Caregivers' reports of the home literacy environments of children with developmental language disorder and typically developing peers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are at heightened risk for reading difficulty. We investigated the home literacy environments of kindergarten children with DLD and typically developing (TD) peers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: We analysed scores from standardised assessments of oral language, nonverbal intelligence, and word reading in conjunction with home literacy questionnaire data at three time points.

A Review of Screeners to Identify Risk of Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose: This review aims to comprehensively summarize, compare, and evaluate screeners used to identify risk for developmental language disorder (DLD), a common learning disability that is underidentified. Screening for DLD is a cost-effective way to identify children in need of further assessment and, in turn, provides much needed supports.

Method: We identified 15 commercially available English language DLD screeners in North America.

Minding the Gap: Using Implementation Science to Improve Clinical Practice in Schools.

Purpose: This purpose of this prologue is to introduce readers to the Forum: Minding the Gap: Using Implementation Science to Improve Clinical Practice in Schools. Ten articles comprise this forum presenting a variety of topics, such as the use of implementation science frameworks and methods, program adaptation, de-implementation, and interprofessional collaboration.

Conclusion: As showcased in this forum, implementation science offers many ways to bridge the gap between research and practice and improve school-based services for children with communication disorders.

What Works in Collaboration? Identifying Key Ingredients to Improve Service Delivery in Schools.

Purpose: This survey study examined factors that may influence interprofessional collaboration in schools to support children with oral and written language impairments, namely, knowledge, collaborative beliefs and practices, and resources.

Method: A survey was conducted across 319 school-based professionals, in a partnering public school district, to examine these constructs within the context of each individual participant's professional role.

Results: Between-groups comparisons were made between special educators, general educators, paraprofessionals, and indirect educators (i.

A Generic Implementation Framework for School-Based Research and Practice.

Purpose: One of our biggest challenges is integrating evidence-based research into practice to serve students with communication disorders. To encourage the systematic application of research findings into practice, implementation science offers frameworks and tools, many of which have a narrow scope. It is important to have comprehensive frameworks that encompass all essential implementation concepts to support implementation in schools.

Educators' Perceptions of Barriers and Facilitators to the Implementation of Screeners for Developmental Language Disorder and Dyslexia.

Developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia are common but under-identified conditions that affect children's ability to read and comprehend text. Universal screening is a promising solution for improving under-identification of DLD and dyslexia, however, we lack evidence for how to effectively implement and sustain screening procedures in schools. In the current study, we solicited input from educators in the U.

Building Sustainable Models of Research-Practice Partnerships Within Educational Systems.

Purpose: To describe the 9-year journey of a group of language and literacy researchers in establishing and cultivating Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs). Those interested in incorporating implementation science frameworks in their research may benefit from reading our exploration into this type of work and our lessons learned.

Method: We showcase how a group of researchers, who are committed to collaboration with school practitioners, navigated building and scaling RPPs within educational systems necessary for our long-term implementation work.

Less Is More: Implementing the Minimal Intervention Needed for Change Approach to Increase Contextual Fit of Speech-Language Interventions.

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and researchers face difficulties in moving evidence-based practices from clinical research into widespread practice, in part due to a mismatch between the design of typical intervention research studies and the realities of clinical settings. SLPs must adapt interventions from the literature or established programs to fit the needs of specific clients and settings. Researchers must design studies that better reflect clinical practice.

The Impact of Dose and Dose Frequency on Word Learning by Kindergarten Children With Developmental Language Disorder During Interactive Book Reading.

Purpose The goal was to determine whether interactive book reading outcomes for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were affected by manipulation of dose (i.e., the number of exposures to the target word during a book reading session) and dose frequency (i.

Interactive Book Reading to Accelerate Word Learning by Kindergarten Children With Specific Language Impairment: Identifying Adequate Progress and Successful Learning Patterns.

Purpose: The goal of this study was to provide guidance to clinicians on early benchmarks of successful word learning in an interactive book reading treatment and to examine how encoding and memory evolution during treatment contribute to word learning outcomes by kindergarten children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: Twenty-seven kindergarten children with SLI participated in a preliminary clinical trial using interactive book reading to teach 30 new words. Word learning was assessed at 4 points during treatment through a picture naming test.

Growth of Expressive Syntax in Children With Fragile X Syndrome.

Purpose: This research explored syntactic growth in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) over a 5-year period, and variability in growth in relation to autism symptoms, nonverbal cognition, maternal responsivity, and gender.

Method: Language samples at 4 time points from 39 children with FXS, 31 boys and 8 girls, were analyzed using the Index of Productive Syntax (Scarborough, 1990) and mean length of utterance (Brown, 1973). The degree of autism symptoms was evaluated using the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (Schopler, Reichler, & Renner, 1988) at the first time point.