Developing partnership with parents in special schools: parental perspectives from Northern Ireland

From the 1960s, the development of home–school relationships in special schools has become increasingly important, culminating in the current official understanding of parents as partners. This paper traces the development of the relationship, setting out the challenges to partnership development from professional perspectives within education. A professionally located investigation was undertaken into parental experiences and perspectives to identify factors inhibiting and promoting effective partnerships. Using a mixed-methods approach, the views were explored of parents with children attending a special school in Northern Ireland. Findings strongly indicated the need for educators to pursue and engage with the views of parents, and to recognise the emotional context of these relationships at an interpersonal and organisational level, so that home–school relations can be realigned to support partnership. Implications are set out that will be instrumental in achieving this reconfiguration between the current official understanding of parents as equal partners and actual practice in some schools.     

Case studies of learning disabled students with deficient syntactic control in English as a foreign language

This paper discusses a mini‐experiment; an exercise was devised to investigate the effects of repeated articulation on the acquisition of syntax. The main participants of the experiment are two Hebrew‐speaking students, one formally assessed as having reading disabilities, one female age 14 (Q) and one dyslexic male age 16 (W). Q has been learning English at school for 4 years; she is in eighth grade. She is in the group for weak learners of English and does not show signs of a reading disability. She has taken private tuition once a week for approximately 5 months. She had not previously studied the target structure in the experiment. The results are discussed in light of the literature review findings, and some applied implications and conclusions were drawn for learning disabilities (LD) teaching.