If you’ve been searching for some kind of developmental progression or hierarchy to help you organize your language therapy, and you haven’t found what you’re looking for…
It’s because you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.
Many SLPs ask me for a hierarchy for language therapy. They want to know the developmental progression of language skills so they can understand how to strategically work up from least to most difficult as they work with students.
They also want to minimize the cognitive fatigue that comes from constantly making these kinds of decisions on-the-fly.
Asking for a “hierarchy” or a “curriculum” for language therapy is reasonable. And the concept of a hierarchy is part of what you’d need to do as you scaffold within specific treatment protocols.
But as you’ve likely discovered already, if you search for a hierarchy, curriculum for the entirety of your entire system, you’ll keep coming up short.
The good news is that you don’t need a hierarchy to have a solid system for language therapy. At least not the way you think.
Instead, you need a way to ORGANIZE your language therapy based on clusters of skills, or linguistic components so that your “hierarchies” are well-sequenced and arranged.
I help SLPs achieve this level of structure using a concept I refer to as “clinical containers”.
Think of these containers like the bins or shelving units you’d use to organize your closet. The bins are the “clinical containers”, or broader linguistic areas that inform what skills and protocols you choose. Then, within those containers, you have a set of hierarchies.
The large umbrella container I use to inform the framework is VOCABULARY.
Then, there are five containers, or linguistic areas nested under vocabulary:
- Phonology
- Orthography
- Morphology
- Semantics
- Syntax
You define these broader areas first, then start stacking protocols, one at a time, ensuring all five of these areas are addressed in some way.
I can share an example of how this would work related to semantics.
I often get the question, “What vocabulary words are age-appropriate across the school-age years”?
This question is impossible to answer because language and vocabulary skills across the school-age years are highly variable and dependent on environment, exposure, and experience.
On the other hand, you MAY be able to answer the question of what words are expected within the curriculum or other parts of students’ lives, and you may also be able to answer the question of what words might make sense to work on with students, factoring in their current skills and needs.
But you won’t find a neatly organized list outlining when and how you should teach specific words at certain ages that would be relevant or helpful across students and geographic areas.
You CAN look at semantic knowledge as a broader area, and come up with some protocols that could fill your “semantics” container, and then work up a progression within those protocols.
For example, you could pick a set of words to target that would make sense for your students, and then teach them a strategy for self-questioning and describing words using specific semantic features.
You may be aware that it’s generally more difficult to state a word’s category than it is to state its function, so you may know that you’ll need to model and support students more when describing categories compared to other semantic features.
You may also know that abstract language is more difficult than concrete language, so you may introduce semantic study protocols with concrete vocabulary students are familiar with before more abstract Tier 2 vocabulary.
You can use the concept of a hierarchy WITHIN the container. The same thing applies for skills like syntax. There IS a developmental progression we can use to inform HOW and WHEN we introduce skills within the “syntax” container.
Think of clinical containers as bumpers.
They help organize your decisions and protocols. They help you evaluate all those materials and activities you have on your shelves or in your head.
They allow you to make certain decisions and set a certain structure up front, so you don’t have the equivalent of a closet full of things in a huge pile.
That’s why one of the first things I have clinicians do in Language Therapy Advance Foundations is familiarize themselves with the “Essential 5” linguistic components (phonology, orthography, morphology, semantics, syntax) that will create their “containers”.
Then I start outlining a set of protocols that help fill those containers, and strategically build them over time until you have a complete, robust, system that allows you to show up to sessions confident that you’re scaffolding and sequencing skills in a way that covers your bases.
Language Therapy Advance Foundations is my program that helps SLPs design a scalable language therapy system that helps them minimize the amount of time they spend planning therapy without sacrificing quality.
>>>Learn more about how to join Language Therapy Advance Foundations here.
