Abstract. A retrospective descriptive study (chart review) of the Drooling Control Clinic at The Hugh MacMillan Medical Centre investigated the effectiveness of three conservative treatment approaches in reducing drooling and investigated the relationship between 15 clinical variables and treatment OUtcome. The conservative treatment approaches were effective in reducing the severity or frequency of drooling in 66% of the patients treated. The results of the no-direct-intervention group confirm that a segment of the clinic's population will show spontaneous improvement in drooling control without treatment. The results SUggest that a feeding/oral stimulation treatment program may be the Icast effective approach of those described. The study highlighted threc t:aclors that best predict a good therapeutic outcome and Warrant further investigation: oral motor inVolvement, mobility, and age.

This exploratory study investigated the outcome of in-service training on language facilitation strategies of child care providers in day care centers. Sixteen caregivers were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Caregivers were taught to be responsive to children's initiations, engage children in interactions, model simplified language, and encourage peer interactions. At posttest, the experimental group waited for children to initiate, engaged them in turn-taking, used face to face interaction, and included uninvolved children more frequently than the control group. In turn, children in the experimental group talked more, produced more combinations, and talked to peers more often than the control group. The results support the viability of this training model in early childhood education settings and suggest directions for future research.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether professional development enhanced educators' use of conversational strategies during shared book reading with small groups of preschoolers. Twenty preschool educators and small groups of children from each of their classrooms were randomly assigned to the experimental or control group. The 10 educators in the experimental group received instruction in shared book reading strategies as well as individual classroom coaching sessions. Each educator was video-recorded reading two storybooks to a small group of preschoolers at pretest and posttest. The video-recordings were transcribed and coded to yield the measures of the book-related talk. The findings revealed that the educators in the experimental group used a greater number of open questions, responsive statements and different words compared to the control group. The educators and children in the experimental group also maintained longer book-related conversations and had more conversations that were five or more turns in length compared to the control group. These findings suggest that professional development that includes group instruction

An exploratory study examined adults' questions to small groups of children to determine how questions influenced their response rate and complexity of response. Thirteen educators of toddlers and 13 educators of preschoolers were videotaped during free-play. Both groups of educators used an equivalent frequency of open-ended and closed questions, but the preschool educators used more topic-continuing questions. Consistent with their developmental level, preschoolers responded more frequently than toddlers. Toddlers demonstrated few effects of question type. In contrast, preschoolers used more multiword utterances following open-ended questions and topic-continuing questions. Implications for in-service education for staff of early childhood settings include increasing the use of both open-ended and topic-continuing questions.

These findings suggest that professional development provided by a speech-language pathologist can yield short-term changes in the facilitation of emergent literacy skills in early childhood settings. Future research is needed to determine the impact of this program on the children's long-term development of conventional literacy skills.