Effect of Specific Language Impairment on Mathematical Development - Essay Example

Affect of Specific Language Impairment On Mathematical Development Language is a mode of communication which could be in form of symbol, words and expressions. Its development is based on both environmental and biological clues. The Language impairment results from the delayed or disordered development of the content, form, or use of spoken language. It is a communication disorder consisting of inappropriate use in any of the structures of language (e.g., morphology refer as the structure of a word includes the patterns of inflections and derivation), syntax (organization of words in sentences defines the ordering of and relationship between the words and other structural elements in phrases and sentences The syntax may be of a whole language, a single phrase or sentence, or of an individual speaker), semantics (the study of how meaning in language is created by the use and interrelationships of words, phrases, and sentences), and pragmatics (the branch of linguistics that studies language use rather than language structure) which adversely affects educational performance. The content of language refers to what individuals talk about or understand. The form of language refers to the shape and sound of the units of language and their combinations such as word endings, the words, or sentence structure. The use of language refers to the reasons why individuals speak and the ways they construct conversations depending upon what they know about the listener and the context. The child with language impairment may have difficulty in any or all of these areas furthermore it is fundamental to education because it is the major form of representation and articulation of knowledge and the principal medium of instruction. Language impairment can be further broken down into receptive and expressive language impairments. It may be helpful to determine that the impairment is receptive or an expressive or both, prior to examining form, content, and its specific affect on mathematical development. A child whose major problem is with receptive language (comprehension) faces difficulties in language which inhibit appropriate communication exchanges and their comprehension may act as a barrier to the development of social interactions and socially-skilled behaviours as compared to children with expressive language difficulties, Also they are more likely to experience social and behavioural problems and to be the target for bullying. Their measures of cognitive and language performance tend to be consistent over time, but ratings or measures of behavioural difficulties are more variable they show higher level of behavioural, emotional, and social adjustment difficulties. A child with expressive language impairment has difficulty with the production of language that adequately represents the child intended message and may include problems with word retrieval, word use, sentence formulation, and/or conversational skills. The following characteristics may indicate difficulties in producing language. The child speaks in words, phrases, incomplete or inaccurate sentences, relies upon gesture to supplement or substitute for oral language, uses pronouns, plurals, and possessives incorrectly, has difficulty with the agreement of subjects and verbs, , has difficulty telling a story or describing an event or procedure in a logical sequence, uses run-on sentences, has limited expressive vocabulary, has difficulty finding the appropriate word (s) to express meaning, overuses filler words such as "ah" or "um". Language being the mode of communication is very important in comprehension, organization and for the articulation knowledge, As far as it affect on mathematical development is concerned the further areas such as oral language impairment, the use of language in instruction and assessment, the phonological process impairment, the role of working memory in knowledge of numbers, Basic Calculation, Knowledge of Combinations, and Story Problems and the counting process, principles will highlight the important details that weakens the mathematical development in an individual. Children whose Oral language development is impaired should therefore be at risk for learning difficulties. The oral language impairment affects development of mathematical cognition during the school years. Studies indicate that the mathematical competence of adolescents is compromised by early language impairment and Reading difficulties might contribute to this relationship. The language is the primary mode of Instruction and assessment and it has make increasing demands on literacy as children progress through school. Children with language impairment are at greater risk of developing reading difficulties. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are those who combine oral language impairment with nonverbal intelligence in or above the average range. Their risk of developing reading difficulties is substantial but not as great as that for children with both language and nonverbal impairments therefore when an individual has SLI they are not able to comprehend the information and hence further process the calculation, counting and other areas that is the process weakens completely. Children with SLI show disorders of phonological processing. This is also characteristic of children with specific reading disability or developmental dyslexia. Although SLI and developmental dyslexia are not distinct disorders people with the specific learning impairment show semantics and syntactic difficulties hence show deficits in some number skills. The present study compares children with SLI with their typically developing peers and with younger children with similar oral comprehension skills by using tasks derived from the early elementary school curriculum and existing research on number development. The tasks differ in whether they concerned skills and knowledge that most first-grade schoolchildren are expected to possess or whether they assessed aspects of numbers that are the focus of instruction in the first years of schooling. No task involved extraneous literacy demands. The only reading required was of numerals and areas relating to the tasks and other characteristics were assessed children with SLI come up with errors in readings of numerals. The process of proficient counting requires understanding of counting principles, procedural skills, knowledge of the arbitrary sequence for numbers below 20, and knowledge of the syntax and grammar for the structure of higher numbers. By the end of first grade, most children can successfully recite the number list well beyond 20 and accurately count sets of objects up to this numerosity. They can also count forward and backward from numbers in the decades. By third grade, they can count on from numbers in the thousands but children with SLI are considerably delayed in their development of counting accuracy and knowledge of the count list but are less impaired in their understanding of counting principles. It is likely that they will experience difficulty in progressing to higher numbers as these involve mastering linguistic rules. This study examined the counting abilities of preschool children with specific language impairment compared to language-matched and mental-age-matched peers. In order to determine the nature of the difficulties SLI children exhibited in counting, the subjects participated in a series of oral counting tasks and a series of gestural tasks that used an invented counting system based on pointing to body parts. Despite demonstrating knowledge of many of the rules associated with counting, SLI preschool children displayed marked difficulty in counting objects. On oral counting tasks, they showed difficulty with rote counting, displayed a limited repertoire of number terms, and miscounted sets of objects. However, on gestural counting tasks, SLI children's performance was significantly better. These findings suggest that SLI children have a specific difficulty with the rote sequential aspect of learning number words where as rote sequential aspect of learning is a term for fixing information to your memory through sheer repetition. It is often viewed as bad practice, although some would argue that rote memorization is a necessary first step in learning some subjects. Another contributing factor is memory children with language impairment differ from their typically developing peers in their working memory characteristics working memory deficits are mainly responsible for the deficits in counting and knowledge of number facts that children with SLI show. As Number tasks make demands on one or more aspects of working memory: counting, backup strategies in basic calculation and development of knowledge of combinations and transcoding raises the chances of less recall in SLI when required. It is important to assess whether differences in working memory explain differences between children with SLI and their peers. This, however, raises the question of which aspect of working memory would explain those differences. Earlier versions of an influential working memory model consisted of three components: the phonological loop, the central executive, and the visuospatial sketchpad. The phonological loop is a temporary storage system from which information is lost if not rehearsed. Tasks that measure it include forward digit span. The central executive is involved in attentional control and can be assessed by various tasks that require both storage and processing of information, such as backward digit span and counting span. The visuospatial sketchpad integrates visual, spatial, and possibly kinesthetic information into a unified representation that may be temporarily stored and manipulated and can be measured with Corsi span. Recent versions of the working memory model have included a fourth component, the episodic buffer. This is a limited capacity storage system that allows combining information from different modalities. Currently no measures of it exist. Swanson and Sachse-Lee (2001) found story problem accuracy related to each of the three earlier components. The varying relations between measures of working memory and aspects of math ability might be because the importance of working memory components differs with number task. An alternative is that they result from the different amounts of variance shared between aspects of memory functioning and intelligence. Relations between intelligence and both memory and arithmetic performance have long been recognized: Omnibus intelligence tests have included span measures and arithmetic items since Binet. Current research and meta-analyses of adult data indicate substantial relationships between working memory and intelligence but conclude that they are not the same. Some claim that the more complex span measures used to assess central executive functioning are more strongly related to intelligence than simple span measures We therefore included a measure of nonverbal reasoning as well as assessments of each component of working memory. Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM; Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998) is the children's subset of Raven's Progressive Matrices, a test described as the best measure of g and often used in studies of the relationship between intelligence and working memory. It is considered nonverbal because the child does not need to speak or understand speech to understand what is required or to indicate his or her response. The Basic Calculation, Knowledge of Combinations, and Story Problems are also few areas which are affected if individual has specific learning impairment. The Basic calculations are the addition and subtraction of numbers less than 10. Development of expertise in basic calculation involves learning addition and subtraction combinations, developing a range of backup strategies, and mastering different problem formats, principally number-fact problems and story problems. Also the importance of knowledge of combinations, and so attention paid to this aspect is likely to vary. Most young children solve number-fact problems in several ways that include retrieval, guessing, and backup strategies involving counting. The strategy choices show several adaptive characteristics, such as using backup strategies when retrieval is likely to be inaccurate. From first to third grade, they develop new backup strategies, such as decomposition and counting on from the larger addend, and make increasing use of retrieval. Limited knowledge of simple addition combinations is frequently found in children with math difficulties (MD) and in children with SLI. As a consequence, their retrieval is less accurate, and they depend more on backup strategies. Their skill in executing backup strategies is also impaired, particularly with larger numbers In general, they show less adaptive choices Story problems involving addition and subtraction can vary substantially in complexity. Most children from kindergarten onward succeed on problems where the result is the unknown, but it is not until third grade that similar levels of success are achieved on problems with unknown initial quantities. More complex story problems make greater demands on both mathematical and language understanding because the child has to understand the story to be able to identify the corresponding arithmetic problem. Persistent weakness in solving story problems by children with MD and SLI has frequently been reported. Children with language impairments are likely to find the linguistic demands of story problems challenging. Final area of discussion which affects the mathematical development is transcoding. The Competence in written arithmetic requires skill in transcoding, or translating between the two language system this is done by using digits and place value and the verbal numeration system for representing numbers. Although both systems share a common base, the correspondence between these forms, at least in English, is weak. For Example, in the teens, the spoken number order is the reverse of the numeral representation-for example, "nineteen" and "19." A further difference is that in numbers above 100, the verbal form in U.K. English uses the conjunction "and" to link parts of the same number-for example, "one hundred and ninety-five" for "195." It's possible that this induces the common error in writing numbers of concatenation, such as writing "1008" for "one hundred and eight." By the end of first grade, children are expected to read and write numbers up to 20. By the end of third grade, their range is expected to expand to numbers above 1,000. Children with SLI are typically unimpaired in transcoding small numbers Tasks with multi digit numbers may be more problematic. Therefore children with SLI are clearly at risk for difficulties with number and the specific language impairment affects the areas of mathematical development. References: 1. Raven, J., Raven, J. C., & Court, J. H. (1998). Raven's progressive matrices: Coloured progressive matrices. Oxford, England: Oxford Psychologists Press. 2. Swanson, H. L., & Sachse-Lee, C. (2001). Mathematical problem solving and working memory in children with learning disabilities: Both executive and phonological processes are important. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 79, 294-321. Read More