Banter Speech & Language

Sydney speech pathologists helping adults and children speak for themselves.

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Friends are the key: Parents play an important role in helping children with Developmental Language Disorder to fit in

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I don’t say much in public about my experience as a parent of a teenager with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), but this research really hit home. Parents need our support as they do the hard work of helping their children to make friends and to be included in everyday activities. Thanks, as always, to the researchers.

DLD is used to describe significant problems understanding or using language that are not caused by any known biomedical condition. On average, it affects two children in each class at school, but is not as well known as ADHD, ASD, or Dyslexia. For more information about DLD, check out our free family guide here.

Having friendships and positive social relationships is good for the well-being of children, including children with DLD. But many children with DLD experience emotional and social difficulties because of the effects of DLD. 

Parents of children with DLD experience feelings of stigma and are worried about others’ attitudes, what others think about their children, and that their children will not fit in.

Parents of children with DLD find themselves playing lots of roles, including:

  • normal parent jobs, e.g., to:
    • protect their child’s physical safety; 
    • provide a supportive environment; and
    • provide stimulation at home and other places to help their child to develop; and
  • additional jobs in response to the effects of DLD, e.g., to:
    • advocate for their child by explaining DLD to others; 
    • ‘translate’ what their child is trying to communicate;
    • be a therapist/educator for their child; and 
    • find potential friends for their children.

Many parents of children with DLD advocate constantly to ensure their children are not misunderstood, left out, or ignored. This work is exhausting! 

Educators and health professionals should collaborate with parents of children with DLD. Social inclusion in peer groups should be a joint goal because friendships are key.

Main source:

Jensen de Lópes, K.M., Feilberg, J., Baena, S., Lyons, R., Harding, S., Kelić, M., Klatte, I.S., Mantel, T.C., Novogrodsky, R., Ulfsdottir, T.S., Zajdó, K. and Rodriguez-Ortiz, I.R., (2021). “So I told him to look for friends!” Barriers and protecting factors that may facilitate social inclusion for children with Language Disorder in everyday social settings: Cross-cultural qualitative interviews with parents. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 115, 103963. Available here.

Related articles:

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Oral language and listening therapy for young children with hearing loss: 8 things everyone should know

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  1. Dramatic improvements in universal newborn hearing screening have led to significant reductions in the age at which most children with hearing loss are identified.
  1. Many – but not all – parents choose for their children to use hearing technologies, acquire spoken language, and enrol in local schools.
  1. Family-centred management of hearing loss may include early fitting of amplification, enrolment in early intervention, and, for children with bilateral severe and profound sensorineural hearing loss, the use of cochlear implants. 
  1. One way of helping children with hearing loss to learn spoken (oral) language is auditory-verbal therapy (AVT) with the support of Listening and Spoken Language Specialists (LSLS) and Audiologists. This therapy includes speech and language goals, and also audition (listening) goals following a hierarchy that includes detection, discrimination of words, identification of prosody, vowels and consonants, and language comprehension.
  1. The Ling Six-Sound Test covers the speech range for English: /m/, /u/, /a/, /i/, “sh” and /s/ and can be used to monitor a child’s access to the speech spectrum. 
  1. In AVT, hearing, listening, speaking, reading, writing and thinking support each other. 
  1. Strategies to support listening, language and literacy for children with hearing loss include songs and music, listening to stories, personal FM transmission systems at home, preschool and school, language experience books, reading aloud, phonological awareness training, training families to use narration, and evidence-based literacy instruction.
  1. Many children with hearing loss can now access auditory information almost from birth, and therapy to obtain language and literacy levels equal to their hearing peers.  For much more information, check out The Shepherd Centre in Australia.

Main source: Houston, K.T., Robertson, L., Wray, D. (2018). Providing Interventions that Support Literacy Acquisition in Children with Hearing Loss. What Professionals Need to Know. Topics in Language Disorders, 38(3), 242-260.

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Eight strategies to support children with selective mutism

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Selective mutism is a persistent failure to speak in specific social situations (e.g. at preschool or school), despite speaking fluently in familiar situations. We’ve written about it here and here and here.

So how can families, carers, educators, and others help children with selective mutism?

  1. Focus on what the child can do by developing their skills, talents and interests. Value the child as a whole person – there is much more to life than just talking!
  2. Schedule regular physical exercise to help the child manage anxiety and to boost confidence.
  3. In private, acknowledge the child’s achievements around talking. In public, praise the child for other (non-talking) behaviours in the same way you would praise any other child.
  4. Don’t be too helpful! Encourage the child to have a go, or think of ways to simplify tasks to increase success. Don’t jump in and “save” children from opportunities to communicate for themselves.
  5. Help the child to see difficult tasks like talking as exciting challenges. Change the language from, ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t’, to ‘can’t yet’.
  6. Normalise mistake-making! Acknowledge and praise the child for trying new things regardless of outcomes. Encourage practice.
  7. Welcome and respond to any kind of communication from the child, including gestures, nodding, drawing, making choices, or helping in different ways.
  8. Help the child to build friendships by pairing them up with another child for unstructured play dates, or at preschool or school.

If you are concerned about a child with suspected selective mutism, have a chat with a psychologist or speech pathologist with experience in the area.

For an accessible version of this infographic, here’s our video:

Main source: Johnson & Wintgen. 2017. The Selective Mutism Resource Manual (2nd edition). Routledge.

Related articles:

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

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Teenagers with DLD are at risk for peer problems, anxiety and depression but we don’t know why

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Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects 7-8% of the population, and is a difficulty with receptive and/or expressive language that cannot be accounted for by any other neurotypical disorders, hearing impairments or global intellectual difficulties. 

You can read more about DLD, its effects, and treatments here in our DLD Guide for Families.

Compared with their typically developing peers, teenagers with DLD are at risk for:

  • peer problems;
  • anxiety; and
  • depression.

We don’t know why.

Language is integral to social functioning, affecting the quality of friendships and participation in many social activities.

Teachers, on average, rate children with DLD as more withdrawn than typically developing classmates.

Many children with DLD struggle to initiate and to maintain conversations with peers, and have difficulties with conflict resolution and hiding emotions to protect others’ feelings.

Children with DLD experience higher rates of victimisation compared with their typically developing peers. 

Some (but not all) teenagers with DLD report higher feelings of social stress and social phobia.

Parents of teenagers with DLD perceive that their children experience significantly higher rates of peer problems compared to typically developing children.

Difficulties interacting with others may explain over half the variance in emotional problems experienced by teens with DLD.

Interestingly, teenagers with DLD did not report significantly higher peer and emotional problems compared with their typically developing peers.

The gap between parent and teenager perceptions of social difficulties may be because some teenagers with DLD are less aware of their social difficulties due to the effects of DLD. There may be other explanations, though, and we don’t yet know for sure.

For an accessible version of our infographic, watch our video:


Source: Forrest, C.L., Gibson, J.L., & St Clair, M.C. (2021). Social Functioning as a Mediator between Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Emotional Problems in Adolescents. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18, 1221. 

Related articles:

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Five ways to help 11-14 year-old students to improve their vocabularies for school and life

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Vocabulary is essential to language development, and helps with:

  • the acquisition of academic skills;
  • early reading skills;
  • generating inferences;
  • reading comprehension; 
  • writing quality; and
  • the expression of experiences, thoughts and feelings.

Vocabulary plays an increasingly important role as students move into adolescence. Typically developing students learn about 2,000-3,000 words a year: approximately two-eight root words per day!

We have to choose which words to teach carefully for two main reasons:

  • Time: Vocabulary knowledge increases with how many times a word is encountered in context. It can take 8-20 exposures before a word is properly understood.
  • Bang for buck: Teaching words explicitly helps students read taught words. But it does not transfer to unrelated words. We therefore need to teach words that are used across the curriculum and in other important environments.

High quality reviews of general vocabulary research suggests that explicit instruction, careful word selection, instructional activities requiring active processing of words, morphological awareness training (teaching students root words and affixes), semantic network development, and rich and motivating language learning environments are good practices to promote vocabulary development. 

Vocabulary recommendations and resources for 11-14 year old students

  1. Teach vocabulary intentionally.  For example, select words from Coxhead’s Academic Word List, such as “explain” and other exam verbs, and Hiebert’s most common word families. See our word lists here, and exam and essay verb resources here.
  1. Teach independent word-learning strategies, including morphological awareness training, starting with inflectional suffixes (e.g. -s, -es, -ed, -ing, -er, -est), high frequency prefixes (e.g. un-, de-, pre-, mis-) and then derivational suffixes (-ous, -ity, -ably), e.g. see Banter high frequency prefixes. 
  1. Develop semantic networks and background knowledge: Use graphic organisers (e.g. from the Florida Center for Reading Research), and semantic feature analysis scaffolds (see our Word Learner and Semantic Feature Analysis resources). 
  1. Increase opportunities for group discussion and writing with the target words.
  1. Provide a motivating, rich language learning environment. Select interesting texts, model excitement, encourage collaboration and fun (including idioms and jokes), use technology (but don’t get carried away), include problem solving and practice activities, and award points for spotting target words outside of class (e.g. on TV, in movies, the Internet).

Evidence-based vocabulary programs for 11-14 year-old students include Word Generation, ALIAS, PACT, and RAVE.

Five ways to help 11-14 year old students to improve their vocabularies for school and life

Watch our video for an accessible version of the infographic:

Key source: Elleman, A.M., Oslund, E.L., Griffin, N.M., & Myers, K.E. (2019). A Review of Middle School Vocabulary Interventions: Five Research-Based Recommendations for Practice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 50, 477-492.

Related articles and resources:

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

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