Involving parents in extending the language development of their young mentally handicapped children

Summary Language facilitation schemes for the Mentally Handicapped have been designed mainly for use by therapists or teachers and they have tended to ignore the contribution which parents inevitably make to their child's development of language. However in this study, the parents were solely responsible for carrying out the language learning activities at home. They were given guidance on the choice of suitable learning objectives and games to play and. where necessary, their teaching methods were modified. The result demonstrated that parents were effective in teaching their child to identify and name objects and to structure two‐word sentences. It is argued that a “parent‐centred” approach not only makes more effective use of professional resources but that it may overcome the generalisation problems encountered by previous approaches.