ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the theoretical issues relating to child language and language intervention. It deals with a discussion of issues concerned with language description and the various approaches to language assessment. There are two issues which deserve consideration in respect of the assessment of language production and language comprehension. The first concerns the relationship between comprehension and production during development. The second issue involves the need to consider both production and comprehension skills when assessing the linguistic abilities of mentally handicapped children. Furthermore, teaching a broader range of language skills in a developmental sequence is compatible with an alternative philosophical perspective – that intervention is concerned with facilitating developmental changes. Research on the social interactional processes which seem both to precede and to create the conditions for language development indicated ways in which intervention might be directed at supporting such processes rather than attempting to circumvent them through direct instruction.
