Supervisors info:
Φαίη Αντωνίου, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα ΦΠΨ, Φιλοσοφική Σχολή
Φωτεινή Πολυχρόνη, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα ΦΠΨ, Φιλοσοφική Σχολή
Ασημίνα Ράλλη, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα ΦΠΨ, Φιλοσοφική Σχολή
Summary:
The aim of this study is to enhance the vocabulary, expressive and receptive, and the pragmatic skills of students who are at risk of learning disabilities. The main pragmatic skills explored are the Children's Response to Communication, the Response to Communication Conditions, the Understanding of Communication Framework and the Understanding of other’s Intention. Participants in the research were 51 primary school pupils attending integration courses in Attica. All children were evaluated with two standardised tests, the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices (Sideridis et al., 2015) and the Reading Test New-Tela (Padeliadou et al., in press), which contributed to identify those children who were at risk of Learning Disorders. Additionally, before and after the intervention, the children were assessed with the Psychometric Instrument Logometro (Mouzaki et al., 2017. From the sample of 51 children, the 27 were in the experimental group, which attended the intervention, and the 24 were in the control group, which delivered the traditional instruction. The Lexomon intervention program was applied to groups of 2 to 4 students for 16 hours by the special educators of the integration classrooms. The children, through Direct Instruction, were taught, apart from vocabulary and pragmatic skills, narrative skills, phonological awareness skills and morphological awareness skills, the examination of which was not the target of this research. According to the results of the study, the children of the experimental group had statistically significantly higher scores than the control group in vocabulary knowledge in total, and in particular in the receptive vocabulary, while in the expressive vocabulary the differences between the two groups were not statistically significant. A statistically significant improvement of the experimental group was also observed in the Pragmatics in total but also individually in the Understanding of the Communication Framework and in the Understanding of other’s intention, while statistically significant differences did not occur in the Response to Communication and in the Response to Communication Conditions. The findings of this study are encouraging and, as there are no similar research in the Greek literature, they are thought to contribute significantly to the construction of such early interventions.
Keywords:
Receptive Vocabulary, Expressive Vocabulary, Pragmatics, Interventions, Language Disorders
