Squid has done marvellously well. ‘Just outside the range of normal’ for understanding, grammar and language. Her NHS speech therapist wants to move her onto only speech sound targets for the next block.
Apart from ‘just outside the range of normal’ means that on every test they administer she scores between 5% and 10% less than lower bound of the very wide range of normal for a child her age. And she still struggles. So I think it would be wrong to consider this the end of language intereventions. But possibly it might be the right point to view her as receiving support ‘in context’ – i.e. parents and school.
I copied the below from http://www.asha.org. Does anyone have any other thoughts to add for a good flight-plan to support a language disordered primary school aged child?
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Intervention For Elementary School Children (Ages 5–10)
The focus of language intervention for elementary school children with language difficulties is to help the child acquire the language skills needed to learn and succeed in a classroom environment. Interventions are curriculum-based, that is, goals address language needs within the context of the curriculum where these skills are needed.
Interventions may also address literacy skills (e.g., improving decoding, reading comprehension, and narrative and expository writing), as well as metacognitive and metalinguistic skills (e.g., increasing awareness of rules and principles for use of various language forms, improving the ability to self-monitor and self-regulate) that are critical for the development of higher-level language skills. See the treatment section of the Written Language Disorders Practice Portal page.
For children who speak a language other than English in the home, it may be necessary to use the home language as a mechanism for transitioning the child to using the language of the school. Planning and implementing an effective language intervention program is often a coordinated effort involving the SLP, classroom teacher(s), and other school specialists.
Areas targeted for this population typically include
phonology
- enhancing phonological awareness skills,
- eliminating any residual phonological processes.
semantics
- improving knowledge of vocabulary, including knowledge of curriculum-related vocabulary,
- improving depth of vocabulary understanding and use, including
- subtle differences in meaning,
- changes in meaning with context,
- abstract vocabulary,
- figures of speech;
- understanding figurative language and recognizing ambiguities in language (e.g., words with multiple meanings and ambiguous sentence structures);
- monitoring comprehension, requesting clarification;
- paraphrasing information.
morphology and syntax
- increasing the use of more advanced morphology (e.g., monster/monstrous, medicine/medical, school/scholastic);
- increasing the ability to analyze morphologically complex words (e.g., prefixes, suffixes);
- improving morphosyntactic skills (e.g., use of morphemes in simple and complex clauses, declarative versus questions, tag questions and relative clauses);
- improving the ability to understand and formulate more complex sentence structures (e.g., compound sentences; complex sentences containing dependent clauses);
- judging the correctness of grammar and morphological word forms and being able to correct errors.
pragmatics
- using language in various contexts to convey politeness, persuasiveness, clarification;
- increasing discourse-level knowledge and skills, including
- academic discourse,
- social interaction discourse,
- narrative discourse,
- expository discourse,
- use of cohesive devices in discourse;
- improving the ability to make relevant contributions to classroom discussions;
- improving the ability to repair conversational breakdowns;
- learning what to say and what not to say;
- learning when to talk and when not to talk.”
