Case Study #1: Melanie

Nine-year-old Melanie has difficulty participating in oral language activities in class. She has trouble staying focused and organizing her thoughts when presenting information. Story invention or retelling suffers from lack of organization both within utterances and staying with the sequence of events. Her written work exhibits similar problems. She also "talks all the time" and won't let others participate in conversations. This case study contains a portion of the conversational language sample that was collected by the school SLP and a selection of analyses which provide descriptive data for a variety of linguistic features, words and morphemes, speaking rate, pauses, mazes (repetitions and revisions), bound morphemes, alphabetized list of the words used, and selected word lists, e.g., personal pronouns. The transcript is also compared to the SALT Conversation reference database to compare Melanie's performance to a group of age-matched, typically-developing peers.

Case Study #2: Kathy

Twelve-year-old Kathy was referred for a speech and language evaluation because she was having severe difficulties with writing, particularly with story construction. The classroom offers little opportunity for oral language presentation. The Speech-Language Pathologist visited with Kathy and had her practice telling short stories. It became evident that she was having difficulty with oral language as well. A narrative language sample was collected with Kathy retelling the movie "Batman" that she owns. The sample was transcribed and a portion of the transcript is included in the case study. Selected tables have areas highlighted to indicate potential problems. Kathy's transcript is also compared to the SALT Narrative SSS reference database to compare these data to a group of age-matched, typically-developing peers.

Case Study #3: María

Seven-year-old María is a native Spanish speaker who is in a transitional first grade classroom. Spanish is the only language spoken in her home. María was referred for a speech and language evaluation by her classroom teacher because of the difficulty she is having acquiring English. The purpose of this evaluation is to determine where María is on the Spanish/English scale and also to check for a possible language disorder. Two story-retell narrative samples were collected, one in Spanish and one in English. These transcripts, included in the case study for you to read, are then compared to each other providing descriptive data which document María's fluency in Spanish compared to English. María's language samples are also compared to the Bilingual Spanish/English Story Retell reference databases to compare her performance to other seven-year-old bilingual children retelling the same story. These reports allow you to explore in more detail, measures that are significantly higher or lower than age-matched peers.

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