We’ve all gotten that dreaded referral for unexplained “language processing” difficulties. Sometimes it can be hard to know where to start. The first challenge is knowing what type of screening procedures you should use when you’re deciding if you should evaluate. Once we’ve evaluated students and they’re on our caseloads we face a different problem:…
Author: DrKaren
How do I know when to do a language evaluation?
Have you ever had a parent or teacher approach you because their child has “processing issues”? Are you constantly questioning your screening procedures, wondering if you’re either wasting time with unnecessary evaluations…or even worse….missing kids who truly are in need of help? If so, you’ll want to check out the video below where I walk…
Should I get my doctorate? (for speech pathologists and special education teachers)
Every time I ask this question on a public forum, I get a massive response. It seems this is a question that plagues a lot of speech pathologists (and possibly teachers as well). We have the urge to keep going and pushing ourselves. But maybe you feel like you’re barely treading water. Still paying of…
Should DHH students get speech even if their language scores are average?
This week I got a great question from one of my readers (paraphrased): “I have seen that a lot of DHH students have made some great progress by early elementary school, and a lot of them have language scores that fall in the average range (with a standard score of at least 85). I’m not…
How do I write IEP goals for language?
How do I write IEP goals for language? This is a question asked all the time among groups for SLPs. With the massive laundry lists of language skills we often think we need to address, it can be a daunting task. That’s why earlier this year, I published a 5-post series about how to write…
Push-in services: Are they better than a pull-out model?
Do you ever feel like you should be doing more push-in services? Push-in services and co-teaching seem to be the rage these days. Many of us are getting pressured to get in to classrooms rather than pulling kids out; which means leaves us scrambling to figure out how to make it work. Some of this…
School-age language developmental milestones: Ultimate Guide Review
If you’re an SLP treating pediatric language disorders, you’ve probably already realized how hard it is to to find a school-age language development chart. This makes it really hard to determine what’s “normal” across the school-age years. There really isn’t an easy answer to the “What language skills are expected at each grade level?” question….
Syntactic development in the school-age years
Last on the agenda for our language development series is syntactic development. Many times, when we have students with poor syntactic development; we know they have a poor sense of sentence structure, but aren’t sure which skills are causing problems. The other problem is that we have information on typical syntactic development up through about…
Text language across the school-age years
Now that we’ve discussed both sides of reading level debate, we’ll move on to our discussion on language development and text language. If you read the last article, you know that it’s difficult to define someone’s ability based on a single level. On top of that, it’s also challenging to analyze the text language and…
The myths of reading levels
The subject of reading levels has become a hot topic these days, just like the Common Core Standards. The use of reading levels has a lot of supporters; but also has a lot of, well….”non-supporters”. For those who support the use of reading levels, we may like that there are clear-cut guidelines and levels we…