Often, when we're working with kids with DLD, we assume that we need to be working on simple sentences or very basic vocabulary, but should we be aiming for more? Can we support children with DLD to learn to use grammar and vocabulary in ways that are functional for their life, such as their everyday communication or their school curriculum?
Amanda J. Owen Van Horne, Maura Curran, Susan Wagner Cook, Renée Cole, Karla K. McGregor
First published:
02 May 2023
Useful resources:
Preparing Student Clinicians to Provide Recast Therapy on Complement Clauses: A Training Program
Can vocabulary lessons increase the amount of complex syntax produced by head start teachers? A pilot study
Often, when we're working with kids with DLD, we assume that we need to be working on simple sentences or very basic vocabulary, but should we be aiming for more? Can we support children with DLD to learn to use grammar and vocabulary in ways that are functional for their life, such as their everyday communication or their school curriculum?
Amanda J. Owen Van Horne, Maura Curran, Susan Wagner Cook, Renée Cole, Karla K. McGregor
First published:
02 May 2023
Useful resources:
Preparing Student Clinicians to Provide Recast Therapy on Complement Clauses: A Training Program
Can vocabulary lessons increase the amount of complex syntax produced by head start teachers? A pilot study
IJLCD: Teaching little kids big sentences
Transcript Date:
3 May 2024
Speaker Key
HOST: JACQUES STRAUSS
AMANDA: AMANDA OWEN VAN HORNE
MUSIC PLAYS: 0:00:00- 0:00:06
HOST: 0:00:06 Welcome to another RCSLT podcast. My name is Jacques Strauss. This is an IJLCD edition of the podcast in which we talk to authors of papers in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders about research that we think would be of interest to the wider SLT community.
Today’s paper is entitled ‘Teaching little kids big sentences: A randomized controlled trial showing that children with DLD respond to complex syntax interventions embedded within the context of preschool kindergarten science instruction’.
We spoke to the lead author, Professor Amanda Owen Van Horne of the University of Delaware about this research, and I think it will be of great interest to SLTs working in schools. I started by asking Amanda to introduce herself.
AMANDA: 0:00:55 Yeah, so Hi, I’m Amanda Owen Van Horne. I’m a faculty member at the University of Delaware. I’m a speech language pathologist in the United States, and I do research on children with developmental language disorder. I’m particularly interested in how we can help kids with DLD learn to use grammar and vocabulary in ways that are functional for their life, so things that relate to their academic curriculum, or things that relate to their everyday communication.
I do a lot of work on helping kids to say things that we think might be a little bit of a reach. So, frequently, when we’re working with kids with DLD, we assume that we need to be working on simple sentences or very basic vocabulary. But I think when we do that, we undershoot what they need to be successful in life. And so, a lot of my work has focused on how do we get kids to say longer sentences, sentences that have two parts. He thought that the sun was shining. He knew what happened yesterday.
Those kinds of sentences really are the nuts and bolts of communication about perspective, taking memories, telling stories, those sorts of things. So, I try to help kids learn how to say those longer, more complicated sentences.
In collaboration with a colleague at the University of Iowa, Karla McGregor, who is interested in helping kids learn to say more complicated words, we’ve done some research on how to do that work in an academic curriculum.
HOST: 0:02:25 So, there’s the two building blocks, really – more complicated words and more complicated sentences. And I would remind listeners about a previous podcast we did for DLD Awareness Day in which we spoke to two people who have DLD about what the condition meant for them and how it impacted their lives.
So, Amanda, could you tell us what clinical question you were trying to answer?
AMANDA: 0:02:49 Yeah, so we know that kids with DLD have difficulty with learning… I would call them ‘tier two’ vocabulary words – those academically relevant vocabulary words – and with learning grammar and syntax. And we know that kids with DLD have difficulty with long-term academic outcomes. But we don’t really know whether we can teach kids academic content, in our case science content, science curriculum, at the same time that we can provide them with language intervention.
And I don’t know exactly how time goes for SLTs in the UK, but at least in the US, we often hear that there is more work to be done than there are hours in the day, and there’s more kids on the caseload than an SLT can really spend all their time on. And so, we also wanted to think about priorities. If you wanted to pick, should I teach vocabulary, should I teach grammar; which thing is going to give the biggest boost to kids academics? We wanted to try and answer the question: which one should we focus on the most?
And so, those were the two core clinical questions. Can kids learn two things at the same time – curriculum and a language target? And if you have to pick just one thing to focus on, which things should you pick to focus on for the best gain, best benefit, for the kids?
HOST: 0:04:10 I have no doubt that SLTs in the UK face similar time and resource pressures. So, what does the existing literature say about this?
AMANDA: 0:04:21 A core thing that we were interested in doing when we were thinking about designing this study is we were interested in using well-established, well-known therapies. So, for the vocabulary instruction, we used a well-established, well-known therapy called [Bridge/Rich 0:04:37] Vocabulary Instruction, introduced by Beck and McKeown.
For the grammar therapy, we did a well-known, well-established grammar intervention that was first developed by Keith Nelson back in the 1970s and then developed more fully by Mark Fey in the 80s and 90s called recast therapy. And recast therapy is the process of picking up what the child says. So, if the child says a sentence like ‘him going’, and you’re trying to teach a sentence like… or a grammatical target like ‘is’, then you, as the therapist, might say, back to the child, oh, yeah, he is going. You’re not placing a demand on the child, you’re not asking them to copy you, you’re not using visuals to support that; your goal is just to provide really intense models of the target. But the way it goes from being modelling to being recast therapy is you’re reusing the child’s utterances.
So, we think that by reusing the child’s own utterance, like when they say ‘him going’, and you pick that back up and you say, oh, yeah, he is going. We think that by reusing the child’s own utterances, they’ve pre-activated the vocabulary words, they’re motivated by the topic because they’re talking about something they’re already interested in, you’ve made it easier for them to compare their utterance to what you said, so that if there’s a mistake they can see how there’s a difference there and that comparison process is really easy. And then you’re providing this really intense dose of modelling of the target structure. So, we think all of those things are the special recast sauce that makes recast work.
And it’s a really useful therapy because it can be used for kids who are really young, who aren’t reading yet, who maybe don’t have the meta linguistic skills to talk about language yet, and who need to grow their communication skills in a more natural way.
We also think that recast therapy is really beneficial for something like what we were doing, where we’re embedding intervention in a larger curricular context. Because you could do this in a mixed classroom where you have typical children and language impaired children together, and you’re not interrupting the flow of the lesson necessarily, you’re just picking up what the child is saying, and giving it back to them.
The tricky part about recast therapy is that you have to do it at a pretty high dose in order to be effective, so you’re looking for about one recast a minute over a six- to ten-hour period in order to see benefit. I don’t mean six hours at a go! I mean, like, right, you do half an hour, and then you come back another day and you do another half hour, and so on. But still, you’re looking at a good number of intervention hours to get benefit.
And then the other thing about it is, we really think you have to focus on one structure. So, there’s some evidence that focusing on too many different things, if you’re just generally recasting, generally picking up and correcting the child’s utterances, instead of being focused on a single target, doesn’t really lead to the same level of benefit for kids.
So it’s a tricky therapy to do, but at the same time because it can be embedded in a natural situation, because it’s good for kids who aren’t reading and writing yet, because it’s good for kids who don’t have meta linguistic skills it can be a nice tool to have in your toolkit alongside other more explicit therapies.
HOST: 0:08:03 The recast therapy sounds really interesting, but it sounds like pretty hard work if you have to focus on just one area at a time.
AMANDA: 0:08:11 Yeah, I think for the speech language therapist there’s a couple tricks to getting it right. We have a couple of papers that are recently published, one in AJSLP, led by [Donyang Wang 0:08:23], about how you can make it easier to do these things. So, one way to make it easier to do these things, particularly when we start to get away from the simple sentences and into the more complex sentences, is for the SLT to have some code words or some trigger words that they use.
So, if you want to teach things like adverbial clauses, because, and, so, or, if, then, then instead of focusing on how to put together adverbial clauses, which sounds super fancy, you can think of it as take what the child said, put the word ‘because’ in and finish the sentence, or take what the child said, put the word ‘if’ in and then finish the sentence.
For complement clauses, which is what we worked on in the paper with the science classrooms, one of the things you can think about doing is focusing on verbs that use cognition, perception, communication, or desire. So, words like think, wonder, guess, know, hope. For those kinds of sentences… in fact, in the classrooms, we posted 20 verbs that SLTs could use as a mental reminder that take what the child said, put something about think or wonder or guess or ask in front of it, and then say it back to the kid. So, that’s one of the ways that you can really reduce the mental load is to look for ways to trick yourself.
HOST: 0:09:52 Could we teach these skills to teachers as well, so that it’s not just limited to SLTs?
AMANDA: 0:09:58 This probably actually started initially out of an Implementation Science Conference that I attended with the [ASHA 0:10:05] Foundation back in 2014. I had been thinking about these kinds of verbs and tricking yourself into saying things. And we did a very small study that I… where was it published? Child language teaching and therapy. And what we did is we asked Head Start teachers… Head Start in the United States is a preschool focused on children who live in poverty. So, we asked Head Start teachers to work with their classrooms and either deliver lessons focused on the vocabulary words.
Now, we told the teachers that we were focused on vocabulary words, for think, no, wonder, guess, remember, assume, try. I can’t remember all the vocabulary words right now, but those kinds of words. Or to focus on verbs that were the same frequency, but were action words – words like measure, or observe, and these action words that were really very action-oriented. And we looked at whether we got simple sentences or complex sentences from the teachers.
The teachers produced seven times as many two clause sentences – sentences with two parts – to these preschoolers when they were using cognitive verbs, communication verbs, desire verbs, and all simple sentences. We had to hunt and hunt and hunt to find the complex sentences when they were focused on teaching action words.
The kids learned vocabulary words, but what we were really interested in doing was getting the kids to say the complicated sentences. We weren’t able to see benefit at the kid level in the timeframe that we had available because it was a really short intervention. But we saw enough change on the part of the teachers that we felt like this would be a good strategy to use [inaudible 0:11:58] the strategy that we picked up for training the clinicians in this study is focused on the vocabulary words. It’s not a vocabulary lesson – we’re not teaching the word think – but focus on using the words as a way of making your cognitive load get lower.
I do think you could teach teachers. Again, we have a tutorial out on connecting this process of thinking about how do you select targets and then embed them in the curriculum, and what do you need to have happen in order to make that happen?
One of the biggest challenges that our providing clinicians had actually was learning the science content. [Recording scrambled 0:12:35] the intervention, but they were also the science teacher for these kids, and they had a hard time learning the science content. And if you imagine being in partnership with a teacher, right, the teacher needs to check that the SLT is teaching science properly, and/or the SLT needs to check that the science teacher is doing language therapy properly. And so, you really need this trusting relationship, this partnership, this ongoing coaching, and it’s not that dissimilar to working with a parent. A parent needs to be able to communicate with the SLT about what their child’s needs and wants are, what are the functional goals, what works in their family, how does this fit? And the SLT needs to be able to coach the parent on how to provide a good solid intervention with high fidelity.
So, this partnership process: contributing what? How are we working together as a team? How are we advancing this child’s needs? It is really important, and it’s an orientation or perspective than an SLT can take about being in full partnership with the other people serving that child.
HOST: 0:13:41 Could you tell us a little more about how you went undertaking this research?
AMANDA: 0:13:47 Yes. We were funded by the National Science Foundation in the United States, and so we had money to design three different classrooms that were going to receive intervention. All of the classrooms received a first grade, so I guess in the UK you have reception, and then what comes after reception?
HOST: 0:14:04 [Fortunately 0:14:04], I wasn’t born or schooled here, so I don’t know!
AMANDA: 0:14:07 Whatever comes after reception – someone can fill that in! So, we selected a first-grade science curriculum. In the United States, in the mid-90s to the early 2000s, there was a big revision of all the school curricula. And one of the revisions was for the science standards. So, we picked a science curriculum, and the science curriculum focuses on something called inquiry-based instruction. The idea is is that you give the kids tiny experiments, they do the experiments themselves, you guide them through, connecting that experiment to a phenomenon that is an actual science phenomenon that you want to teach, and then they learn both about the scientific method, they learn about communication and data collection, and they learn the actual science concepts.
This was a really big change that happened, and what it has meant is that the language load on learning science has gotten really heavy. It’s a much more complicated way of learning science. But the idea is that even little kids – even like five- and six-year-olds – can learn this. And when they learn it like this, they become interested in science and they’re going to carry on with science.
So, we started with a first-grade science curriculum. First grade in the United States is kids who are seven or eight. We picked that because we didn’t want any of the kids to have learned the science yet. We wanted it to be all new things for them. And so, then we had to adapt the curriculum backwards for four- and five-year-olds. So, we had four- and five-year-olds doing really fun things, like learning about sound by using rubber bands of different thicknesses to learn about how vibration works, or planting different plants and putting some of them in the sun and some of them in the shade to learn about how plants grow.
These are all very accessible activities for kids. Then they had to do things like collect data. So, every day for a week, they’d measure their plants, with help from a teacher, and keep track of how tall their plants were and which ones grew better. I can’t say that we saw the classic phenomenon that the ones in the sun grew better than the ones in the shade, because there was an over-watering problem! But they got to actually explore how this worked.
For one of the classrooms, we put vocabulary instruction in, for one of the classrooms, we put grammar instruction in, and for one of the classrooms we put phonological awareness instruction in. The idea here is that if kids can learn the science and can learn the language targets at the same time, we should see similar growth in science across all the classrooms, but we should see vocabulary growth in the vocabulary classroom, grammar growth in the grammar classroom, and phonological awareness growth in the phonological awareness classroom.
All of the interventions were well established interventions – interventions that we already knew worked – and so our questions weren’t, does recast therapy work, or does [rich/Rich 0:17:03] vocabulary instruction work, or does phonological awareness instruction work? Our question was, which thing will lead to the better science growth at the end, and do we see equal science gains in all the classrooms?
HOST: 0:17:17 So, you have this ideal setup of three classrooms with three slightly different interventions? And so, I guess the question is: what did you find?
AMANDA: 0:17:28 So, the beauty of running this classic experiment was really amazing. It was truly a gift from our funders. A fly in the ointment is, just as we were about to collect our third wave of data, COVID hit. Not good. So, we have a slightly underpowered study. That means we don’t have quite as many kids as we had planned and were only able to answer some of our questions.
So, when we actually got to the point of doing the math to answer the questions, we put the vocabulary and the phonological awareness classrooms together into one group. We did that for a variety of reasons related to data collection issues, the way kids participated, and the fact that when we looked at the data as scientists, we felt like those groups were more similar to each other.
When we compare the grammar classroom and how they did on grammar to how the phonological awareness and vocabulary kids did on grammar, we see that the grammar kids got better on grammar and the other kids didn’t. We also see, when we look at how did everybody do on science, that everybody got better on science; they got more better on science than we would expect for a preschooler to get better at science over a six-week period when we’re teaching them a pretty advanced curriculum. So, we’re pretty sure that they learned the science.
We saw some very beginning evidence that the kids in the grammar condition made more progress on science than the kids in the other conditions. I can’t push that result really hard, because instead of having 60 kids, we had around 30 kids. And so, we should have had more kids. We were on track to make up those numbers. We had kids enrolled, and all the schools closed in the United States, so we weren’t able to continue with that. But if we had had all the kids, we would have been able to answer that question with more confidence.
So, I want to say we think, perhaps, that the grammar condition helped the kids more at their science than the other two teaching conditions, but I don’t want to be super pushy about it.
HOST: 0:19:33 Right. So, that was using recast therapy within the science curriculum, which possibly but we’re not sure, produced better outcomes in the science learning.
So, if that were the case, do you have any thoughts as to why that might be?
AMANDA: 0:19:53 We think that one of the things that’s going on with science and science communication and science thinking is that you have to be able to represent knowing something with confidence, knowing something with doubt, guessing about something, asking questions, and that the process of putting together those complicated sentences may help open up access to some of the ways that people do instruction.
We have, in process, some work during the pandemic, where we redid our same study, but we did it over Zoom. So, we mailed families science boxes with all the stuff. The parents sat next to the kids and help them do the science experiments. Our therapists taught over Zoom. We used a deeper kind of therapy, so we combined recast therapy with some of the SHAPE CODING work that Susan Ebbels does and did that. And then we also had a vocabulary condition and then a science only condition.
And then that work, it looks like all the groups were able to learn science equally. It doesn’t look like grammar pushes quite as hard on the science outcomes as it did in the live instruction. So, we’re not quite sure. We’re not quite sure if grammar’s the right priority.
I think the biggest finding or the biggest outcome is that kids can learn curricular content at the same time that they’re receiving language therapy instruction. And so, if you’re an SLT [inaudible 0:21:27], at least in the United States the way therapy works is you take the child out of the regular classroom, you go off to your speech room, you provide intervention, and then you take them back to the regular classroom. You get to pick as the therapist what you want to talk about. And a lot of therapists might think, well, we don’t want to push too hard on the kids, we don’t want to stress them out, we’ll let them do science or social studies or math in their classroom, and I’ll do something easier in my classroom, so that we can focus on the language.
But really, they’re missing instruction to come hang with me. And if I can incorporate instruction into my therapy, and they can learn both things at the same time and make just as good progress on both things, which is what we think is true, then we really should be trying to match our work as tightly as possible to whatever the curricular content is that they’re missing.
HOST: 0:22:21 So, if we take kids out of the classroom to work on their DLD, they fall behind in their science learning, and then that becomes a whole new challenge to deal with.
AMANDA: 0:22:33 Yeah. I think that if I was going to say one… There’s two things that I think are the big contributions from this work. One is that little kids can learn these big sentences and these big vocabulary words. We know that typical five-year-olds are using these complicated sentences at a really high rate. We know that first and second grade science instruction is using these kinds of complicated sentences. The textbooks that are using these kinds of sentences are using complicated sentences for about a third of the sentences in the textbooks.
So, if the kids don’t have access to these kinds of sentences or these kinds of vocabulary words, they’re not going to succeed. And so, we can show that these kids can learn these things really early and we should be teaching them in reception, first grade, second grade, not waiting until eighth and ninth grade to teach complicated sentences. Teach them early, it opens access to the curriculum.
The second thing is is that the kids can learn the curriculum at the same time that they can learn the language targets, and we should be doing both at the same time.
HOST: 0:23:35 This is a slight tangent, but what do we know about these sorts of interventions with bilingual children?
AMANDA: 0:23:44 Yeah, so I’m in a collaboration with a colleague, Anny Castilla-Earls at the University of Houston, and we’re doing some work on Spanish-English bilingual recast therapy. In that work, we’re asking questions about, does it matter if the child is English dominant, or able to use both English and Spanish equally well, or Spanish dominant, and what language the therapy should be provided in.
We’re doing recast therapy. We’re focused on complex syntax. It’s really very similar to the work that was just published in IJSLT. And we’re interested in, if we teach a structure in English, like if then, do we see benefit for the child in Spanish? Or if we teach a child in Spanish si entonces, do we see benefit for the child on the same structure if then in English?
So, we’re interested in that transfer effect, and then we’re also interested in does it matter how proficient the child is in terms of whether we see the same degree of transfer? That work is ongoing. It’s funded by NIDCD at the National Institutes of Health in the United States. We are in year one of that, and we don’t actually have the post test data yet. It is being collected as we speak.
But, from some pilot data that we have, we do think that there’s transfer effects that when kids learn in Spanish, they see benefit in English; when kids learn in English, we see benefit in Spanish, as long as the structure that you’re teaching is similarly represented in both languages.
It’s really important from a linguicism system perspective, from an honouring all the child’s languages perspective that we’re interested in benefit in all the child’s languages. So, the ultimate question that we’re asking isn’t, can we teach in English and get benefit in Spanish? It’s, which language should we be teaching in for the child’s proficiency level to see both of the languages get better, and see the child’s overall proficiency in both of their languages grow?
HOST: 0:25:49 That’s really interesting. Hopefully, when you get that data, we can get you back on to talk about it more.
We’ve touched on this, but I think it’s worth asking as a discrete question. What does this tell us about what therapists should be doing?
AMANDA: 0:26:06 Generally, I think therapists should be looking for ways to select and treat really functional targets for a child. We shouldn’t be undershooting what the child can do. So, we should be looking for what are those reach targets that are going to really benefit the child in their academics, in their communication, in their storytelling, in their ability to generally participate?
I think it goes back to my answer to the previous question about what’s the bottom line out of this work, and that is kids can learn tier two vocabulary words. They can learn words like measure or observe. And also, kids can learn to put together these two parts sentences. He hypothesised that the car went down the ramp. Those kinds of sentences that have two parts, we tend to leave for later, and by moving them earlier in the instruction we unlock access to a lot of content that’s coming the child’s way.
I think those are the two biggest things that I would say are the big takeaways. And then of course, put it into something that’s useful for the child. You have to talk about something, you might as well talk about what the child needs to learn in the classroom that they’re missing anyway.
HOST: 0:27:22 We’re trying to raise awareness about a big pot of research money that is becoming available across the allied health professions for research. And of course, we’re always promoting the ROOT, which is the RCSLT Online Outcome Tool, which is great for collecting real-world data.
In light of this work, what further research would you like to see in this area?
AMANDA: 0:27:48 All the work that we did thus far was really in laboratory-controlled experiments. And if I was going to dream and wish, I would wish for something that was being done in a natural school setting where you had SLTs with their normal everyday pressures trying to figure out how to actually collaborate with somebody teaching science, or how to actually collaborate with somebody teaching social studies or math, in order to do this.
I think that kind of work not so much on do we see benefit for the kids? Of course, we want to see benefit for the kids, but the kind of work on what kind of supports, what kinds of pre-made curricula, what kinds of protected time is needed in order for this to roll out in a real setting is really the next big question that’s required.
I think… I have a hunch that part of what is needed is to go ahead and build some of those coaching materials or build some of the stuff that you would need to be able to present to a classroom teacher. But we haven’t actually done that work yet, and I think that that’s the kind of thing that’s really missing right now from being able to take this work to the next level.
HOST: 0:29:04 So, we know it works in a laboratory setting but what we need now are some strategies and processes and ways of working and, crucially, material to bring this into a real-world setting.
AMANDA: 0:29:22 One of the strategies I would suggest to SLTs, even though we don’t have the research yet, is to think about this as picking one kid and one grade level and one subject. So, I’m going to take Susie, maybe she’s seven and she’s working on learning how sound works in her first-grade classroom. And I’m going to pick that one unit and I’m going to work with that teacher on that one thing and we’re going to figure out how I can do sound in my speech room and the teacher can add ‘if then’ into her classroom. Then, I’m going to develop all of those materials and then I’m just going to put it down.
But then next year, when I have two more kids who are in first grade who are coming through, I’ll have that material ready and maybe next year I focus on teaching ‘because so’ in the air and the wind unit.
And so, I think one way to think about doing this as an SLT and not get overwhelmed – it’s not that you’re going to transform your entire practice in one fell swoop – is that you’re going to pick one unit at a time with one target and one child and develop that, and then the next year develop one or two more, and then the next year develop one or two more. And pretty quick, you’re going to have some flexible units that you can use.
The Next Generation Science Standards in the US are a spiral curricula, so kids learn sound in first grade and in fourth grade. And every time they learn it, it gets a little bit deeper. And so again, if you develop a first-grade lesson, you might not be that far off of having fourth grade lesson ready to go, and so you also might be able to develop these lessons that then expand across your caseload.
I think that kind of material development is really ripe. There’s a really good evidence base for developing these kinds of things. But the actual implementation part is the part that we’re not as sure about.
HOST: 0:31:22 And presumably, we need to find ways to share these materials as well once they’ve been developed. And that could be where the likes of [ASHA 0:31:28] or RCSLT come into the picture as well.
AMANDA: 0:31:32 I think there’s another opportunity, and I think this is an opportunity that goes back to what’s efficient. That partnership with the teacher to go back and forth, what can we put into the classroom and what needs to happen in the speech room? A lot of the work around how vocabulary is taught, even though it requires a higher level of intentionality than we see in a lot of general education classrooms, the kinds of practices are practices that teachers are really comfortable with. And so it may be that the SLT can pass with some coaching and with some follow-up vocabulary instruction off to someone else.
But it may be that other kinds of things, like teaching grammatical forms, do require this really specialised knowledge that an SLT has. And that may be something that is, in fact, better taught by an SLT in the speech room.
I want to, again, give a real shout-out to Susan Ebbels’ work on SHAPE CODING. I think that’s a much more efficient way of teaching once a child can read and write, once they can really think about and talk about language. And so it may be that doing SHAPE CODING in the SLT classroom, and then returning the child to general instruction where the teacher is reinforcing that content using recast therapy might be a way to speed up the work that we’re doing, and might be more efficient than recast therapy alone, and more curricularly relevant than something like SHAPE CODING alone. So, you might be able to push those things together and move things forward faster and more efficiently for a child.
There’s so many pieces of language to learn that really looking for those efficiencies and those functional benefits is really important.
HOST: 0:33:16 Last question: what are the key messages you want to leave SLTs with?
AMANDA: 0:33:22 I would really like to see SLTs having high expectations, language-wise, of kids with DLD. I’d really like to see us thinking about what are typical kids doing and what kind of things does that unlock for them ages five, or age seven or age nine, and really trying hard to think of ways that we can really bring kids along and promote that level of functional communication. I think that is really important, and that’s something that requires us to really look for the abilities and look for the ways that we can really stretch kids into the most functional things possible.
HOST: 0:34:04 A very big thank you to Amanda for her time today. If you are interested in doing some research using these techniques, Amanda has said that she would be happy to consult, and please do get in touch with RCSLT so that we can talk about how we could possibly support you in this.
As always, please see the show notes for links to all the papers discussed.
Until next time, keep well.
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