Constructing (in)competence

Chapter 5

The Social Competence of Children Diagnosed With Specific Language Impairment

Terry Irvine Saenz

California State University, Fullerton

Kelly Gilligan Black

Anaheim City School District

Laura Pellegrini

Placetinia Yorba Linda Unified School District

Traditional approaches to the study of social competence of children have not considered the full range of factors involved in judging a child’s social competence. The approaches have typically designed abstract measures of children’s social competence and used the measures to classify the children as socially competent or socially incompetent. Some researchers, for example, have used teachers’ and children’s judgments of a student’s likability as a sole indicator of that child’s social ...