Language Therapy and Leadership for Pediatric Clinicians
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….
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…
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 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…
Expressive language grows at a rapid rate during the school age years. Yet with all the different skills we could be monitoring, it’s a challenge to focus on the heavy hitters that make a true difference in academic performance. When it comes to expressive language and vocabulary, we know this area is massive. We also…
It’s painfully obvious to point out that vocabulary development is critical during the school age years, and equally obvious to say that we need to make a conscious effort to address it with our students. What’s less obvious is how we determine what is “normal vocabulary development”. How can we crawl in to someone’s head…
No discussion of language development would be complete without a mention of morphology; which is why today we’re going to dive in to morphological development in the school age years. Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and how they’re formed, including parts such as roots, bases and affixes (Nippold, 2016). There’s…
For anyone working with the school age population, navigating Common Core Standards for students in special education can be a nightmare. Most of us know our students are far behind where they should be, especially when it comes to these early developing language skills that typically emerge before students come to school. But we can’t talk…
If you’re a professional working on building language skills; you’ve most likely taken a language development course at some point in your training. As an SLP, knowing norms for language development is the foundation for understanding how to diagnose and treat problems in this area. Yet I regularly hear discussions in professional forums debating what…
Many SLPs have a hard time finding good language therapy resources that make their lives easier with their huge caseloads; which was my motivation for starting Dr. Karen Speech and Language back in 2015. As we come to the end of the year, I wanted to take a quick second and highlight some of the…