Communication counts: Speech and language difficulties in the early years. Fleur Griffiths. London: David Fulton Publishers, 2002.

Extract

This book presents a personal view of working with young children who have communication problems. It is aimed at practitioners working in early years settings, including nursery teachers, teaching assistants, speech and language therapists, and parents. Fleur Griffiths communicates her practice with heartfelt conviction. The reader is left with some vivid pictures of how successful interactions can be achieved between children with communication difficulties and adults. She also describes some useful techniques for working with children. Because the book is aimed primarily at practitioners, the author might assume that her readers have knowledge of communication problems. However, the range of speech and language difficulties, the plethora of names and labels for these difficulties, the lack of precision in the use of the labels, and the differing and often competing theories of language development and disorder make it almost obligatory for an author to specify what is meant by children with communication problems and to define what is meant by any technical term or piece of professional jargon the author might use. These terms are generally not clearly defined (e.g., the age range that corresponds to “early years” is not specified). For a lay reader, this lack of context and explanation could make parts of this book difficult to follow, with terms like semantic-pragmatics and phrases like “moments of agency with a synchronous partner” (p. 23) left poorly defined.