What Lies Beneath: Language Impairments in Children with Disruptive Behavioral Disorders (What You Can Do)
1. What Lies Beneath:
Language Impairments in
Children With Disruptive
Behavioral Disorders
(What You Can Do!)
Maryellen Rooney Moreau and Linda Lafontaine
2. Maryellen Rooney Moreau, M.Ed. CCC-SLP,
President & Founder, MindWing Concepts, Inc., Springfield, MA
Financial: Maryellen has ownership interest in MindWing Concepts, holds intellectual
property rights and patents. Maryellen is employed as president of MindWing
Concepts. In that capacity, she writes books, creates materials, consults, trains and
presents.
Nonfinancial: No relevant nonfinancial relationships exist.
Linda M. Lafontaine, M.A. CCC-SLP,
Speech Pathologist and Principal at The Curtis Blake Day School at Children’s Study
Home
Financial: Consultant for Mindwing Concepts, Inc., Springfield, MA
Non-Financial: Linda has been a friend and colleague of Maryellen Moreau, owner
of MindWing Concepts, Inc. for 20 years.
Disclosures
3. “Oral language competence is a key competency that
needs to be acquired early in life, so that important
interpersonal, academic and vocational goals can be
achieved in pro-social ways and the risk of offending
behavior can be reduced.”
Background Information
Snow, P & Powell, M. (2012). Youth (in)justice: Oral language competence in early life and risk for engagement in antisocial
behavior in adolescence. Trends and Issues in crime and criminal justice, 435. Australian Institute of Criminology.
4. “Youth offenders… marginalization from the mainstream
begins in early life, particularly in the classroom, where they
have difficulty both with language/literacy tasks and with the
interpersonal demands of the classroom. Underlying both sets
of skills is oral language competence – the ability to use and
understand spoken language in a range of situations and
social exchanges, in order to successfully negotiate the
business of every day life.”
Snow, P & Powell, M. (2012). Youth (in)justice: Oral language competence in early life and risk for engagement in antisocial
behavior in adolescence. Trends and Issues in crime and criminal justice, 435. Australian Institute of Criminology.
5. “A recent meta-analysis of studies of
language deficits in children ages 5-13 years
diagnosed with emotional behavioral
disorders found an estimated prevalence of
previously unidentified language deficits
around 81%”
Hollo, A. Wehby, J. & Oliver, R. (2014). Unidentified language deficits in children with emotional and behavioral disorders: A
meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 80, 169-186.
Westby, C. & Culatta, B. (2016). Telling tales: Personal event narratives and life stories. LSHSS. 47 (260-282).
6. “These language disorders are pervasive
compromising expressive and receptive
language skills across all domains –
vocabulary, narrative ability, to
understanding figurative language.”
Snow, P. (2014). Prevalence of different types of speech, language and communication disorders
and speech pathology services in Australia. Monash University.
7. “Children with EBD (Emotional Behavioral Disorders) may have fewer
opportunities to interact with other children, due to frequent alienating
and antisocial behaviors, and – like children with LD – fewer
communicative tools to participate appropriately in interactions with
peers and adults”
Suggestions (among others):
• Recognize and use feeling words to describe personal feelings.
• Recognize and label feelings of others by making an inference
about a person’s nonverbal cues.
• Consider the perspective of another person.
Cited by Armstrong : (Hyter, et al. (2001). Pragmatic language intervention for children with
language and emotional/behavioral disorders. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 23(1), 4-16.
Armstrong, J. (2011). Serving children with emotional/behavioral and language disorders: A
8. Personal narratives and fictional narratives are analyzed by
some form of macrostructural analysis: Story Grammar (Stein &
Glenn, 1979) or High Point (McCabe & Bliss, 2003).
Westby and Culatta cite the levels of story grammar analysis:
• Descriptive sequence (before 4 years): The child describes
actions, scenes, or characters.
• Action sequence (before 4 years): The child describes a
temporal sequence of actions or events.
• Reactive sequence (about 4-5 years): The child indicates
causality between events, through terms such as because and
so.
Westby, C. & Culatta, B. (2016). Telling tales: Personal event narratives and life stories. LSHSS. 47 (260-282).
9. • Abbreviated episode (about 6-7 years): The child
refers to the goal of the main character but does not
explain a plan or how the goal is achieved.
• Complete episode (about 8-9 years): The child refers
to an initiating event and a goal, an attempt to achieve
the goal, and a description of how the goal was or was
not achieved.
• Elaborated episodes: Stories with obstacles to
attempts, multiple sequential episodes or embedded
episodes.
12. Youth offenders in a study of personal narrative
production (Noel, 2011), showed that they
“expressed themselves in poorly organized,
syntactically simple sentences using few dependent
clauses to explicitly signal the temporal and causal
relationships within their stories.”
Noel, K. & Westby, C. (2014). Applying theory of mind concepts when designing interventions targeting social
cognition among youth offenders. Topics in language Disorders, 34, 344-361.
Microstructure Concerns
13. “Of their narratives, 51% did not have a plot, which
would involve and character’s intention to accomplish
a goal.”
“References to thoughts and emotions, either their
own or others’, were almost nonexistent.”
Noel, K. & Westby, C. (2014). Applying theory of mind concepts when designing interventions targeting social
cognition among youth offenders. Topics in language Disorders, 34, 344-361.
In youth offenders…
14. “Language Impairment exists when you do
not have sufficient expressive and /or
receptive skills to verbally navigate through
the business of everyday life at the
expected developmental level.”
Snow, P. (2014). The Language of language impairment. Roses by other names can still be thorny.
The Snow Report.
17. Children’s Study Home History
The Children’s Study Home was originally founded in April
of 1865 as The Springfield Home for Friendless Women
and Children. This organization was one of the first social
service agencies in Massachusetts and was started by a
broad group of religious leaders ‘to provide a temporary
home for friendless and destitute women and children;
and to give them employment and instruction with the
ultimate design of providing for them a more permanent
situation, or of fitting them to maintain
themselves.’ (Agency Constitution, 1865)
18.
19. Mill Pond School of the Children’s Study Home
! MA DESE Approved School Established in 1976
! Grades K-12
! Primary Disabilities
! Emotional
! Behavioral
! 6:2 Teacher: Student Ratio
! Academic, therapeutic and recreational activities
! Follow MA Curriculum Frameworks
! Primary goal to reintegrate student back to home
school district
21. Student Ages
March 2017 September 2017
Elementary
Classroom
7 to 10 years 8 to 10 years
Middle
School
Classroom
9 to 12 years 10 to 12 years
22. Student Grades
March 2017 September 2017
Elementary
Classroom
1st to 4th grade 2nd to 5th grade
Middle
School
Classroom
4th to 6th grade 5th to 7th grade
23. Related Services
Speech-Language
Therapy
2 x 30 minutes
Occupational Therapy
2 x 30 minutes
3rd grader X X
4th grader X
5th grader X X
5th grader X X
6th grader X X
6th grader X
24. Timeline
! Baseline Narratives obtained March 2017
! Elementary Classroom received 11 lessons from
April to September 2017
! Middle School Classroom received 9 lessons from
April to September 2017
! Final Narratives obtained end of September 2017
! 30 minute lesson
25. Narrative Protocol
! Student listened to taped story of “A Boy, A Dog
and a Frog” from the Strong Narrative Assessment
Protocol while following along with the picture book
by Mercer Mayer.
! Student narrated story
! Narrative taped on digital tape recorder
! Narrative transcribed by second author
! Narrative scored by second author
! Narrative scored by first author
31. Mental State Verbs
! Think about the character’s
thinking
! Know for a fact
! Remember from the past
! Realize from own experiences
32.
33.
34.
35. TEACHING
PHASE
TEACHER
BEHAVIOR
LEARNER
BEHAVIOR
Demonstration • Initiates
• Models
• Explains
• Thinks Aloud
• Shows “How to
do it”
• Listens
• Observes
• May participate
on a limited basis
What does the Gradual Release of Responsibility
Model look and sound like?
Source: Routman, R. (2003) Reading Essentials, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
“I Do”
75. Macrostructure-Story Grammar
Elements included in Post Narrative
Classroom # of Students
who included
Feeling
# of Students
who included
Plan
Pre Post Pre Post
Elementary 0/6 0/6 1/6 3/6
Middle School 1/6 1/6 5/6 6/6
104. March 2017
Third Grade
9 years old
Emergent Action Sequence
Note only retold beginning of story and
word retrieval difficulties
Baseline Narrative
105.
106.
107. September 2017
Fourth Grade
9 years old
Emergent Action Sequence
Note retelling included entire story
Post Narrative
108.
109.
110.
111.
112. March 2017
Fourth Grade
9 years old
Emergent Action Sequence
Note inclusion of macrostructure with
temporal cohesion
Baseline Narrative
113.
114.
115.
116. September 2017
Fifth Grade
10 years old
Emergent Abbreviated Episode
Note inclusion of attempts, noun phrases,
adverbs and mental state verbs
Post Narrative
117.
118.
119.
120.
121.
122. March 2017
Fifth Grade
11 years old
Descriptive Sequence
Note retrieval issues, unclear referents,
minimal macrostructure, omitted middle of
story
Baseline Narrative
123.
124.
125. September 2017
Sixth Grade
11 years old
Descriptive Sequence
Note less scaffolding, increased
macrostructure elements, included one
action from middle of story
Post Narrative
132. September 2017
Seventh Grade
12 years old
Descriptive Sequence
Note “cliff note” beginning then increased
scaffolding to elicit more details
Post Narrative
133.
134.
135.
136. Elementary Classroom Comprehension
Questions
5 Factual
March
5 Factual
September
5 Inference
March
5 Inference
September
40% 80%/100% 50% 60%
No Response 100% No Response 80%/100%
60% 80% 0% 0%
No Response 80%/100% No Response 60%
50%/90% 100% 20%/40% 80%
40% 40%/60% 0% 20%
173. References
! Moreau, M., & Fidrych, H. (1994). How to use the Story
Grammar Marker®: A guide for improving speaking,
reading and writing skills within your existing program.
Easthampton, MA: Discourse Skills Productions, Inc.
! Moreau, M. (1998, 2008). ThemeMaker. (An
intervention manual devoted to expository text, the
academic language required within it and advanced
sentence structures required to communicate it.)
Springfield, MA: MindWing Concepts
! Strong, C.J. Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure
(SNAP). Wisconsin, Thinking Publications. (1998)