Tired of wondering how to treat “processing” problems?
Do you wish someone would give you a roadmap to show you exactly what to do next?
I know I use to feel that way. That’s why I wrote this free e-book for you, The Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure: The SLP’s Roadmap to Language Comprehension and Expression.
If you have students whose language issues make school miserable for them and you feel like you’ve tried everything, keep reading to find out exactly where to intervene.
You can get a sneak peak at the first chapter of this free guide if you keep scrolling, or listen to the audio version right here:
Chapter 1: The truth about “language processing” problems
If you’re working with school-aged kids, you’ve probably had dozens…maybe even hundreds of referrals for “processing” concerns. You may also know that it’s your job to help these students.
We often get these referrals, take our best guess at what we should be working on…and then start therapy.
But that’s the problem. Many times, we feel like we’re guessing. And when we’re just grabbing random things off our shelves, jumping around from skill to skill, we’re not really improving much of anything.
It seems like there’s no way to get to all the skills holding our students back. After all, when we get these referrals, we also get a laundry list of concerns about what students CAN’T do. Which means our list of therapy activities is also massive; and we often struggle to make headway with every single skill on the list.
It may be a little like this:
- Students give off-the-wall answers to “wh” questions, no matter how many times you model the right answer and reword the question. Your “wh” question flashcards are falling apart because you’ve used them so much.
- Reading comprehension isn’t improving, no matter how many times you practice “stating the main idea”.
- When you ask students to retell a story, they look at you like a deer in headlights. So you get out some sequencing card deck and practice telling stories…but their sentences aren’t sounding right and you can’t quit put your finger on why.
- They can’t answer inferencing questions, and their teacher keeps telling you how badly they’re bombing all their reading assignments. So you work inferencing questions some more with different stories, but they’re still not getting it.
- Written language and essays are a mess of grammatical errors and sentences that don’t make sense, or the same simple structure over and over again. You’ve worked on verb tenses and pronouns because that’s all you can think to do…but you know there’s something else holding them back.
- Students may have weak grammar in general, and when you ask them to “use a vocabulary word in a sentence”, you get the same sentence structure over and over again. The only technique in your toolbox for working getting better sentences is saying, “Can you use that word in a sentence?”
- Your students can’t follow directions in class, and you’ve worked on the “Will follow 2-step directions with 80% accuracy” goal until you’re blue in the face. And they still can’t follow directions with 80% accuracy. But you’re not sure why.
- You can’t quite put your finger on your students’ “processing difficulties.” Sometimes you even get a parent who wants to look in to some type of alternative treatment they read about on the internet that’s supposed to be a magic fix because they’re getting so desperate.
When I used to get these cases, I used to spend tons of time working on the same “comprehension” strategies that teachers were using, like stating the main idea, recalling details from a story, or answering inferencing questions.
I used my sequencing, “wh” question, pronouns, and verb tenses card decks until they literally fell apart.
My IEPs looked nice and pretty on the surface, because I’d written goals with the right format and I’d even figured out which curriculum standard went with my objectives.
But I had a big problem.
None of this was working. It might have looked good on paper; but my students weren’t getting any better.
I was working on the same things over and over again to improve “language processing”.
I was taking the behaviors my student couldn’t do (like answer comprehension questions), and I was working on them over and over, year after year.
But they weren’t improving.
Why?
Because I was missing something.
I was treating the SYMPTOM, not the CAUSE.
So what was I missing?
Syntax.
The rules that show us how to put words together to form a coherent sentence.
The rules that explain how to use a vocabulary word correctly in a sentence, or how to use grammatically correct sentences in essays.
The rules that emphasize what words in a sentence are important, so we can make sense of what we’re reading and the directions we hear in class.
The rules that help us make sense of sequence, and that help us stay organized when we’re speaking; so what we’re saying is understood by others.
The rules that show us how to comprehend a question, and that show us how to answer it.
I was working on SYMPTOMS, but had completely neglected the CAUSE.
No wonder my students were suffering.
I mean, I knew that sentence structure was important. I just didn’t realize HOW important. And once I realized it, I wasn’t sure where to start.
I hadn’t thought about deconstructing sentences since junior high English.
Chances are if you’re reading this, you may be in the same boat.
Yet we’re supposed to be the “language experts”, so it’s kind of embarrassing to admit that we’ve forgotten the basic rules of syntax.
Many of us have also forgotten those more advanced sentence types that our students actually need to succeed in school, which is why most school language IEPs completely skim over this skill.
Or, we might not see this skill addressed on IEPs until secondary school…which is too little too late.
We start to use complex sentences in oral language as early as 5-6 years old (Dudek-Brannan, 2018). If your students don’t have a grasp on these syntactic structures…they’re already headed down the path to a miserable school experience.
That is, unless you do something about it. And you have all the skills you need to make that happen. All you need is a roadmap to guide you through the types of sentences likely to hold your students back.
Which is exactly what I’m going to give you in this guide.
But before we get to that, we’ll talk about some seminal research that’s essential to understanding why syntax is the culprit behind so many “language processing” problems.
Let’s talk about Loban (1977), who did a massive longitudinal study where he looked at language development from Kindergarten through 12th grade.
Loban wanted to see what skills stood out over the course of the years. And there was one language skill that stood out over all the rest.
That skill was syntax. Specifically, it was the use of subordination to form complex sentences. This means that as we get older and our language skills get more advanced, we use subordination more in both oral and written language.
If you’re thinking, “What the heck is subordination?”, I’ll break it down for you.
We use subordination when we attach a subordinate, or dependent clause to an independent clause (we’ll get in to these terms more in chapter 4).
When we do this, we form complex sentences.
People with stronger language skills use more complex sentences than people who don’t. Many Kindergarteners are even starting to use complex sentences in oral language. If you have a school-age student who isn’t doing this, or isn’t doing often, that’s a definite red flag that syntax could be the cause of their processing issues.
A poor sense of sentence structure can be a huge problem when it comes to anything “academic” we have to do, like reading a textbook or participating in a class discussion.
Complex sentences are seen often in academic texts; yet they’re extremely difficult for students with language disorders to process (Balthazar & Scott, 2018).
Research has also shown us that syntax a necessary skill for reading comprehension (Nippold, 2017),
Scott (2009) said it up best in her paper A case for the sentence in reading comprehension when she made the case that we won’t be able to understand what we read if we can’t understand one sentence at a time.
The good news is that working on problem sentence types not only improves sentence production (Balthazar & Scott, 2009), but it can also have carryover effects on reading abilities (Gillon & Dodd, 1995).
So if syntax is so important, why aren’t we addressing it more often?
I’ll tell you why I didn’t, at least at first: I didn’t know how.
Based on what I’ve gathered from talking to other SLPs, I’m not the only one who’s felt this way.
Syntax is one of the most overlooked and underserved areas. Rarely do I come across detailed language therapy goals on an IEP that address syntax.
There are often some general goals about verb tenses, or maybe some vague comprehension goal…but nothing that addresses the types of sentences that are actually causing students to have comprehension breakdowns.
Why are so many of us missing this?
Mostly because it comes so easy to us.
We’re competent language users. So competent, in fact, that we use complex sentence structures without even thinking about it.
Because these sentences are so easy for us, we never really have to “get meta” about them. Which means we don’t know what sentence types to teach our students who haven’t caught on to the rules of syntax yet.
We know syntax so well IMPLICITLY, that we aren’t explaining it EXPLICITLY, which is what our students need.
There are two essential first steps to solving this problem:
- Figure out what types of sentences are hard for students
- Write IEP goals to guide us through teaching those sentence types
That’s why this entire guide is dedicated to doing those two things.
Yes, we also have to have the right therapy techniques, and I’ll share some materials and examples of that as well. But figuring out the problem and creating a plan with the right objectives is half the battle.
And it’s often the part we struggle with the most. That’s why I’m going to set you on the right path.
I even promise what you could call an “IEP Goal Bank” for syntax, plus some ideas about how to help students meet the goals in therapy.
But let me say first, I don’t use a goal bank. Instead, I use the process I’m going to talk you through in this guide.
If you understand this process, you will rarely ever need a goal bank. Regardless, I’m going to give one to you to help you learn the ropes; but make sure you’re using it as a tool to guide you rather than a crutch.
Before I wrap up this first chapter, I’m going to give you an overview of the sentence structures that will follow in this guide.
Identifying the difficult sentences.
If your students are struggling with sentence structure, the list of error patterns they make can seem endless. We don’t have time to get to them all, nor do we need to.
That’s why for syntax, its necessary to examine the types of sentences that are MOST difficult to process, because these are the ones that will give our students with language disorders the biggest headaches.
If we’re aware of the biggest culprits behind their processing difficulties, this can narrow our focus considerably. It can also make our therapy more effective, because we’re hitting the skills holding them back in the first place.
Thankfully, Dr. Richard Zipoli Jr. cleared up some confusion with an article he wrote in Intervention in School and Clinic.
According to Zipoli (2017), sentences with the following can be really difficult:
- Sentences with passive voice
- Sentences with adverbial clauses and causal/temporal conjunctions
- Sentences with relative clauses
- Sentences with three or more clauses
Don’t worry if you don’t know what these are off the top of your head.
I had to look some of these up too when I started working on them with my kiddos. It’s okay if you don’t walk around all day thinking about center-embedding and relative pronouns 🙂
I’ll be walking you through each of these and explaining what they are; but first I’m going to start us off with the first thing I do when writing any language therapy goal.
So that’s what we’ll do in the next chapter.
Want to read the rest of The Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure: The SLP’s Roadmap to Language Comprehension and Expression?
If so, you can get the entire FREE 36-page guide here.
Want to check out the Table of Contents for this free guide? If so, visit this post here.
