Curriculum vocabulary learning intervention for children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD): findings from a case study series

Abstract

Although a considerable proportion of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) are reported to have impoverished or impaired language development, very little is known about how children with SEBD learn language, specifically the curriculum vocabulary that is essential to their engagement and learning in the classroom. The present study evaluates a combined phonological and semantic approach to new word learning that is reported to be effective for other populations of children with language impairment. Five children with SEBD educated in a Primary Inclusion Centre (PIC) were recruited to the study. The children completed a series of language and literacy measures to determine their language and literacy profiles before participating in the curriculum vocabulary intervention. The intervention facilitated phonological awareness skills as a precursor to a second phase of intervention that combined phonological and semantic approaches to the learning of specific curriculum vocabulary. In total, four sessions of phonological awareness intervention and six sessions of curriculum vocabulary learning intervention were completed individually on the site of the PIC during the school day. Both phases of the intervention were evaluated using a repeated measure within subject design to determine the effectiveness of the intervention across the five participants. Assessment identified lower than average language and literacy abilities although the profiles varied across the participants. The participants made significant progress in their phonological awareness skills and maintained this progress as a result of the first phase of the intervention. In phase 2, the participants learnt all the target curriculum vocabulary compared to none of the control words. This learning was maintained four weeks after the completion of the intervention. It was found that primary-age schoolchildren with SEBD are able to engage in structured interventions to facilitate their curriculum vocabulary learning, and they benefit from the same phonological and semantic approaches to vocabulary learning as other children with language impairment do. Identifying the language abilities of children with SEBD may be productive in informing how best to facilitate their language learning to promote their optimal engagement and learning in the classroom. The challenges of engaging children with SEBD in structured interventions and the robust evaluation of this are discussed.

Keywords:

• vocabulary learning
• children
• emotional and behavioural difficulties
• intervention
• case study series