Communicative Assessment: Pragmatically Speaking

This presentation focuses on informal strategies and descriptive techniques utilized in assessing preschool children`s communicative abilities. As the field of speech-language pathology continues to progress toward an orientation on communication and data collection outside of formal and artificial testing situations, there is a need for a clear understanding of the theoretical and practical issues involved in a synergistic approach to assessment. This presetnation will clarify the definition and implications of communicative assessment, provide a framework/context for understanding its rationale, provide an assessment format consistent with this approach, and demonstrate a range of strategies and techniques consistent with this "alternative" to formal, standardized language assessment for use with the preschool population. Implications for intervention will also be presented.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• To provide participants with an understanding of communicative assessment, its component parts and rationale.
• To provide participants with hands-on strategies and techniques based on a communicative assessment perspective.
• To describe a child`s performance based on communication modalities as opposed to separate fragments of language behavior.
• To improve participants` skills at designing and implementing assessment and intervention programs that are practical applications of a communicative assessment model.
• To describe the role of clinical intuition to substantiate decision-making.