Abstract
The purpose of this research study was to investigate the language and social skills of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD).The primary objectives of the study were to: (a) describe the semantic, syntactic, pragmatic language as well as social skills of children with EBD; (b) determine differences in performance of language and social skills for gender, grade, socio-economic status, home language, and ethnicity; (c) determine the presence and magnitude of relationships between language and social skills; (d) test the model of communicative competence for predicting pragmatic language using measures of language and social skills.The Test of Language Development (TOLD-I: 3) (Hammill & Newcomer, 1997), the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) (Gresham & Elliot, 1990), and the Test of Pragmatic Language (TOPL) (Phelps-Terasaki & Phelps-Dunn, 1992) were used to assess the students (n = 61) in 7 different schools in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The criteria for participation in the study were placement in fourth and fifth grade self-contained emotionally handicapped programs and students were not receiving services for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL).The results indicated that 75.4% of the students scored between one and two standard deviations below the mean in semantic language, 65.6% scored between one and two standard deviations below the mean for syntactic language, 60.7% scored between one and two standard deviations below the mean in pragmatic language, and 50.8% scored between one and two standard deviations below the mean for social skills. In addition, 6.5% of the sample presented no deficits in language or social skills, 14.8% presented only one deficit, 24.6% presented two deficits, 31.1% presented three deficits, and 19.7% presented deficits on all the measures.Analysis of variance analysis found no statistically significant differences for gender, grade, SES, and home language for the measures. Ethnicity was found to have practical significance as assessed by effect size (Eta = .09), which means that ethnicity affects the overall results of the scores on the TOPL, IQ, and TOLD-I: 3. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)