Newcastle University

Looking for the 'Theories'

The question

One of the objectives of our COST action is to spot similarities and differences across Europe in language-impairment intervention. Are the same professions involved? Do they work in comparable environments? Do they provide the same treatments? Do they share perspectives on why language impairments occur and which is the best way to support language development?

This last question is part of the remit of Working Group 1 of the COST Action. This Working Group (lead by David Saldaña and Carol-Anne Murphy) includes representatives from 33 different countries. It aims to analyse whether we share a common view. More precisely, whether there are similar “theories” across the interventions in participating countries. Initially, this would seem pretty straightforward: just ask the practitioners. As many of you know, this is not so simple. And the main and first obstacle is not in relation to getting responses from speech and language therapists, teachers, psychologists, and other persons involved in this kind of intervention. Rather, the first issue is that theories and interventions for children with language impairment are not as easily matched as one would like.

Although many treatments are clearly linked to a behavioural, a constructivist, or a nativist perspective, many others might not be. The truth is we do not really know how many there are. Also, if a theory is linked to a treatment, it does not follow that practitioners decide to use an intervention because of its theoretical orientation, or that they are even aware of its specific foundations. However, specifying theories and mechanisms of intervention is important. With better knowledge of the theory, we should be able to identify why interventions might be more or less effective for particular groups or languages and to identify how we might improve our interventions.  

The approach

The Action has provided a unique opportunity for teams from different countries to network around this issue. Two specific collaborative projects are underway at the moment. In one of them, a number of people are involved in a series of systematic reviews to examine the link between interventions, theory, and evidence base, in international and national research databases.  We have located and screened over 10 000 papers, looking for empirical studies on interventions with children with language impairment. Currently, five thematic groups across different countries – intervention in phonology, intervention in vocabulary, intervention in morphosyntax, intervention in pragmatics, and dosage in interventions — are screening the relevance of the full text articles for these aims. A number of reviews have already been carried out on this issue, but in our case we are specifically exploring whether a theoretical grounding can be found for each intervention, and if this in turn can be related to a certain level of evidence. For each intervention, we hope to describe and label its possible components (Turkstra et al., 2016). These broad reviews are being complemented by specific searches into different national databases and grey literature. The aim is to further understand the nature and theoretical orientation that particular national research and practitioner communities may be following.

This literature-based approach is complemented by a questionnaire for practitioners that will be simultaneously launched across all COST IS1406 participating countries. One section of the questionnaire relates to theoretical orientations and practices.

Relating theory and practice is not an easy task. Theoretical considerations are not always the most relevant in decision-making about intervention. Many interventions are more eclectic than theory based. Theories may be more related to research programmes than intervention strategies. But if a group of dedicated researchers and practitioners across all of Europe and beyond are not up to this task, who is?

 

Reference

Turkstra, L. S., Norman, R., Whyte, J., Dijkers, M. P., & Hart, T. (2016). Knowing What We’re Doing: Why Specification of Treatment Methods Is Critical for Evidence-Based Practice in Speech-Language Pathology. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 25(2), 164. http://doi.org/10.1044/2015_AJSLP-15-0060

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rswatski/8143587887

 

Last modified: Fri, 22 Sep 2017 14:59:01 BST