Intervention for Developing Language Pt. 1 Flashcards
Developing Language Stage
• For typically developing children, occurs between 2 or 3
and 5 years of age.
• Brown’s Stages II through V
• MLUs of >2 but
Intervention Policy Issues
Individualized Educational Program (IEP)
Provides skeleton of intervention program; guides
overall programming direction
• Biggest difference between the IFSP and IEP: Program
focuses on the child rather than the family
• Family is still considered the central members of the IEP
team.
• Must be notified of IEP meetings
• Meeting must be at a convenient time for parents and staff
• Have the right to accept or reject IEP & request
modifications
• Must approve plan before initiation
(Example of IEP may be found in Appendix 12-1
Intervention Policy Issues
Intervention Settings
Children “start school” at age three versus receiving
services at home.
Intervention Policy Issues
Family-Centered Practice
• Have meaningful and serious discussions about
diagnostic findings
• Respect family’s wishes about the extent they want to
be involved
• Respect family’s preferences about intervention goals
and methods
Intervention Products: Goals for
Children with Developing Language
• To help the child acquire intelligible, grammatical,
flexible forms of expression
• Give the child tools to make communication effective,
efficient, and rewarding
• Provide the oral language basis for success in
literacy
• See Table 9-1: Milestones of normal communicative
development during the preschool years
Intervention Goals: Phonology
Many problems will resolve on their own
• If seriously unintelligible, treatment warranted
• Social disvalue; social isolation; frustration; behavioral & emotional
reactions
• Long-term goal: Increase overall intelligibility
• Ensure generalization
• Assess syntactic & semantic skills in unintelligible children
to avoid missing deficits masked by speech problems
• Providing ILS, focused stimulation, auditory bombardment
• Production: control language targets for pronounceability
• Phonological Awareness (PA)
• Providing PA activities may prevent literacy difficulties
Intervention Goals: Semantics
Children with developmental language disorders (DLD):
• May need to hear a new word twice as many times before
comprehending and producing it.
• Have particular difficulty with words to talk about cognitive
states, verb vocabulary, use of verb particles.
• Less able to identify semantic features
• Broader difficulties with receptive vocabulary than simply
a reduced ability to acquire labels
• May benefit from enriched input
• Repeated opportunities to see connections between words and
their referents
• Potential Vocabulary Targets listed in Appendix 9-1
(Owens 2009)
• Also expose children to rare words
• Help children broaden the range of ideas they can talk
about.
• In practice, it is hard to separate syntax from semantics
• One thing at a time—Be sure new complex syntax encodes a
meaning the child has already expressed in a more simple way
• When expressing new meanings, control for syntactic complexity
Intervention Goals: Syntax & Morphology
• See table 9-2: Principles of Goal Selection for
Grammatical Targets in the DL Period
• Syntax & Morphology goals are virtually always
appropriate for this period
• Don’t ignore other language areas of concern
• Typical grammatical deficits (focus on these)
• Bound morphemes
• Auxiliary verbs
• Articles
• Prounouns
• Verb marking (auxiliaries & inflections)
• Complex sentence production
Intervention Goals: Comprehension vs.
Production
Guided production activities facilitate both
comprehension & production of new meanings &
forms
• Auditory bombardment—”syntax stories”
• Combination of focused stimulation, ILS, &
auditory bombardment plus activities to elicit
production
Intervention Goals: Pragmatics
• Central role of pragmatics—how we get things done in the
real world.
• Pragmatics-the study of how language is used in the
context of communication
• Two ways to add pragmatics to practice:
• Generate a set of pragmatic targets for intervention
• Incorporate pragmatics in the intervention program
• Paul advocates providing real communicative contexts
• Select contexts based therapy data (What are the
problem areas?)
• Incorporate pragmatic contexts into intervention plan for
every objective, but not for every activity
Intervention Goals: Play and Thinking
• Encourage child to use new language to structure pretend
play, solve problems, explore new ideas
• Play in context in which problem solving and exploration
take place
• New language can be put in service of more mature &
imaginative play
• Use play contexts for practicing new forms and meanings
• Generalize intervention targets
• Use language to achieve new levels of symbolic and
conceptual development with models and support
Intervention Goals: Preliteracy
• Many preschoolers with language delays develop
problems in learning to read and write
• Indicators of literacy success in school include:
• Strong oral language
• Phonological awareness
• Understanding about print
• Alphabetical knowledge
• Invented spelling
• Rapid naming
• Ability to write name prior to kindergarten
• Increasingly, SLPs are expected to address preliteracy
development
• SLPs have deep knowledge about phonological
awareness and the connection between oral language
and reading
• The most effective intervention for literacy includes a
focus on oral language, phonemic awareness, lettersound
relationships, vocabulary & language
comprehension
Domains for Preliteracy Intervention (Kaderavek &
Justice, 2004)
• Phonological Awareness
• Count syllables and sounds
• Identify rhymes and words that start with the same sounds
• Manipulate sounds in words
• Print Concepts
• How books work
• Alphabet Knowledge
• How print represents speech through written language units
• Narrative and Literate Language
• Exposure to stories, poems, plays, etc.
