According to Lerner (l98l), speech disorders or pathology has several forms. For some children, the form is an extremely limited vocabulary and a very specific, narrow and concrete sense of word meanings. For other children, the problem is difficulty initiating lingual motor movements; still other children experience problems internalizing the morphological structure of the language. Finally, some children experience difficulties in generating long syntactical units or sentences. While there are several teaching techniques, most of which are designed with one particular form of speech pathology in mind, one teaching area believed to be crucial to development of speech skills regardless of the type of speech pathology children have is the area of listening skills (Klausmeier, l985; Stone and Nielsen, l982).
In the research proposed here, three listening activities are compared for effectiveness in elevating the oral language skills of three classrooms of children with speech pathologies.
Three special education classes of children with speech pathologies shall be randomly selected from the local school district. All selected classes shall serve children six to eight years of age. Each classroom of children shall be randomly assigned to one of the three listening activities that will be investigated in the proposed study.
2.
Listening activities shall constitute the independent variable in the study. This variable has three levels, each level consisting of one of the listening activities. The first level consists of a listening activity designed to teach auditory perception and discrimination of language sounds. This activity is called "Riddle Rhymes" and consists of the teacher making up riddle thymes and encouraging the children to make up others. For example, a riddle rhyme might consist of the teacher saying, "I rhyme with look. You read me. What am I?"<...