Investigating Hanen's Intervention on Children With Language Delays and Their Parents' Interaction Skills in St. Vincent and the Grenadines

• In Event: Transforming the Future of Educational Research: RISE Caribbean

Abstract

Globally, efforts to address children with Special Educational Needs (SENs) indicate that children with language delays encounter difficulty with speech production, resulting in communication breakdown and barriers (Pennington, et. al, 2009). Research has shown that parents are the main facilitators for their child’s communication, promoting daily interaction and engagement, which fosters language development. These indications suggest there is a need for more parent-child interaction programs, tailored to teaching parents strategies to help support their child's communication. Recent calls invite researchers to investigate such interventions and their efficacy and to consider explorations that will allow children to be more active participants regarding their interaction and vocabulary and present parents with more opportunities for their children to communicate, thereby increasing their turn taking and making meaningful communication (Pennington & Thomson, 2007) and introducing new interventions that are more child sensitive. As such, there remains a key opportunity in the field of Speech and Language Therapy to interrogate these interventions and build on their constructs as a measure of improving communication (Fong et al., 2012), particularly in the Eastern Caribbean.
This region is one locale where SENs can be addressed in relation to children with language delay by implementing these Parent Child Interaction programs. Stakeholders within the Caribbean have made the first step toward the responsibility for the assessment and treatment regarding children with SENs, via numerous policies implemented. However, there appears to be a disconnect, as children with SENs are still being left behind with many being neglected and others ‘slipping through the cracks’ (Blackman, 2021). Evidence has revealed that contribution towards this disconnect between the parents themselves and their children, occurs due to lack of acceptance and little understanding of the diagnosis by the parents, resulting in reduced communication and interaction (SVG National Curriculum Assessment, 2015). The absence of PCIs in St. Vincent and the Grenadines then forms the foundation for the current study. I draw from Piaget’s (1936) theory of play and Eybergs’ (1988) PCI therapy theory to investigate the effect of Hanen’s (1975) intervention ‘More than Words’, on the language ability of children diagnosed with a language delay, and the change of their parents’ interaction skills in the Caribbean Island of SVG. Specifically, quantitative data collected from this study within the context of an international research practice-partnership (Weinstein & Worrrell, 2016) provides an opportunity to determine the efficacy and feasibility of this intervention in a small island developing state, provide comparative analyses regarding the research questions and an alternative course of action in addition to current practices regarding communication for children with a language delay. The significance of the study for policy-makers, researchers and educators is also highlighted given the usefulness of insights from this research for addressing disconnections between parents and children with SENs.

Authors

• Jimelle Roberts, University of the West Indies
  Presenting Author

• James R. King, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author