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M Staskowski

Publications and source records attributed to M Staskowski.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Reading comprehension: a language intervention target from early childhood through adolescence.

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) play an important role in helping children and adolescents with language impairments to construct meaning from spoken and written language. They work in collaboration with other professionals and families to provide the optimal learning experiences and to introduce strategies for seeking meaning and monitoring understanding. This article describes language intervention techniques to enhance reading comprehension, including the development and enhancement of background knowledge and schemata, vocabulary, knowledge of text structure, and strategy use. The discussion includes suggestions for young children who are developing language comprehension, as well as for elementary students and secondary students who comprehend text with increasing independence.

Adolescent↗

Language disorders and learning disabilities in school-refusing adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: We undertook this study to test the hypothesis that school-refusing adolescents hospitalized on an inpatient psychiatric unit have more language and learning disabilities than diagnosis-, age-, and sex-matched psychiatric controls. METHOD: The Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-Revised (WJTA-R), the WISC-R, the Adolescent Language Screening Test, the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Revised, and the Test of Language Competence (TLC) were given to a group of well-characterized, primarily depressed school refusers and matched psychiatric controls. RESULTS: We found that school-refusing adolescents had significantly lower WISC-R verbal intelligence scores, lower Math and Written Language subscale scores on the WJTA-R, and lower scores on the TLC than nonrefusers. School refusers were found to have a significantly higher incidence of both language impairments and learning disabilities than controls. CONCLUSIONS: We infer that academic and communicative frustration and the adolescent's resulting inability to meet the academic and social demands in the school environment may play a role in the etiology of school refusal.

Adolescent↗