RESUMEN
Background: Stroke acquired communication impairments impede effective communication. Consequently, in stroke care, communicative interactions can be challenging for both patients and staff and can predispose patients to increased risk of preventable adverse events. Communication partner training (CPT) can mitigate such negative outcomes by optimising communicative interactions. Providing CPT to student health and social care professionals (SH&SCPs) has the potential to enhance their clinical expertise and experiences and enhance the future clinical care of patients with stroke acquired communication impairments. This research aims to expand our understanding of how CPT is operationalised for SH&SCPs in higher education institutions and determine: what works; for whom; in what contexts; how and why? Methods: This review is Phase 1 of a research project employing a realist approach with public and patient involvement (PPI). It incorporates five iterative steps: 1.) Clarifying the scope; 2.) Searching for evidence; 3.) Selecting and appraising evidence; 4.) Data extraction; 5.) Synthesising data and developing a middle range theory explaining how CPT is expected to work for SH&SCPs. An advisory panel, including PPI advisors, content advisors, student advisors, realist advisors and educationalist advisor has been set up to consult throughout the review and collaboratively agree the middle range theory. Discussion: While there is an evolving evidence base for CPT, including stroke specific CPT for SH&SCPs, it is acknowledged that there are challenges to its implementation in complex real-world settings. In combining empirical evidence with theoretical understanding, realist review permits synthesis of data from diverse sources and goes beyond determining efficacy to explore generative causation and solutions for real world practice. A middle range realist programme theory that coherently explains how CPT is expected to work when teaching SH&SCPs to communicate with people with stroke acquired communication impairments will provide educators with new insights into CPT development and implementation in their higher education institutions.
RESUMEN
The number of children speaking more than one language as well as the number of languages spoken in Ireland has increased significantly posing a problem for timely identification of children with language disorder. The current study aims to profile performance of monolingual and multilingual children on language processing tasks: non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR). We used: (1) Crosslinguistic (CL) and English Language-Specific (LS) NWR and (2) SR in English, Polish and Russian. Children's socioeconomic status, language emergence, the age of exposure (AoE) to English and the percentage of English spoken at home were recorded. The study included 88 children age 5-8 attending a school in a disadvantaged area.CL and LS NWR yielded similar distribution of scores for monolinguals and multilinguals. The tasks identified small number of children who performed significantly lower than the mean while there were no significant differences between the groups. In English SR, monolinguals significantly outperformed multilinguals. Comparison of SR in English and Polish/Russian indicated that some children showed balanced performance in both of their languages while others showed marked differences performing better in either Polish/Russian or English depending on their AoE to English and percentage of English spoken at home.The pilot study suggests that CL-NWR is a promising screening tool for identifying monolingual and multilingual children with language disorder while SR provides more detailed information on children's language performance relative to their language exposure. SR task is recommended to be used only if comparable tasks are available in all of children's languages.