Teaching language in the classroom to children with severe learning difficulties: a case study

Abstract

A review of past work shows convincingly that subnormal children with severe language deficiencies should make substantial improvements through a behavioural language programme, especially if it is designed on functional rather than developmental principles. The paper describes one such programme carried out with nine children by their teacher under normal classroom conditions. The progress of Nicola is selected for detailed exposition, demonstrating how she moved over four school terms from largely two-word utterances to a repertoire of well-developed syntactic structures which she generalized to a number of non-training settings both within and outside the classroom.