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JCPSLP
Volume 16, Number 1 2014
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
efficacy of these interventions and control behaviours
to demonstrate that the treatment is responsible for any
improvement rather than natural recovery or other client
factors.
speechBITE rating: 3/10
Partnerships between early childhood
educators and speech pathologists that
facilitate emergent literacy
Girolametto, L., Weitzman, E., & Greenberg J. (2012).
Facilitating emergent literacy: Efficacy of a model that partners
speech-language pathologists and educator.
American
Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
,
21
, 47–63.
Ahmed Rivera-Campos
Emergent literacy skills in early childhood have been found
to influence a child’s later literacy abilities. It usually falls to
teachers and speech-language pathologists to ensure that
young children are being adequately stimulated in this area.
Literacy enrichment programs that do not require an
extensive time commitment can be a powerful tool for
professionals who work with young children to ensure that
they are exposed to pre literacy enrichment.
This paper – comparing two groups before and after
intervention – studied the efficacy of the
ABC and Beyond:
The Hanen Program for Building Emergent Literacy in Early
Childhood Settings
training program with early childhood
educators. The researchers were interested to see if training
early childhood educators to use the program would
increases educators’ use of decontextualised language
during shared reading and use of utterances containing
print/sound references during shared storybook reading
and a post story writing activity. In addition, researchers
wanted to see if children in the program used more
decontextualised language during shared reading and more
utterances containing print/sound references in the shared
storybook reading and the post story writing activity.
This paper reports the results of 20 female early
childhood educators and 76 children from low
socioeconomic backgrounds in Toronto, Canada. The
teachers were randomly assigned to two groups with only
one group of teachers receiving training in the literacy
program. The methodology of the research was structured
to compare whether training teachers would have an
impact on the pre literacy skills in young children and
whether children would demonstrate behavioural changes
regarding these pre literacy skills.
Following the research, the teachers who were trained
showed more use of decontextualised language compared
to the teachers who were not trained. This suggests that
children who worked with teachers who had been trained
were exposed to more complex language forms than could
be learned by focusing on the “here and now” events.
Additionally, children who had trained teachers used more
decontextualised language during shared reading. This
suggests that these children were practising and acquiring
more complex language skills that required them to talk
about things outside their immediate context. A third
measure that showed significant differences was that the
trained teachers used more utterances containing print/
sound references during shared storybook reading and a
post story writing activity. This suggests that children were
being more frequently exposed to print/sound referencing
which plays an important part in the acquisition of pre
literacy skills. From the final measure, neither group of
Warren, S. F., Fey, M. E., & Yoder, P.J. (2007). Differential
treatment intensity research: A missing link to creating
optimally effective communication interventions.
Mental
Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research
Reviews
,
13
(1), 70–77.
Williams, A. L. (2000a). Multiple oppositions: Case
studies of variables in phonological intervention.
American
Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
,
9
, 289–299.
Williams, A. L. (2000b). Multiple oppositions: Theoretical
foundations for an alternative contrastive intervention
approach.
American Journal of Speech-Language
Pathology
,
9
, 282–288.
Recommending tongue exercises and swallowing
practice to people following glossectomy?
Ahlberg, A., Engström, T., Nikolaidis, P., Gunnarsson, K.,
Johansson, H., Sharp, L., & Laurell, G. (2011). Early
self-care rehabilitation of head and neck cancer patients.
Acta Oto-Laryngologica
,
131
, 552–561.
Patricia McCabe and Eric Landry
As treatments improve, people with cancer survive longer
and with less morbidity (ongoing illness). Consequently,
clinician attention has been directed to how people live after
cancer rather than whether they survive. In regards to head
and neck cancer, this is an under-researched area, with
much treatment being the best available practice derived
solely from clinician experience rather than client-focused
treatment chosen from a range of research-driven, evidence
based options. This study presents a prospective non-
randomised comparison of two parallel groups allocated by
geographical location where one group underwent early
preventive rehabilitation (experiment) and the other group
was not offered any systematic rehabilitation (control).
The treatment group were instructed to practise self-care
activities at home including doing various exercises 1–2 times
per day during radiotherapy and for three months afterwards.
Speech pathology related exercises included: tongue
mobility exercises consisting of five repetitions of extending
the tongue as far as possible straight out, up, down, and
laterally and then moving the tongue over the whole inside
of the oral cavity and teeth and Mendelson manoeuvre
(holding the larynx at its most superior position for 2–3 s
during swallowing, repeated 10 times with a 5–15ml bolus
each time). Patients in this group were also provided with
physiotherapy exercises to be completed with the same
frequency. The researchers hypothesised that early
preventive rehabilitation of head and neck cancer patients
could reduce functional impairment and improve quality of
life, and thereby also affect the survival of the participants.
Primary outcome measures were the two-year survival
rate and weight loss, and there was no difference between
the two groups on these items. The secondary outcomes
were sick leave, self-reported loss of function and anxiety
or depression. Here the results get interesting. The control
group reported less swallowing disability than the treatment
group, less speech impairment, and better recovery
overall. In short, doing the program was not associated
with improved outcomes and therefore it cannot be
recommended.
While the research has flaws, the result draws our
attention to many of the standard practices of head and
neck clinicians including prescription of range of motion
exercises during and following radiotherapy. At the very
least, clinicians should collect careful data about the clinical
