The Topics in Language Disorders guest issue editors, Christine B. Vining and Mark Guiberson, have brought together a group of Native American scholars and their colleagues to contribute articles for our issue, titled Enhancing Language Services to Native American Children: A Look From the Inside. There are at least two consistent themes across the articles in this issue. First, scholarship addressing the language and literacy learning needs of Native American children is limited and deserves broader consideration and sustained, intensive focus. One of the primary reasons why Drs. Vining and Guiberson proposed and shepherded this issue was to highlight and coalesce the important work that is being done on behalf of Native American children with or at risk for communication and literacy disorders. Second, research and practice within Native American communities are best accomplished when those communities' beliefs, values, and desires are not only respected but also prioritized in such efforts, not only because this is ethical practice regardless of the individuals or groups with whom we work, but also because Native American communities across the Americas have endured intergenerational trauma due to genocide and enduring colonialism and thus want research about and services for members of their communities to authentically represent their worldviews informed by these events.

In the first article, Davis E. Henderson outlines the limitations and biases inherent in using off-the-shelf assessment tools for Navajo children broadly and specifically for evaluating narrative language skills. Dr. Henderson advocates using dynamic assessment as a culturally and linguistically appropriate mechanism for evaluating storytelling skills in this group of Native American children. He describes a case study to illustrate how to employ dynamic assessment for narrative language and to highlight how this approach can more accurately characterize narrative development in this population. In the second article, Grace E. McConnell and Diane Loeb report their study of microstructure and macrostructure features of narratives produced by Native American children across three storytelling task formats (retell, illustrated picture prompt, and picture sequence prompt). A unique aspect of their work is that they go beyond the typically employed story grammar analysis for examining macrostructural features and include high-point analysis and the inclusion of evaluative elements (i.e., explicit narrator statements regarding the importance and relevance of narrative elements and the reasoning for the narrative and its telling). In the next article, Kyliah Petrita Ferris, Mark Guiberson, and Erin Bush present a qualitative study that examines, through ethnographic interviewing and descriptive thematic analysis, the priorities and preferences of Native American caregivers for their children's development and school readiness. One of their key findings is that, at least in their small and geographically restricted sample, many caregivers used books and shared book reading to foster the language and literacy skills of their children, even though oral storytelling is prized in many Native American communities. In the final article, Matthew Gillispie describes the application of culturally affirming language and literacy instruction in preschool settings serving Native American children using a portion of the Culturally Responsive Early Literacy Instruction (CRELI) curriculum, designed by Dr. Gillispie as part of a training grant in his work with the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. His clinical tutorial provides a detailed outline for how to integrate culturally responsive teaching and quality early language and literacy instruction using storybooks that focus on Native American culture and language. We hope readers will find this collection of articles informative and beneficial in their work on behalf of culturally and linguistically diverse populations, especially those who are Native American.

-Gary A. Troia, PhD

-Sarah E. Wallace, PhD

Co-Editors