Content Teachers' Written Comments on Their Life-long English Language Profiles

CLIL in Italy has been compulsory by law since 2003 (Moratti’s Law) for the last year of all secondary schools. Subject-matter teachers were chosen to be the CLIL teachers, and only in 2012 did methodological and linguistic training begin (provided by universities all over the country). This study explores the profile of content teachers attending CLIL training not in terms of their linguistic competence but in terms of their relationship with English as an additional language. To do so, 115 trainees were asked to fill in a questionnaire composed of 10 open-ended questions and 2 close-ended ones. This questionnaire had both a research and training goal, since it was submitted at the beginning of the training course to investigate content teachers’ perceived linguistic profiles, which served as a psychological and pedagogical starting point for the course. Results show that content teachers have a specific linguistic identity and have had similar past experiences with the English language. These results could have repercussions and be exported to other training programmes, especially in terms of shifting teachers’ personae from subject-matter to fully-fledged CLIL teachers

Language Profiles of Transcortical Aphasia

BACKGROUND: The term "transcortical aphasia" is applied to primary lesions not involving the receptive and expressive language areas, but rather the areas connected to the association cortex. By definition, patients with transcortical aphasia can repeat what they have heard, but they have difficulty producing spontaneous speech or understanding speech. This paper reports the clinical features of stroke patients with transcortical aphasia to delineate the language profiles of its subtypes. METHODS: Eighty patients with stroke were divided into three subtypes of transcortical aphasia: transcortical sensory aphasia, transcortical motor aphasia, and mixed transcortical aphasia. A Korean version of the Western Aphasia Battery was used to compare the subdomains of language ability among the three groups. RESULTS: The patients showed a relatively preserved repetition ability, but the performances in repetition and generative naming, and the aphasia quotient were highest in the transcortical sensory aphasic group, followed by the transcortical motor aphasic and mixed transcortical aphasic groups. CONCLUSIONS: The present study provides detailed information on the language profiles of the three subtypes of transcortical aphasia, which can be differentiated based on the aphasia quotient and generative naming scores.ope

Comparing Language Profiles: Children with Specific Language Impairment and Developmental Coordination Disorder

Background: Although it is widely recognized that substantial heterogeneity exists in the cognitive profiles of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), very little is known about the language skills of this group. Aims: To compare the language abilities of children with DCD with a group whose language impairment has been well described: children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Methods & Procedures: Eleven children with DCD and 11 with SLI completed standardized and non-standardized assessments of vocabulary, grammatical skill, non-word repetition, sentence recall, story retelling, and articulation rate. Performance on the non-standardized measures was compared with a group of typically developing children of the same age. Outcomes & Results: Children with DCD were impaired on tasks involving verbal recall and story retelling. Almost half of those in the DCD group performed similarly to the children with SLI over several expressive language measures, while 18% had deficits in non-word repetition and story retelling only. Poor non-word repetition was observed for both the DCD and the SLI groups. The articulation rate of the children with SLI was slower than that of the DCD group, which was slower than that of typically developing children. Conclusions: Language impairment is a common co-occurring condition in DCD. The language profile of children with either DCD or SLI was similar in the majority of, but not all, cases

Language Profiles Of Thai Children With Autism: Lexical, Grammatical, And Pragmatic Factors

This dissertation is a linguistically-motivated investigation into different areas of language in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), compared to typically developing (TD) children. Fine distinctions between linguistic units were used in designing tasks on language production and comprehension in seven experiments. The focus of each chapter of this dissertation was on three main hypotheses respectively, namely (1) the Abstract Representation Difficulty Hypothesis that children with ASD (perhaps limited to the subgroup with co-morbid language impairments) have difficulties activating abstract lexical representations as effectively as TD children, due to their hyperattention to phonetic details of speech, (2) the Pragmatic over Grammatical Deficit Hypothesis that pragmatics is particularly difficult for all the ASD children, while morphological and semantic aspects of language are relatively intact, and (3) the Cognitive Factor Hypothesis that cognitive factors such as nonverbal intelligence quotient (NVIQ) and nonverbal working memory play a greater role in the ASD than the TD performance on linguistic tasks. Chapter 2 investigates the morpho-phonological and semantic aspects of the lexical processing of Thai compound and simplex words. Results suggest that morphological facilitation effects can be obtained independently of phonological and semantic relatedness in the processing of Thai compounds. While children with ASD with lower task performance display hyper-attention to the acoustic differences between primes and targets, children with ASD in the higher performance group have enhanced morphological effects, compared to their TD peers, and the effects appear to be independent of the presence of phonological effects and enhanced semantic effects. The lack of phonological effects in the first set of experiments was explored further in the later experiments. Children with ASD were found to be slower in processing natural-sounding surface phonological forms, suggesting that a deeper processing of neutralized forms than full forms. The similar performance on the next task with the integration of visual information suggests that the slower processing may result from their slower lexical semantic processing. The Abstract Representation Difficulty Hypothesis, thus, holds for a subgroup of children with ASD, while other children with ASD display intact phonological representation, enhanced morphological processing compared to TD controls, and intact but slower lexical processing. Chapter 3 explores the Pragmatic over Grammatical Deficits Hypothesis. Using fine distinctions within the personal reference terms, consistently replicated results suggest that while grammatical person phi-features are intact in children with ASD\u27s representation of pronouns, these children are less sensitive to deictic information in their interpretation of pronouns and tend to avoid using the first-person pronoun, with high deictic level, when they have freedom to choose personal names to refer to themselves. Children with ASD also performed more poorly on the comprehension of unmarked pronouns which requires implicated presupposition, suggesting that even with minimal comparisons among the pronouns, lexically-encoded core grammatical features and pragmatic ones are distinguished in children\u27s language processing. Chapter 3 also adds to the literature on lexical presuppositions, scalar implicature, and implicated presuppositions that not only adolescents, but also children with ASD are age-appropriate in deriving scalar implicatures and that not all kinds of pragmatic inferences are equally challenging for children with ASD. The most indicative difference between the children with ASD and the TD group lies in the children with ASD\u27s heavier reliance on literal, logical meaning when other semantically- and pragmatically-inferred meanings are violated. Chapter 4 partly contributes to the Cognitive Factor Hypothesis, suggesting a possibility that cognitive factors, as opposed to developmental factors, correlates more with children with ASD\u27s performance on linguistic tasks. Additionally, children in both groups displayed correlations in their performance across all of the experiment in the dissertation. Individual language profiles were compiled with the results from the previous chapters. Two subgroups of children with ASD were identified through k-means cluster analysis. The children with ASD in Cluster 1 have globally better performance across experiments than children with ASD in Cluster 2, supporting that ASD children may be able to be classified into subgroups based on their performance on linguistic tasks alone. Even with globally better linguistic task performance, the children with ASD in Cluster 1 still appear to be less sensitive to social-deictic information, confirming that certain types of pragmatics are indeed more challenging than the others. In sum, this dissertation advances our understanding on morphological, semantic, and pragmatic abilities of children with autism through carefully-designed linguistically-motivated experiments

Associated reading skills in children with a history of Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

A large cohort of 200 eleven-year-old children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were assessed on basic reading accuracy and on reading comprehension as well as language tasks. Reading skills were examined descriptively and in relation to early language and literacy factors. Using stepwise regression analyses in which age and nonverbal IQ were controlled for, it was found that a single word reading measure taken at 7 years was unsurprisingly a strong predictor of the two different types of reading ability. However, even with this measure included, a receptive syntax task (TROG) entered when reading accuracy score was the DV. Furthermore, a test of expressive syntax/narrative and a receptive syntax task completed at 7 years entered into the model for word reading accuracy. When early reading accuracy was excluded from the analyses, early phonological skills also entered as a predictor of both reading accuracy and comprehension at 11 years. The group of children with a history of SLI were then divided into those with no literacy difficulties at 11 and those with some persisting literacy impairment. Using stepwise logistic regression, and again controlling for IQ and age, 7 years receptive syntax score (but not tests of phonology, expressive vocabulary or expressive syntax/narrative) entered as a positive predictor of membership of the ‘no literacy problems’ group regardless of whether early reading accuracy was controlled for in step one. The findings are discussed in relation to the overlap of SLI and dyslexia and the long term sequelae of language impairment