The most common and disabling communication gaps are seen in kids with expressive language dysfunctions. Their weaknesses take several different forms. There are some students who have trouble with words; either it is hard for them to find the words they need when they need them (so-called expressive dysphasia) or they simply possess inadequately developed vocabularies. In the latter case, a student has trouble learning and incorporating into her speech newly acquired words. Other students have trouble with sentence formulation. This is a big problem in elementary schools. A child may know what he’d like to say but then have serious problems constructing a grammatically correct sentence to convey his thoughts. Such trouble may make him reluctant to speak or it could cause him to “dumb down” his ideas to fit them into a simple sentence. What a shame! Continue Reading »

ON a cold Saturday morning in February, Shawn Pelak and David Parent were at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, in New Haven, Conn., soon after the doors opened. But the couple, from Ann Arbor, Mich., wasn’t there to hit the books. Ms. Pelak and Mr. Parent were spending the weekend in Hartford, 45 minutes north, and after downloading a walking tour of the Yale campus from the school’s Web site, they had gotten in their car for a first-hand look. Continue Reading »