School Age & Adolescent Language Disorders
Language Disorders in Older Children
Three groups of school-age children are at risk for having a language disorder. First, children who had a language disorder as a preschooler are likely to exhibit language difficulties during early school years because of increasing linguistic demands of the curriculum. Even if they had treatment as a preschooler and their language abilities improved, use of higher-level vocabulary and complex sentence structure will often be too much for their fragile language systems. A second group of children who are at risk for language disorder during school age is the population of youngsters diagnosed with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder. In both of these groups, language is often their weakest area and increasing demands of the curriculum reveal their difficulties with linguistic material. Finally, those students who are not performing well academically and routinely earning grades below "C" should be evaluated for language disorder because most of the curriculum is learned through the medium of language. In all three of the above groups it is important to realize that language abilities are used in reading, writing, spelling and learning in academic courses. Thus, these children often have difficulties across all of these areas. It is very important that assessment and treatment relate directly to the educational setting and involve talking, reading and writing.
Assessment of Language Disorders in Older Children
In a two hour assessment of an older child, the following areas will be addressed:
* Case History and Interview: A detailed case history will be mailed to the parents for completion prior to the evaluation. We are especially interested in prior therapy, problems other than language, and especially academic performance.
* Standardized Testing: There are many standardized tests available for this population of children which focus on specific areas of language such as vocabulary, word retrieval, sentence structure, language comprehension, reading, writing and the social uses of language.
* Language Sampling: Several types of conversational samples will be taken to determine the child’s ability to carry on social conversation, give directions, provide detailed descriptions, stay on a given topic, shift conversational style for various types of listeners and perform narrative tasks.
* Hearing Screening: Every language evaluation will include a hearing screening to rule out the possibility of hearing loss.
* Oral Examination: The clinicians will make sure that the child has the appropriate oral structures and functions necessary to produce adequate speech.
After the evaluation the student clinician and supervisor will meet with the child and parents to talk about preliminary results of the assessment. As in other types of evaluations, tests and videotapes must be scored for more specific results, but parents can be given a general idea about the child’s areas of strength and concern. A detailed report will be written and mailed to the parents and educational institution. The report will include detailed recommendations for how treatment can be incorporated into the child’s educational curriculum.