Inclusive Action to Improve Oral Language Skills and Early Literacy in Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

An analysis is given of an intervention programme based on inclusive practice in oral language and early literacy performance in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The programme was carried out in the classroom, with the collaboration of a research team from the University of La Laguna, Canary Islands, preschool teachers and speech and language therapists. The two main purposes were, first, to try and improve the development of linguistic comprehension and production and, second, to encourage progress in basic skills for literacy, focusing on narrative development and phonological processing. The contents of the programme were sequenced in increasing order of cognitive complexity and were implemented with dialogues, scripts, stories, oral language and early literacy. Four hundred schoolchildren were carefully screened, and a final sample was chosen of six children diagnosed with SLI whose use of language was seriously damaged and whose basic psycholinguistic processes were affected. The design was based on the action-research model, although only partial data from initial and monitoring assessments are given here. The Wilcoxon T test was used to study the pretest/posttest differences. The results show that SLI children improved on scripts, syllabic awareness and letter knowledge. On the other hand, only some limited progress was made in narrative development, in intrasyllabic and phonemic awareness, in phonological, semantic and morphosyntactic development and in phoneme-letter connection. The conclusions suggest that combining classroom work with one-on-one support and greater family cooperation would help to achieve satisfactory performance levels with this kind of practice.