This past year, I had the opportunity to connect with various administrators and Ed Tech leaders who are selling curriculum products to school districts at a large scale. During many of these conversations it became clear that districts are making core, evidence-based reading curriculum a priority. One of the best ways to see what’s important…
Category: Language Development
Navigating challenging language evaluations and developmental milestones
I get tons of questions about how to do language therapy evaluations effectively, so I wanted to share this special Q & A session I did for the members of Language Therapy Advance Foundations. Most people want to know what test protocols they should use and how to supplement with non-standardized tools; and it can…
Syntax: What’s age appropriate and what skills are high priority?
One of the biggest challenges for speech pathologists treating kids with language disorders is knowing how “normal” language development looks over the school-age years. We have a lot of language developmental milestones charts out there, but most of them end around age 6. After that, you’ll be hard pressed to find a neat little chart…
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…
Expressive language development: Here’s one skill you should be tracking
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…
Vocabulary Development in the School-Age Years
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…
Morphological Development in the School-Age Years
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…