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Glossary of Terms (BDA 9th International Conference Poster: Early Intervention: A Practitioner's Perspective)

Usual Definition of Early Intervention
  • Provision of wide-ranging educational services and support for children who are at risk of learning difficulties who are usually identified at pre-school (around 4 to 5 years old)
Our definition of Early Intervention: A Practitioner's Perspective 

1)    Looking “deeper” than remediation of symptoms of learning difficulties of their underlying causes

2)    Starting before birth, ensuring first that a child progresses sequentially through the various stages of development; primitive reflexes are inhibited and postural reflexes are developed.

3)    Using developmental milestones, ensuring that the child progresses successfully in the various domains (speech, language, motor, social-emotional) as well as develops preparatory skills needed for reading, writing and maths.

4)    This sets a strong foundation for higher order skills to be built upon and gives the child the ‘best start’ regardless of whether he/she is at risk of learning difficulties.

5)    'Hothousing' of children before they are developmentally ready to learn or have the necessary foundation skills is not recommended. 


 What are Reflexes?
  • Primitive reflexes: automatic stereotyped movements directed from the brain stem and not involving the cortical area
  • Postural reflexes: mediated from the midbrain and helps the baby to develop the necessary skills. Needs to mature to allow for child to develop skills to function independently (e.g. walking, talking , seeing) for voluntary movement
What is Phonological Awareness? (Gilton, 2002)
  • Phonological Awareness refers to the explicit understanding of a word's sound structure
  • Critical for the efficient decoding of printed words and the ability to form connections between sounds and letters when spelling
  • Multi-level skill: reflects how words can be broken down into smaller units in differing ways (syllable-level, rhyme –level, phoneme-level tasks)
  • Measures of phonological awareness (especially at the phoneme level) are powerful predictors of reading success
  • Can predict early literacy performance more accurately than variables such as intelligence scores, vocabulary knowledge, and socioeconomic status. 
Hierarchy of Phonological Awareness Skills ( Johnson & Roseman, 2003)
Preparatory Activities
-      Develop Listening Skills
-      Tune into Print
Rhyme Awareness Activities
-       Identify words that rhyme
-       Produce words that rhyme
Phoneme Awareness Activities
-       Identify beginning, ending and middle sounds of a word
Segmenting Activities
-       Segment sentences into words
-       Segment words into syllables
-       Segment words into sounds
Blending Activities
-       Blend syllables into words
-       Blend sounds into words
Manipulation Activities
-       Delete syllables from words
-       Substitute syllables in words
-       Delete sounds from words
-       Substitute sounds from words


POSTED BY suelynnteoyz ON Monday, 24 March 2014 @ 09:00
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