Language Arts Review. Intervention in Language Arts

This book successfully demonstrates the link between oral language difficulty and reading and writing problems in school-age children.


The book's great advantage is that it provides a framework and list of effective strategies for speech-language pathologists to make the most of text-based intervention.


Kathryn DeKemel outlines a range of practical diagnostic and intervention tools. The tools can be used by clinicians to plan therapy for students with language impairment, pretty much straight away.


Intervention in Language Arts is more a practical manual, in the guise of a theoretical textbook.

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One of the most important sections of this book is its description of the importance of oral narratives for both assessment and intervention.


Oral narrative provides an important bridge between the contextualized language of home and the more difficult decontextualized language of the classroom.


Kathryn DeKemel has identified its importance, and created a very useful narrative assessment tool that can be tailored for your individual students.


What I particularly enjoyed about this book was that Kathryn DeKemel uses real life case studies and demonstrates how she actually uses the techniques. The examples she provides eliminates a lot of the guess work for clinicians.


My experience with new therapy techniques is that if they are difficult to plan and implement then they tend to be thrown in the too hard basket.


Kathryn DeKemel, with this factor in mind no doubt, provides a range of assessment and therapy tools on a CD ROM that can be implemented almost immediately with a small amount of effort.

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One of the chief criticisms of text-based intervention is that it is not as detailed and systematic as more traditional language intervention. Kathryn DeKemel indicates that this is simply not the case.


She does this by demonstrating that with effective goals and systematic documentation of progress, text-based intervention is ideally suited for clinical practice. There is also a section regarding speech pathology service delivery options, including classroom based intervention.


The intervention goals contained in the text are based on research, and are considered best practice for school-age language intervention.

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