Barbara Zurer Pearson writes:
UMass Linguistics was represented at the American Speech Language and Hearing Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, November 14-17.
Fourth-year graduate student Tracy Conner led a "Dialect Awareness Workshop: Enhancing Language Flexibility in African American English-Speaking Children & Their Teachers & Clinicians." Co-presenters for the hands-on activities of the two-hour workshop were myself, and Tamika LeRay, a 2009 participant in Professor Lisa Green's Summer Dialect Research Project, who is now a practicing speech-language therapist in the Boston Public Schools. The workshop was based on a paper by me, Tracy, and co-author Janice Jackson published earlier this year in Developmental Psychology (volume 49:1). [Janice was unable to join them because she had extensive brain surgery earlier in the fall. Fortunately, she is now on the mend.) ]
Tom Roeper and Ondene van Dulm, a colleague from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, presented "Toward a Principled Approach to Child Language Remediation", showcasing materials based on the DELV-Norm Referenced test (Seymour, Roeper, & de Villiers, 2005) that Ondene and Frenette Southwood of Stellenbosch University in South Africa created.
LARC member Jill de Villiers of Smith College participated in three presentations of a still-unnamed computer-based assessment of vocabulary and syntax for monolingual and bilingual preschoolers being developed in conjunction with researchers at Temple University, University of Delaware, and Laureate Learning Systems. Like the DELV, the new assessment focuses on a more sophisticated notion of syntactic and lexical knowledge than most current tests that screen for language delay.
I also presented on the DELV-NR in Catherine Snow's class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on Monday November 25.
