Communication is something so simple and difficult that we can never put it in simple words. - T. S. Matthews (1901-1991), editor of Time magazine (1949-1953)1

In this issue of Topics in Language Disorders, issue editor, Sandra Gillam, and her authors take readers on a circle tour of discourse across the life span. In these articles, they capture the essence of all that makes communication both simple and difficult. Discourse seems simple when it serves natural communicative purposes and all goes well. At such moments, it is essentially transparent. The complexities of discourse become more visible, however, when people with language disorders struggle to pull together all the complex pieces that are needed to cohere language into a connected integrated discourse unit.

The authors in this issue show how to parse discourse types into component skills. They also describe current evidence for therapeutic approaches appropriate for different age clients. By doing so, they offer insights for language interventionists whose goals are to help make what seems particularly difficult for individuals with language disorders become simpler. Practitioners will find reviews of current scientific evidence that can make their jobs easier. Researchers will find themselves stimulated to ask new questions. In fact, one of the special features shared by articles in this issue is their combination of cogent reviews of the evidence for a particular age of client and form of discourse, accompanied by original work on an innovative approach for different ages and discourse types. As Gillam (2016) points out in her Issue Editor Foreword, there is a developmental cycle in discourse forms that are prominent for different purposes and at different points across the life span-from narratives to informational texts and back to narratives again.

Starting at the preschool level, Petersen and Spencer (2016) review literature and describe their own narrative intervention that is designed to accelerate canonical story grammar and complex language growth in culturally diverse preschoolers. Then, moving to the school-age level, Gillam and Gillam (2016) describe their SKILL approach for targeting narrative discourse by emphasizing the multiple levels involved. Taking readers into adolescence, Danzak and Arfe (2016) describe how persuasive writing varies when bilingual high school students are writing in their first or second language. Ward-Lonergan and Duthie (2016) then address the needs of older children and adolescents, describing interventions designed to improve expository reading comprehension skills in students with language disorders. Cannizzaro, Stephens, Breidenstein, and Crovo (2016) shift the level in a different way by providing insights into the prefrontal cortical activity that occurs during discourse processing. Finally, Milman (2016) describes integrated discourse treatment of aphasia as a way to promote transfer of impairment-based language learning to everyday communicative use.

Collectively, these articles capture the complexities of discourse use. Discourse skills play an important role in promoting social and academic success across the life span. Although discourse is not easily remediated, the articles in this forum demonstrate that significant growth can be facilitated through intervention. Collectively, the articles provide an excellent overview of strategies that have been found helpful in promoting improvement in discourse skills across the life span. And when people improve their discourse-level abilities, they have a communication tool that is useful in many different ways.

Working at the discourse level is also simply fun for clinicians. In fact, in my personal clinical experience, I have never had so much fun working with school-age students as when working with graduate students and teachers in collaborative efforts to help students with and without disabilities develop their written discourse, both narrative and expository. It is through discourse, after all, that one can glimpse the creative ideas that take communication beyond simple words.

-Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD

Editor-in-Chief

REFERENCES