EMT Program and Language Development: Ann Kaiser



EMT Program and Language Development: Ann Kaiser

1. How did you become interested in early intervention and language development in young children?

>> Well it's a sort of interesting study. I was in a graduate program in speech communications thinking I was going to do performance speech sorts of things, and I needed a job, and I got this job observing kids in the child development lab on another part of campus. And I absolutely fell in love with watching kids, and I had avoided anything to do with kids for my entire undergraduate career, and so it was really a surprise to me to find out how much fun it was to watch kids, and I got hooked on taking data, and so I ended up coming in to kind of through the back door.

2. What is your current area of research?

>> I have several areas of research, but the main work that I do is in early intervention for children with language disabilities, including more severe cognitive disabilities, and their parents. And for a number of years we've worked on developing a model of early intervention that really comes out of the developmental and the behavioral literature. It's called Enhanced Milieu Teaching. And we teach parents how to do this model, and then we look at changes in children's development over fairly long periods of time.

3. What are the components of Enhanced Milieu Teaching (EMT)?

>> These things really come right out of what we know about how kids learn language: that environments are set up with conversational partners, with reasons to talk, and things that children want, so it's functional for kids to talk. So we work on teaching parents how to set up environments where talking makes sense for them and for their children, and then we teach parents how to respond when their children talk, how to model language, how to use what the children say as a basis for saying longer things, how to take turns like we're doing. And then we teach a prompting strategy that comes straight from the behavioral literature that works really well to increase kids’ language production. So when you put those together kids who are reluctant talkers have a reason to talk and somebody to talk to and something to say.

4. Explain how parents can use EMT with “reluctant talkers.”

>> We work with lots of parents who have kids with Down's Syndrome or have children with autism, and both of those kids, kinds of kids, tend to be kind of reluctant talkers, meaning they don't talk very much. So typically, what we all do is to talk a lot, take a lot of turns, really sort of overwhelm kids who are reluctant talkers. So we teach parents to choose activities they know their children are going to like, because that's when we all talk, when we are talking about something we know and we like. To balance their turns, wait for their child to talk, and then say something back to them. And then really to shape what's in the content of the parent talk, so it matches what the child is ready to learn. So shorter utterances, more specific vocabulary, and always about what the child is interested in, because it is so much easier for kids to learn language, when the code, or the language itself is really clear, and it maps on to what we are doing together. So that's what we teach them.

5. Who is best-suited to use EMT with children, and why?

>> Parents are good because they spend so much time with their kids, but we've trained moms and dads and grandmas and nannies and uncles and the whole gamut. We also train teachers in Head Start and in special education classrooms. Parents just have more opportunities to do the one-on-one kind of talking with kids. It's very hard in a classroom to get that kind of time, but equally good. Teachers and parents are equally good at doing strategies.

6. What research findings must surprised you?

>> I think the thing that's been the most challenging has been to figure out how to change kids' developmental trajectories. So it's pretty easy to change short-term language in kids. Much harder to really accelerate development, and that problem, I think, has been intriguing the whole time. Just really, how is it that we can get kids on a different developmental track? And that has led us to look at generalization of the parents to different activities. It's moved our model along, so we train at home across different activity settings in the home. But it's also helped us, I think, understand how vulnerable the language system is in kids and how much scaffolding and support it takes to really change children's development. And it's interesting. I mean, it's been, it's been endlessly fun. No one told me that research would be fun, but this has been a lot of fun.

7. Do common games and toys contribute to children’s language development?

>> Parents use books a lot, and I'm a big fan of books, but the way our intervention works, you know, any toy can be a good toy as long as the child really likes to play with it, and the parent knows how to talk about it. But with little kids, things, you know, the littlest kids like first word kits, things like bubbles where the child's really motivated and wants more of them and is willing to talk to get lots more of them, works every time. As kids get a little bit more sophisticated, then toys that have lots of pieces like a farm that has animals and hay and, you know. And with a lot of our kids, finding a toy that they like is really tough. So the fun parts are adding things in like water and shaving cream and balloons which can go with anything. But the most important thing always with toys is that the kid likes it, you know, that's because then you have a chance to talk to them.

8. How might your research be applied in classrooms?

>> Well, it actually has been applied quite a bit. I train teachers, so one of the things that has happened is that this model has gone into classrooms, and in zero to three, what's called Part C early intervention, we've trained a lot of early childhood special educators who work at home with parents when they see their children in the first couple years of life. So I think, and right now we're training teachers in Head Start, and a colleague is training teachers in daycare to do basic clay [inaudible] model in the classroom with kids.

9. Are the benefits of EMT limited to children with disabilities?

>> We know it's beneficial for low-income kids, because we've done lots of work in Head Start and in early Head Start, and I'm pretty it's beneficial to typical kids. We now have about 75 Milieu Teaching babies from our project from people who've worked with over time, and no data, but lots of stories. I think so. It, you know, it builds on what mothers and dads that are good language facilitators already do. So it comes right out of the sort of normal models of what supports language development. So I think it would be good for typical kids.

10. How can parents support their children’s language development if EMT or programs like Head Start are not available?

>> Well, most parents do a wonderful job already. That's, I think parents need to hear that. The main things are sort of things your grandma would have told you. Listen when your child talks. Respond. Say something back that makes sense to your child in the context of what he or she is doing. Teach new vocabulary, because that's one of the things that little kids are learning rapidly. So give another word for something. And really, I think the biggest thing is listen and, listen and respond. You know, our motto is good things happen when you talk, and that's true for parents and for kids.

11. Where do you see your research heading in the future?

>> You know, like everyone else, I'm really interested in children with autism. And we've just started doing younger sibling intervention where we target kids at about 12 months that we think are very high risk for developing autism. And mostly, these are younger sibs of kids who we are already working with. So a sort of family-wise approach to teaching, Milieu Teaching strategies in families where we know there are children who have multiple risks. So that's one interesting direction. We've also taken the responsiveness piece of this and taught it to older siblings to do with their younger brother/sister, and we're using that same model in a classroom study right now. So, you know, we're looking for conversational partners everywhere and with increasingly younger kids.

12. Are interventions involving younger siblings successful?

>> In working with younger siblings, so we're really working with the parent, we know that if we change the parent's style, we can engage the parent with the child more. And I think for these kids, getting them interested in talking to people is a huge step. And so at, you know, 16, 17 months, just being able to get parents to be really effective at engaging their children and for the child to be motivated to learn to talk is huge. So we're pretty good at that part. Now, the really interesting question, though, is does it make a difference for these kids' language development over time? Can we, again, get them on a different developmental trajectory than they would be on if they hadn't had that type of early intervention? The reason for training parents is that they're there over the long haul, and we know from our longitudinal studies that once parents learn a responsive style, they maintain it very well for a long period of time. So we're hopeful about those younger siblings.

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