ABSTRACT
This chapter gives some of the results of a survey of the language abilities of 1381 pupils attending nineteen schools for severely educationally subnormal children in the Cheshire and Manchester areas. It concentrates on individual children's abilities and problems, and how teachers can organize their work to meet the individual needs of educationally subnormal (ESN) children, it may seem strange to begin by describing a large-scale general survey of ESN children's language abilities. The production scale listed a number of key stages in the development of productive speech and language, but by no means covered all aspects of this general skill. A child may indicate his understanding of language without uttering a word. Since learning language depends upon gaining responses from other people, a child who cannot make himself understood suffers many handicaps. One of the major interests of the survey was to examine the relationships between chronological age and the growth of language ability.
