COMMUNICATION ASSESSMENTS OF INDIVIDUALS WITH LIMITED HEARING

Communicative competence is not a matter of selecting a sentence and a pplying it to some use. Nor is competence a single dimension It isa ma tter of interacting in socially coordinated ways with other people in some purposive behavior. Language fits a purpose and fits the people i nteracting. Assessment of the communication of children who are deaf h as often resulted in frustrating lists of various kinds of linguistic elements, but little sense of how a child communicates A better approa ch might focus on communicative competence. This article presents a fr amework of assessment that has been derived from descriptive studies o f the communication of individuals who are deaf. The framework attends to the shirting demands of the speaker and hearer roles in an interac tion, the meanings;that emerge from the interaction, and the action th at ensues. The framework is followed up with some discussion of the or ganizational structures appropriate for comprehensive assessments and for ongoing teaching and therapy.