Marleen F Westerveld

Griffith University · School of Health Sciences and Social Work; Griffith Institute for Educational Research

This open access book describes the Reading Success project, in which a 5-step, assessment-to- intervention process, based on the Simple View of Reading, was used within a primary school setting in Australia to better support those students who struggle with reading. It provides an easily accessible overview of each step of the process involved in...

Personal narratives make up more than half of children’s conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cros...

This study aims to investigate the linguistic organisation and coherence of personal narratives among children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to provide insight into their communication skills in everyday contexts. A cohort of 10-year-old Croatian-speaking children diagnosed with DLD (n = 50, M = 10;8) and their gender-matched typically...

Background & Aims Students with developmental language disorder (DLD) often experience academic underachievement, and require adjustments and accommodations to access the curriculum. Teachers, allied health professionals and parents/caregivers have varying roles in the education process, and it is essential they work together to provide optimal sup...

Background As a group, autistic children with high support needs (with adaptive functioning in the range of an intellectual disability) are at risk of significant literacy difficulties. We investigated the parent‐reported home literacy environment of this group of children. Method Sixty‐two parents of autistic children (4.5 to 18.25 years) attendi...

Purpose Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents' language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are...

This review examines methods used to report on the QoL and/or well-being of autistic people. A search of four databases (June 2023) identified 256 studies that reported on the Qol and/or well-being of at least one autistic person. The quality of studies varied. Results were synthesised on who reported, who was reported on, how information was obtai...

In non-autistic children, academic skills are associated with academic enablers (motivation, engagement, study/interpersonal skills), but few studies have explored these in autistic children. This study identified profiles of academic skills and enablers in autistic students and explored the trajectory of each profile over time. Teachers completed...

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The Child Language Committee of the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP) is proud to present this special issue that focuses on children’s personal narratives, all of which were gathered with the Global TALES protocol. Personal narratives, defined as recounts of personally experienced events, make up half of chil...

Background: The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children's personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited...

Introduction: This small-scale study explored the feasibility of the Global TALES protocol in eliciting personal narratives in typically developing monolingual Irish children, using the online Zoom platform. We investigated children’s performance on measures of productivity (total number of utterances; total number of words) and syntactic complexit...

Introduction: It has been well established that the function of sharing personal narratives is to inform the listener about what the event meant to the narrator, for example by using a range of evaluative devices. The use of these evaluative devices may reflect a person's understanding of the differences between one's own mind and others, by expre...

We explored reading comprehension development in children on the spectrum from pre-school to the first (YOS1) and third year of schooling (YOS3). Children were first assessed on meaning-related skills in pre-school. Forty-one children completed follow-up assessments of reading comprehension, reading accuracy, and listening comprehension in YOS1. Ni...

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech–language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part of...

Purpose: In this commentary article, we explore the needs of people with communication disability in relation to sustainable and inclusive communities. More green and public spaces is one strategy identified by the United Nations in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for creating sustainable and inclusive communities. We argue that through t...

There is increasing awareness of the high levels of support needed for literacy learning for children on the autism spectrum. Although research has investigated the quality of the classroom literacy environment, little attention has been paid to examining the classroom literacy environment in specialist classrooms catering specifically for children...

Background and aims The ability to communicate is a fundamental skill required to participate in school. Students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have persistent and significant language difficulties that impact daily functioning. However, the impact of DLD on the academic achievement of primary and secondary school-aged students has rec...

Purpose: The ability to produce expository discourse (the use of language to convey information) is important for classroom participation and access to the curriculum, particularly during the middle school years. This study investigated the spoken expository discourse skills of students with reading comprehension (RC) difficulties compared to their...

We assessed the spoken language of 73 preschool aged children on the autism spectrum receiving community-based early intervention at two time points, approximately 7 months apart. Using the Spoken Language Benchmarks, there was a small non-significant change in the proportion of children transitioning from below, to at or above, Phase 3 (word combi...

Students with autism often show challenges in social communication, particularly in initiating and responding behaviors. While the classroom offers a natural context for peer interactions, few interventions are designed specifically for classroom settings. This study investigated the effects of a classroom-teacher implemented social communication i...

The ability to narrate past personal events is important for classroom participation and socio-emotional wellbeing. Although school-age children with Down syndrome show significant challenges producing personal event narratives, there is little research to guide personal narrative intervention. This study used a single subject experimental design t...

The goal of this study was to explore the development of reading comprehension in young children on the autism spectrum from pre-school to the third year of schooling. Fifty-seven children on the spectrum were first assessed on a range of meaning and print-related emergent literacy skills prior to school entry (Time 1). Forty-one children completed...

Prompting children to look at print and picture content during shared book reading (SBR) facilitates joint attention and early language and literacy learning opportunities for typically developing (TD) children. Whether preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) respond similarly to bids for joint attention during SBR and how autism character...

Background and aims The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in inf...

This study examines how adults with limited expressive language (with average sentences of five words or less) respond to open-ended questions. Participants (n = 49) completed a baseline measure and were then interviewed about a personal experience using exclusively open-ended questions, followed by open-ended and directive questions about a staged...

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk of persistent language and literacy difficulties. This study investigated the effectiveness of an 8-week parent-implemented shared book reading intervention designed to change parent and child book reading behaviours. Sixteen parents and their preschoolers on the autism sp...

Purpose The adolescent developmental task of establishing autonomy from parents is supported through various aspects of executive functioning, including critical thinking. Our aim was to investigate younger and older adolescent language performance in form, content, and use in response to a moral dilemma task. Method Forty-four typically developin...

Our aim was to explore insights from clinical practice that may inform efforts to understand and account for factors that predict spoken language outcomes for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder who use minimal verbal language. We used a qualitative design involving three focus groups with 14 speech pathologists to explore their views and experi...

We used parent-report data from a prospective longitudinal study to better understand the early strengths in written skills often observed in preschoolers on the spectrum. Consistent with previous research, children demonstrated relative strengths in standardized written communication compared to spoken communication scores on the VABS-II. We found...

Purpose Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk of experiencing difficulties with the development of literacy, including the emergent literacy skills recognized to underpin conventional literacy success. Comprehensive assessment is essential. Characteristics of ASD can make assessment challenging, and this can be compound...

Purpose The purpose of this article is to introduce the LSHSS Forum: Literacy in Autism—Across the Spectrum. The articles in this forum provide an overview of the current evidence related to literacy in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from preschool to adolescence and highlight the high literacy needs of this population. Method This introduction pr...

Children on the autism spectrum are at risk of persistent impairments in literacy. Early literacy opportunities (e.g., Library Story Times) are thus important, but children on the spectrum experience barriers to participating in these. Our objective was to develop an online training package to support implementation of autism-friendly Story Time se...

Autism Spectrum Disorder attracts a range of practices, interventions, and treatments ranging from those with empirical support of positively influencing outcomes, through to those with implausible theoretical bases, evidence of ineffectiveness, or indeed harm. In this chapter, we overview, why evidence based practices (EBPs) are important in the f...

Preschoolers on the autism spectrum are at risk of persistent language and literacy difficulties thus research into shared book reading (SBR) in this group is important. We observed 47 parents and their verbal preschoolers on the spectrum sharing two unfamiliar picture books and coded the interactions for parent and child behaviors. Parents were ab...

This chapter explains what skills are needed for reading success. It highlights the Simple View of Reading and its core components, word recognition and language comprehension, and how it may be used as a guiding framework across different year levels to describe students’ reading abilities and/or difficulties, plan subsequent intervention, and mon...

This chapter describes the results of the Year 4 student responses to the Reading Self-Concept Scale (RSCS; Chapman & Tunmer, 1995). It then outlines three case studies that include data from interviews carried out with students involved in the programme. These students were selected on the basis of their low responses on the RSCS, regardless of th...

In this chapter, we provide three case studies of students with different reading profiles. We demonstrate how using the five-step assessment to intervention approach explained in Chap. 2 assists in creating a detailed profile of each student’s strengths and weaknesses in spoken and written language skills that are needed for successful reading com...

This chapter describes the Reading Success results across the year groups and compares the students’ performance on the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC) with results from school-based reading measures. For students in their learning to read phase (Year 1), we also report their Year 2 results. For students in their reading to lear...

This chapter describes the methodology used in the Reading Success project. We start by briefly describing the school’s context, including the student cohorts who were involved in the project. The specific qualitative data collection methods relating to existing school initiatives for improving the reading performance of their students are then des...

This chapter describes four evidence-based intervention initiatives at three levels of instruction (whole class, small group, and individual): (a) Robust Vocabulary Instruction was provided in Year 5 classrooms by the classroom teachers with support from the speech pathologist; (b) small-group intervention targeting expository structure was provide...

This chapter starts by outlining what we have learned from the Reading Success project. Based on a summary of the main findings from the Reading Success project, we then consider ways in which the Reading Success project findings and practices shared in this book may be transferable to other contexts. We offer recommendations for best practice for...

There has been limited research on identifying and understanding co-occurring challenges associated with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This is an exploratory study to examine the sensory profile of school-age children with DLD, and to investigate possible relationships between sensory profiles and language skills. Chart information was ext...

Purpose Persuasive communication skills are vital for achieving success in school, at work, and in social relationships. To facilitate assessment of persuasive discourse, we developed a clinically feasible persuasive speaking protocol and used it to compile a database of language samples. This database allowed us to describe the properties of adole...

Objectives Many school-aged children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder display challenges in literacy development. Early learning experiences in the home and the community are important for the development of literacy success. Community libraries deliver story time to support children’s literacy experience and to provide parents with literacy...

Lay abstract: Children who have an autism diagnosis often have trouble learning to talk and read. These difficulties become noticeable before children start school and may be linked to lower attention and engagement in literacy-related activities such as sharing storybooks with their parents. To date, few researchers have looked at possible ways t...

This study used data from a prospective community-based sample and compared the code-related emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness and letter knowledge) of 4-year-old children with ASD (n = 36) to their peers without ASD (n = 36), matched for age, gender, socio-economic status, language ability, and nonverbal cognition. We also compared...

The aims of this study were to examine speech-language pathologists’ (SLPs) knowledge and consideration of factors found in research when making clinical decisions regarding AAC for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and to reveal additional factors identified based on SLPs’ clinical practice. A 20-question mixed-methods survey was compl...

Background and aims Children’s early interactions with books are important for fostering development of oral language and emergent literacy skills. It is not known whether children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder show different preferences for text types in the home environment prior to school entry. The current study aimed to: (i) investig...

Purpose This pilot study explored the effectiveness of an early storybook reading (ESR) intervention for parents with babies with hearing loss (HL) for improving (a) parents' book selection skills, (b) parent–child eye contact, and (c) parent–child turn-taking. Advancing research into ESR, this study examined whether the benefits from an ESR interv...

Many children on the autism spectrum struggle in their reading development. This study investigated parents’ views of challenges and facilitators to literacy learning at home and at school in children on the autism spectrum who were in their first year of schooling. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 37 parents revealed parents’ i...

This study aimed to investigate if a universal 24-week oral language and emergent literacy programme delivered to students in the first year of schooling positively impacts reading performance 2-years post intervention. Eighty-nine participants were second grade students from three primary schools in low socio-economic status areas. Using a control...

This study investigated the supports and modifications made available to students on the autism spectrum in Australian schools. Teachers rated the importance of several factors in determining the grades of their students and reported on the frequency of student engagement with a range of instructional materials. Eighty‐seven teachers identified the...

Early storybook reading (ESR) offers a promising opportunity for children to learn language and social communication skills. This preliminary investigation aimed to extend knowledge of ESR with young children with a hearing loss (HL). Twelve parents with young children (birth to 3 years old) with a HL completed a questionnaire examining parents’ pe...

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in school settings are faced with many considerations when selecting appropriate interventions to support positive educational outcomes for students commencing school, within an evidence-based practice framework and accounting for service delivery constraints. However, decisions regarding interventions are often...

Language sampling, also referred to as spontaneous language sampling, refers to eliciting a sample of an individual’s spoken language in a naturalistic setting and is considered one of the most ecologically valid ways of appraising spoken language performance. For that reason, language sampling is deemed an essential element of the speech–language...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly present with comorbid language impairment, negatively impacting their learning and participation across settings. Addressing these needs requires a detailed understanding of their communication trajectories. In this study, we used the language environment and analysis (LENA) system to examine po...

Background In 2015, a father took his 14-year-old son who is on the autism spectrum on a six-month journey aimed to develop his son’s social-communication and independent living skills. The duo travelled across 10 countries, meeting people and practising these skills. This study examined their goals, motivations for, and outcomes of the journey. M...

Children with Down syndrome experience significant and persistent challenges with language and communication and typically receive additional support to facilitate their learning and inclusion at school. This study explored the perceptions and expectations of parents and teacher aides, in relation to language and communication for 10 school-age chi...

A high percentage of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show elevated challenges in learning to read. We investigated longitudinal predictors of reading skills in 41 children diagnosed with ASD. All children completed measures of precursor literacy skills at the age of 4-5 years, including phonological awareness, letter sound knowledge, r...

Documented variability in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention outcomes makes it difficult for clinicians to select systems most likely to be effective for individual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of this study was to identify child-related factors associated with AAC intervention outcomes through a...

With an increase in international students enrolling in universities across Australia, as well as a reported interest in workplace experience, career advice and employability for international students the Work Placement for International Student Programs (WISP) project was timely (Barton, Hartwig & Cain, 2015). The research literature shows strong...

Initiating and responding to peers are social communication behaviors which are challenging for students with autism. We reviewed intervention studies set in mainstream elementary schools, which targeted these behaviors and reported on intervention outcomes as well as the resources required for their implementation. A total of 22 studies met the cr...

Introduction Autism is associated with high cost to individuals, families, communities and government. Understanding educational and participation trajectories during the school years, and factors influencing these, is fundamental to reducing financial and personal costs. The primary aim of this study is to document the trajectories of Australian s...

Students with developmental language disorder (DLD) are at risk of long-term academic and socio-emotional challenges. Evaluating these students’ progress on standardised measures following attendance at a language specialist school provides an opportunity to evaluate the impact of this model of service delivery on language progress. A retrospective...

Purpose: This study examined the effectiveness of low- and high-intensity early storybook reading (ESR) intervention workshops delivered to parents for promoting their babies language and social communication development. These workshops educated parents on how to provide a stimulating home reading environment and engage in parent–child interaction...

Aims: This exploratory study investigated if there were differences in the home literacy environment of preschool children on the autism spectrum and preschool children with Down syndrome to determine if the home literacy environment may potentially be associated with strengths or weaknesses in children's social communication skills. Methods: A...

Objective: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental impairment. To better understand the role of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in different countries in supporting children with ASD, the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) Child Language Committee developed a survey for SLPs working with child...

Abstract: The teaching of reading is a core priority across the education sector. In an attempt to better prepare our next generation of professional teachers of reading, academic staff at an Australian university implemented coursework changes that were designed to enhance the phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge of first-year preserv...

Appendix S2. Background document, with the statements for round 2.

Appendix S1. Background document, with the statements for round 1.

Appendix S4. Report showing quantitative and qualitative responses to Round 1 statements.

Appendix S3. Relationship between Round 2 statements and final statements reported in Results section.

Appendix S5. Report showing quantitative and qualitative responses to Round 2 statements.

Purpose: This study described the oral narrative comprehension and production skills of verbal preschool-age children on the autism spectrum and investigated correlations between oral narrative ability and norm-referenced language test performance. Method: Twenty-nine preschool-age children (aged 4;0-5;9 years;months) with autism, who obtained a...