Search ASHA Publications About Literacy, Language, and Learning
The ASHA Leader and ASHA online journals are excellent sources of materials to supplement your curriculum.
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The ASHA Leader
Answers to Your Biggest Questions About Services for People With Severe Disabilities
Many providers struggle to identify effective ways to work with clients with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Here, a committee of experts offers some advice.
School Matters: Meet the Parents
School-based speech-language pathologists work hard to provide services to students—so much so that they may forget to involve students' parents. This oversight is understandable considering the many demands of the profession, but it can actually hinder students' progress. Here are some suggestions for reaching out to this valuable resource.
Schools as Complex Host Environments: Understanding Aspects of Schools that May Influence Clinical Practice and Research
Schools are complex host environments in which to embed both clinical practice and clinical practice research. As professionals who are invested in changing students' developmental trajectories, we must be aware of features of the school environment that exert influence on students' development.
Special Education Eligibility: When Is a Speech-Language Impairment Also a Disability?
When a child has a speech or language impairment, do they qualify for special education services? Many SLPs, teachers, and family members are eager to address a child's communication needs but are unfamiliar with the nuances of special education eligibility requirements. Learn what needs to be established and by when to provide the right services for every student.
Enhancing Phonological Patterns of Young Children With Highly Unintelligible Speech
The treatment for children with highly unintelligible speech may benefit from the cycles approach to phonological remediation.
Youth Hearing at Risk: Tools for Fun and Learning
Check out these links and interactive online resources dedicated to educating youth—and people of all ages—about the importance of hearing health.
Executive Functions and Communication in Adolescents
We think of adolescence as a time of significant physical and psychosocial changes, but it also is a time of significant brain and cognitive development and, related to these developments, significant changes in communication functions.
Assessing Diverse Students With Autism Spectrum Disorders
Effectively serving students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) requires professionals to possess specialized knowledge, skills, and understanding.
Social Communication Strategies for Adolescents With Autism
Adolescence can be a tricky period for everyone, but students with autism spectrum disorders will need some extra coaching when it comes to the oh-so-critical social communication.
Managing Sound Sensitivity in Individuals With ASDs
Hypersensitivity to sound is commonly believed to be a permanent symptom of autism that must be accommodated, but is that really the case?
Research and Resources: Autism Spectrum Disorders
Drug shows promise for treating autism.
Biological Markers of Reading and Speech-in-Noise Perception in the Auditory System
Researchers at the Auditory Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern University have found that children with language-based learning impairments can have atypical neural representations of speech in their auditory systems.
Classroom Acoustics: What Possibly Could Be New?
A child's ability to hear and listen is very different from that of an adult. When it comes to designing schools, however, not everyone seems to understand the implications of this difference.
Medicaid Reimbursement in Schools
Addresses major issues related to billing and payment for school-based services for Medicaid-eligible children.
RTI Progress Monitoring Tools
RTI frameworks are becoming increasingly common as a means for identifying students with reading and learning disabilities and providing them with quality instruction.
New Service Delivery Models: Connecting SLPs with Teachers and Curriculum
One of the greatest challenges of school-based practice is to how to deliver speech-language services in a way that effects the most change in students. Although some students will require instruction that can be best accomplish in the "speech room," many students can be moved quickly back to less restrictive settings in which typical peers can be used as appropriate speech and language models.
Ethics, Equity, and English-Language Learners: A Decision-Making Framework
Speech-language pathologists and audiologists strive to identify and implement the most ethical and appropriate services. However, clinical decision-making in intervention with English-language learners and their families can be challenging.
The Path to Inclusion
Online Exclusive! A social inclusion program for students with autism spectrum disorders helps not only the students, but the community gain greater understanding and awareness.
Speech Club Helps Students, School, and Community
Students at BayCrest Elementary School in Tampa, Florida, take part in Speech Club, a unique program that not only helps students who have speech and language impairment but also provides service within the school and the local community.
Navigating the Transition to Middle School: Peer Network Programming for Students With Autism
Peer-mediated interventions can help narrow the widening social gap between students with ASD and their typically developing peers that begins in elementary school and can continue as they transition to middle school.
How the Brain Thinks in Autism: Implications for Language Intervention
Autism spectrum disoders (ASD) clearly affect social functioning, but also have an impact on the development and use of language that extends beyond pragmatics. Because ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, clinicians will benefit from understanding what is different about the brains of affected individuals.
Kids Write and Create: A Service Learning Project in North Philadelphia
A service learning project out of Temple University in Philadelphia helps school-aged students take the first important steps toward literacy.
Principles for School-Age Language Intervention: Insights from a Randomized Controlled Trial
During the 1990s, Michael Merzenich and Paula Tallal worked together to create a computerized language intervention program called Fast ForWord-LanguageTM (FFW-L, Scientific Learning Corporation, 1998).
Infusing Tribal Culture in Washington Schools
Over-identification of Native children as needing special education, including speech-language treatment, was a key concern identified in a recently completed study of Native American students in Washington state public schools.
Professional Partners in the Schools
Audiologists and speech-language pathologists collaborate to help students with hearing loss.
Serving Students with Hearing Loss in the Schools: Speech and Language Services for Students in the Mainstream
Professionals should understand the relationship between a child's language and chronological age when serving students with hearing loss in the mainstream.
Telepractice in the Schools: Virtual Services Help Clinicians Do More with Less
A guide to preparing a telepractice program, finding funding, identifying technology, selecting students, and demonstrating success.
Perspective: Apraxia Services in the Schools
When treating students with apraxia, school-based speech-language pathologists face unique challenges related to treatment intensity, and carryover practice.
School Design with Acoustics in Mind
An architect offers suggestions for designing quiet classrooms and practical ideas for improving speech intelligibility in new or existing buildings.
Response-to-Intervention: SLPs as Linchpins in Secondary Schools
Response-to-intervention is relevant in the secondary schools and SLPs need to be key players in the planning and implementation of RTI initiatives in their school.
The SLP and Early Intervention with Infants and Toddlers with Hearing Loss
Skilled speech-language pathologists are in demand to provide early intervention services for infants and toddlers with hearing loss.
Guidelines Help Texas Clinicians Manage Caseloads
A 10-year effort to implement eligibility guidelines for speech-language services is now yielding successful results.
Pediatric Cochlear Implants: Knowledge and Skills of Speech-Language Pathologists
A new survey highlights gaps in speech-language pathologist's training and knowledge of cochlear implants in children.
Speech and Language "Mythbusters" for Internationally Adopted Children
The author explores seven myths surrounding the speech and language development of internationally adopted children and provides evidence that can guide clinical decision making.
A Place to Learn: How Architecture Affects Hearing and Learning
Everyone involved in education-from the architect to the teacher-needs to know more about how children learn so the learning environment can be made supportive for all children.
Teamwork Helps Struggling Readers: Response-to-Intervention Program Pairs SLP, Reading Teachers
One SLP used assessment data and staffing changes as the impetus to launch a new response-to-intervention program in partnership with the reading teacher.
Autism Spectrum Disorders in the Schools: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Intervention Pose Challenges for SLPs
Assessment, diagnosis, and intervention pose challenges for school-based SLPs who must address the unique needs of students with autism spectrum disorders.
Oklahoma School SLPs Expand Literacy Role: In Two Districts, Response-to-Intervention Brings Opportunity for Change
When two Oklahoma districts became the first in the state to adopt a response-to-intervention model, two SLPs took a leadership role in redefining their roles, caseloads, and service delivery models.
On Language and Literacy
We will best serve students by being good team players who offer all our expertise to help teams enhance the language skills-and therefore literacy-of all of the children we serve.
Addressing Emergent Literacy Skills in English-Language Learners
Preschool programs can have a direct impact on the academic skills of children learning English as a second language, potentially closing the gap with quality education.
Students and Soundwaves: Five Strategies to Promote Good Classroom Acoustics
Good classroom acoustics can enhance the classroom learning environment to facilitate inclusion and response-to-intervention.
Telepractice in Schools Helps Address Personnel Shortages
Remote and underserved school districts across the country increasingly are turning to telepractice to meet the communication needs of their students-and finding success.
Volunteer Coalition Helps Improve Literacy
To address the needs of struggling readers, SLP Sherry Comerchero developed a volunteer literacy coalition that sends teams of tutors into the schools.
Second Language Acquisition: Success Factors in Sequential Bilingualism
The same interacting factors that contribute to first-language acquisition success are at play in successful sequential bilingualism.
Early Hearing Detection and Intervention: Audiologists and SLPs Collaborate in Successful Program
Communication and cooperation among audiologists and speech-language pathologists is pivotal to the success of statewide programs for early hearing detection and intervention.
The ABCs of Dysphagia Management in Schools
Management of dysphagia in students with disabilities is rapidly becoming an important area of focus of speech-language pathologists. This article provides an overview of practical strategies for use in school environments.
Considering Conceptual Frameworks in Communication Sciences and Disorders
Critical social theory is a conceptual framework to consider that focuses on understanding the total existence of groups of people and on explaining cultural, economic, and political contexts.
Social Fitness for Students with Asperger's Syndrome
An award-winning classroom-based program was developed to save costs and provide classroom-based services to students with Asperger's syndrome in California's secondary schools.
Treatment for Childhood Apraxia of Speech
When you work with a child with apraxia of speech, you gain a greater respect for the complexity of the speech task and why the understanding of motor learning theory is invaluable for treatment.
Phonotrauma in Children
Rehabilitation of children with phonotrauma, or vocal abuse, involves much more than simply eliminating traumatic behaviors. It involves changing the culture of the home to help parents help their children change vocal habits.
Home Talk and School Talk
The differences between home talk and school talk can be distilled into three categories-why we talk, how we talk, and what we talk about. Understanding cultural differences in talk can help see a child's full potential.
Responsiveness to Intervention
Responsiveness to Intervention presents a chance to change practices to advance the cause of making speech-language services a valued commodity in the schools.
A Tale of Two Languages
Young bilingual children seem able to understand and use two languages independently of each other as early as 18 months of age.
A Passion for Literacy: David Baldacci
Best-selling novelist David Baldacci, known for his high-intrigue thrillers has taken a new turn in a life powered by his love of language with Wish You Well, a story steeped in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. The book led to a foundation that supports family literacy efforts.
Teaming up for Literacy in the Schools
An SLP begins a journey to literacy teaming in effort to close the literacy gap and intervene in the early elementary grades.
Pragmatic Communication Disorders: New Intervention Approaches
An understanding of the basic neuropsychological mechanisms of pragmatic communication will allow the design of more effective intervention approaches for adolescents and adults with neurological disorders.
Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Aspects of Communication: Research-Praxis Relationships
Ethnography and sociolinguistics may enhance our understanding of the multiple factors required for effective communication, such as linguistic, cultural, cognitive, and neurological variables.
"Be-Attitudes" for Managing Change in School-Based Practice
These "Be-Attitudes" help SLPs to conceptualize the nature of their role and to make choices based on values about what is important.
Codes and Contexts: Exploring Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Intelligence
Being able to read the context and decode the message is essential for successful cross-cultural communication.
Learning the Deep Structure: Elements of School-Based Leadership
Learn about commonalities among exceptional educational leaders and among highly effective schools, and about how one's bedrock values and beliefs fuel the leadership process.
SLPs in Secondary Schools: Going Beyond Survival to "Thrival"
Speech-language pathologists need to go beyond survival in the public schools and move to "thrival" by using mantras that would guide practice to meet the dual goals of thriving as a productive professional and helping students thrive in school and life.
Supervision of Speech-Language Pathology Assistants: A Reciprocal Relationship
In the supervisory relationship between an SLP and SLPA, each person has much to give and to receive. Learn about the stages of supervision as the relationship evolves and the important components of the supervisory process.
What Do Children Hear?
Auditory development is a prolonged process, despite the precocious development of the inner ear, and continues well into the school years, as children become more selective and more flexible about the way they process sound.
New Web Resource Targets Linguistic Diversity
A new online resource provides support to clinicians who face the challenges of service linguistically diverse children effectively.
Assessment and Intervention for Bilingual Children with Phonological Disorders
Providing assessment and intervention to children with phonological disorders is complicated given the lack of understanding of the theories of bilingual phonological representation and the lack of knowledge of current best practices.
A Unique Mind: Learning Style Differences in Asperger's Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism
Explore the distinctions between Asperger's syndrome and high-functioning autism and learning style differences in planning interventions for students.
Red Flags for Disabilities in Children Who Are Deaf/Hard of Hearing
In children with hearing loss, other problems may be overlooked until an astute clinician, therapist, or family member notes a lack of appropriate skill progression.
American Indian Stories Enrich Intervention
Students from Washington State University are integrating the oral storytelling tradition-one of the richest cultural resources in American Indian culture-with evidence-based practice to create an early intervention program for children with hearing loss.
Cochlear Implant Collaborations Aid School Success
Successful outcomes occur when parents, schools, and cochlear implant centers work together to foster achievement of the communication goals set for the child by the child's parents.
CHARGE Syndrome
Children with CHARGE syndrome have multiple congenital anomalies including disorders of all senses and speech, language, feeding, swallowing, and behavior.
Neurotoxicants: Environmental Contributors to Disability in Children
Recent research reveals that exposures to neurotoxicants can have a particularly detrimental impact on brain function and in turn lead to the expression of learning and developmental disabilities.
Web Accessibility for People with Communication Disabilities
Individuals with communication disabilities may have an impairment that may inhibit their ability to access the over 4 billion Web pages. Here are ways to help clients better access the Internet.
Managing Dysphagia in the Schools
Speech-language pathologists have found their roles expanding to include the management of students with dysphagia which requires a team approach.
Language Intervention from a Bilingual Mindset
Development in two languages is in some ways different from monolingual development, but it is not more difficult and does not cause language impairment. Seeing the situation from a bilingual mindset gives clinicians a good start.
Parent Programs in Literacy: Differences for Latinos
The factors that will influence the success and failure of parent programs with Latino parents become more difficult to manage without an understanding the families' needs and experiences.
Sound Field Systems on the Rise in Schools
Improved test scores are cited as one reason that the use of sound field systems in general education classrooms is growing by about 20% annually.
Diversity and Learner-Centered Education
Learner-centered education that uses a collaborative classroom culture is an ideal approach for teaching about diversity.
Finding the Evidence for School-Based Clinical Decision Making
A step-by-step approach for clinical decision making to select interventions that incorporate the current best evidence, student-parent factors, and the context of the school culture.