Requests for Imitation
A: Say - The cow is mooing.
Direct Instruction

 Explicit  Adult: When there is

only one animal say is.
instruction about
Here is one cow. When
the conditions for there are more animals,
use of target say are. Here are lots of
forms. cows.
 What We Know
 Imitation > Models  Conversational models
(Connell & Stone, 1992)
& recasts work well for
 Models > Imitation
(Courtright & Courtright, 1976, 1979) forms that frequently
 Recasts > Imitation occur naturally
(Camarata & Nelson, 1992; Camarata 
et al., 1994; Nelson et al., 1996) Recasts must be used at
 Recasts = Models least twice as often as in
(Morgan et al., 1995; Farrar, 1990;
Proctor-Williams et al., 2001) normal conversation
 Recasts > Models  Therapy models and
(Farrar, 1992; Proctor-Williams et al.,
2001, 2007; Saxton, 1997a; Saxton, imitation work well for
2000; Saxton et al., 1997)
forms that are rare

Models = Direct
Instruction  Imitation leads quickly
 (Swisher et al. , 1995) to first use but not to
generalization
What We Don’t Know
 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?
Practice : am, is, are
Model

Time
Recast
Delay

Direct
Expansion
Instruction

Mand Mand
Imitation Question
Techniques to Procedures
When techniques 3 possible outcomes:
are combined, they 1. The whole is greater
become procedures! than the sum of the
parts
2. Effects are additive
3. Use of one technique
negates the
effectiveness of
another
 Intervention Contexts & Procedures
Child-Centered
 Naturalistic, daily
interactions Hybrid Clinician-Directed
 Involves caregivers  Clinician controls  Clinician controls
 Particularly helpful choice of activities all aspects of the
for children who : and materials treatment
 Are responsive  Child controls play  Rapidly elicits
but with their and conversational accurate task-
own agendas topics specific productions
 Rarely initiate  Strong  Must build in
 Strong generalization generalization tasks
generalization  Valuable for  Valuable for
 Valuable during increasing exposure increasing exposure
initial stages of to rarely occurring to rarely occurring
language forms forms
development  Useful for early-  Useful for early-
 Intervention Contexts & Procedures

Child-Centered Hybrid Clinician-Directed

Hanen Programs Prelinguistic Milieu FastForWord
Treatment

Milieu Treatment Enhanced Milieu Drill/Drill-play

Treatment

Dialogic Reading Focused Stimulation Direct Instruction

Conversational Recast
Treatment

Story Grammar
Procedures & Stages of Development
Procedure Prelinguistic 1st Words Simple Complex Stories
Sentences Sentences
Preling Milieu Tx
Hanen
Mileu Tx
Focused Stimulation
Enhanced Milieu Tx
Fast ForWord
Dialogic Reading
Conversational Recast
Direct Instruction
Drill-play
Story Grammar
Rules of Thumb for Changing Goals
and Procedures
 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.
Dialogic Reading

Techniques CROWD Questions

 Completion /Cloze
 Models

 Mands:
Statements
 Recall Questions
Questions  Open-Ended Questions
 Recasts
 Wh-questions
 Expansions  Distancing Prompts/

Questions
 Dialogic Reading Example
 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?
Drill-Play
Techniques Hierarchy
 Slowing  Imitation

 Models  Model-Mand

 Mands: Imitation  Spontaneous

 Mands: Questions  Generalization

 Recasts
 Drill-Play Example
Imitation Practice Play the Game
 I need sugar AND I (Matching)
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

For Generalization: Make cookies

Story Grammar
Techniques Approach
 Direct Instruction  Multisensory
 Mand: Question  Literature-based
 Recast  Metalinguistic
 Expansion  Metacognitive
Story Grammar Example
 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 Don’t
Know
 The optimal frequency
for using techniques
 The optimal techniques
What We Know and their frequencies
 Children with LI require for different
more exposures to morphosyntactic
specific forms that they structures
are ready to learn than  The optimal techniques
are available in typical and their frequencies
conversation to acquire for children with
morphosyntactic forms different etiologies
at the same rate as
children with TL
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
 Final Take-home Messages
 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