Abstract
This study is concerned with the teaching of language skills to severely educationally subnormal children. Following an overview of the development of language teaching and training with the mentally handicapped from 1955 onwards, the study is devoted to the description and appraisal of a language teaching experiment centred in three ESN(s) schools in southern England. The three class groups of mentally handicapped children who comprised the experimental group were aged from 9 to 14 and in most cases had IQ's less than 50. A group of control subjects who were matched on an overall basis according to a number of criteria including age, sex, intelligence and language attainment, were selected from a further 12 ESN(s) schools from the same part of the country. From September 1971 until July 1972 the three teachers working with the classes in the experimental group followed a programme of language teaching based oh a developmental scheme which established a teaching goal for each child. These goals were based principally on simple syntactic structure. Although it was aimed that any activity or situation in school could be used for teaching, the teachers were provided with a set of apparatus specially designed for use in language sessions in the classroom. They were advised as far as possible to use this with individual children or small groups although it was recognised that some class teaching would be necessary. They were also asked to keep a record of the best utterances used by individual children throughout the year. At the beginning and end of the year the language of all the subjects was measured with the Reynell Developmental Language Scales (Expression and Comprehension) and also according to the length of utterances the children used in conversation during testing. It was found at the end of the year that although the experimental group had made slightly more gains than the control group on the Reynell Expressive Language Scale, there were generally no differences in the performance of the two groups of a significant nature.