This text-based course is a transcript of the seminar, “Success with Expository Text, Comprehension & Inferencing,” presented by Vicki Reed, Ed.D., CCC-SLP, BRS-CL.
To all you participants, thank you for joining the lecture today, and thank you for your interest in adolescents and adolescent language.
As you can tell from the title of this presentation, it should be no surprise that I’m going to be talking about three interrelated language abilities that are absolutely critical to academic achievement, but are especially problematic for a large percentage of adolescents. Before we start I want to give a bit of an overview. I’m going to start talking about terminology so that we can all get on the same page. This will lead us into a discussion of discourse and types of discourse, which then leads us into a discussion of exposition and expectations for secondary school students, including an introduction to the notion that academic-specific discourse differs across subjects and that this difference in academic discourse looms really large in middle and high schools. It is something that we have to begin to pay attention to with these adolescents.
We will then talk about who these adolescents are that struggle with language and literacy. This will take us to a discussion of some of the things that SLPs can do or at least need to consider in their approaches to helping these adolescents, and in particular, helping them to succeed with discourse and literacy in the areas of comprehension, inferencing and paraphrasing.
This is oodles to get through today. I’m going to go very, very quickly. For that reason, I would like to hold questions until the end of the presentation. By the way, don’t worry about taking notes. The information that I’m talking about is all in the slides, so hopefully that will help you not feel as rushed as we go through.
Definitions and Perspectives
Literacy and Literate Behaviors
I am going to start with literacy and what it is. Literacy does not just have one definition. There are many, many different definitions of literacy. What it is NOT is just basic reading and writing skills - and the key word there is “basic.” Literacy is so much more than basic reading and writing. Basic reading and writing are really only the starting points of becoming literate and being able to engage in what we call literate behaviors.
