Functional-Pragmatic Evaluation of Communication Skills in School-Aged Children

Abstract

Five receptive and five expressive considerations are presented which serve as guidelines for the selection of informal evaluation tasks. The resulting procedure provides descriptive data on a student's auditory processing skills and his/her ability to use language for various purposes.

The Missing Link in Language Development of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children: Pragmatic Language Development

“…Preliminary data from Yoshinaga-Itano 10 described the pragmatic skills of 54 DHH preschool age children (3-and 4-year-olds). Pragmatic skills were determined using the Pragmatics Checklist, 11,12 which looks at seven categories: instrumental ("I want"), regulatory ("Do as I tell you"), interactional ("me and you"), personal ("Here I come"), heuristic ("Tell me why"), imaginative ("Let's pretend"), and informative ("I've got something to tell you"). These categories have previously been used to describe pragmatic skills of typically hearing preschool-age children.…”

“…These categories have previously been used to describe pragmatic skills of typically hearing preschool-age children. 12 Of the mentioned categories, skills were rated as either "not present" or "regularly present." In this group of children with hearing loss, 3-year-old pragmatic skills that were most often (50% of responses) "not present" included: giving directions, revision of unclear messages, respect for alternative points of view, explanation of feelings, telling an adult what is not understood in accusation, offering opinions on an issue and supplying supportive statements for opinion, supplying basic identification and biographic data, asking questions for clarification, creating stories with beginning-logical eventsconclusion, using precise noun/pronoun referents, engaging in evaluation of an object in contrast to another, and evaluating the quality of an event.…”

The missing link in language learning of children who are deaf or hard of hearing: Pragmatics

“…The items for the checklist were adapted from Simon (1984), a teacher observation tool, to a teacher/parent questionnaire format. Additionally, the original checklist had presence versus absence of the skill (Yoshinaga-Itano, 1999) and the revised Pragmatic Checklist included scoring for absence, presence with one to three words and presence with complex language.…”

Dyslexia and learning a foreign language: A personal experience

“…This was certainly true in my experience. I have honed my metalinguistic skills through clinical experiences and research on assessment of language disabilities (Simon 1984(Simon , 1986(Simon , 1989(Simon , 1998bDamico and Simon 1993). These metalinguistic skills helped me in a number of ways: (1) being comfortable with linguistic terminology; (2) recognizing examples of grammatical structures and patterns of sentence construction; (3) analyzing what I did not understand about French language structure, so I could ask clarification questions; and (4) organizing linguistic data in preparation for exams.…”

“…I believe that my 30 years of clinical experience as a speech-language pathologist combined with my experiences in researching relationships between intact communication skills and academic performance (Simon 1998a;1984;Damico and Simon 1993), have been significant assets in helping me to analyze my learning difficulties and to compensate for linguistic barriers that otherwise might have impeded success.…”