Language Research – Making Research Relevant

A common gripe for a long time with research of language disorders is that much of it has often been irrelevant to the actual teaching of language.  And by often, I mean nearly always.  A lot of the research seems geared toward one isolated characteristic of one subset of one small segment of people, and only to that particular population.  The similarity of the following fake titles to actual titles may help demonstrate my point…

– “Toward Understanding Morphologic Tendencies in Left Handed Nicaraguan Preschoolers.”    or

– “Past Tense Comprehension in Bilingual Adopted Children; A Conceptual Framework.”

It just has long seemed that these are the sorts of research titles that usually exist in the most commonly read sources of language research.  And that’s when these journals even decide to address language at all, which has long seemed to be much less common then research addressing say, hearing, or voice, or stuttering.  And this is too bad.  Because there are many, many language related questions out there that can be addressed scientifically that would actually be useful in teaching language.  So what might these “practical” studies look like?  Here are some ideas I’ve had.

Question:  Do twins often have one member with more language deficits than the other?

Implication:  This often seems to be the case.  Anecdotally, it seems as though one twin often speaks for the other, almost creating deficits in the less talkative twin.  If the research would support this hypothesis, then we could prepare for this with extra early intervention, and assistance for twin parents.