The big picture:
- Difficulties with oral language comprehension are hard to treat.
- But they are not untreatable.
- With evidence-based goals and therapy approaches, students with developmental language disorder (DLD) can improve their language comprehension skills.
Why it matters:
Good language skills make life a lot easier. Language comprehension issues tend to:
- persist into adulthood;
- affect reading, writing, and school success;
- make it hard to make and keep friendships;
- reduce independence; and
- increase risks of unemployment and mental health challenges.
Yes, but:
- Few interventions give us high confidence we can improve the oral language comprehension of school-age children with DLD.
- Recent research gives us a lot more hope and help than we had 10 years ago!
Goals to target:
Based on the current evidence-base, I prioritise:
- specific oral language skills, including:
- academic vocabulary using a semantic-phonologic approach;
- complex syntax and morphology using exposure, repetition, and scaffolded manipulation activities (including cues, prompts and explanations); and
- narrative language, including story grammar, and contextualised language interventions;
- compensatory metacognitive skills, including using mental imagery; and
- the student’s communication environment, especially at school.
What I don’t target:
Language processing skills, e.g. auditory temporal processing or working memory skills. (As yet, there is no high quality evidence that these interventions work.)
Therapy tips:
To maximise therapy time and outcomes, choose activities that combine oral language comprehension goals with:
- associated expressive language goals;
- reading and writing practice; and
- materials that are:
- relevant to the curriculum;
- designed to increase the student’s world knowledge; and/or
- relevant to the student’s social interests.
Go deeper:
Tarvainen S, Launonen K, Stolt S. Oral language comprehension interventions in school-age children and adolescents with developmental language disorder: A systematic scoping review. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments 2021 May 24;6. doi: 10.1177/23969415211010423. (Open access)
Oral language comprehension: what is it? A plain English explainer
Practical resources and strategies:
For Primary students with DLD
Interactive Oral Language Workouts for Primary School Students
Semantic Feature Analysis Workouts
Verbal Reasoning and Inference Workouts
Think Then Write Workbook 1: Simple Sentences Workbook
Think Then Write Workbook 2: FANBOYS Compound Sentences
Think Then Write Workbook 3: Complex Sentences
Think Then Write Workbook 4: Paragraph Writing Foundations
Verbal Reasoning, Independence, and Social Participation
We should teach young students self-regulation strategies to improve their writing
For High school students with DLD
Interactive Oral Language Workouts for High School Students
Think Then Write Workbook 5: Multi-Paragraph Information Report Writing Foundations
Think Then Write Workbook 6: Narrative Writing Foundations
Think Then Write Workbook 7: Persuasive Writing Foundations
How to help a disorganised student: some practical ideas and resources
How to help our secondary teachers support teenagers with language disorders at school
This article also appears in a recent issue of Banter Booster, our weekly round up of the best speech pathology ideas and practice tips for busy speech pathologists, speech pathology students and others.
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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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