Language Treatment for Children & Adolescents

Both group and individual treatment for older children with language disorders is available in the Auburn University Speech and Hearing Clinic. The following areas of emphasis are important in designing treatment goals for older children:

Academic Organization: Older students with language disorders often have difficulty with time management, study skills and the ability to perform critical thinking activities. These are compounded if the student has attention deficit disorder or a learning disability on top of the difficulties with language. Often teachers and parents do not have the time to work with the child on academic organization, however, we can incorporate these goals into our treatment plan.

Listening/Comprehension: Students with language disorders will often have difficulty comprehending classroom language because of the interaction of their language disorder with the complexities of teacher utterances. If the student has difficulty comprehending instruction, academic information or even social interaction language, there will be communication failure that has academic as well as social consequences. Thus, we often have listening/comprehension goals incorporated into our therapy.

Oral Language Production: Some of the most frequent language production goals include maintaining a conversational topic, taking account the listener’s perspective, providing adequate detail, building vocabulary, word retrieval and putting information in a correct sequence. Some of these students also need assistance in producing more complex sentence structures and correcting errors in sentence formulation.

Written Language/Reading: We will often incorporate reading and writing goals into the language therapy. There is some research evidence that if language goals are infused into the reading and writing curriculum, improvement in all the areas is more likely.

General Guidelines in Treatment for Older Children

No matter what specific mode of treatment is used with an older child with a language disorder, four guidelines for the conduct of therapy are typically used:

Teach Strategies, Not Just Memorization: Older students tend to require strategies for academic, social and communicative success, not learning a series of rote behaviors for each difficult situation they encounter. That is, these students need to learn methods to increase their organization, comprehension, memory, test taking skills, oral communication and reading/writing abilities that will apply to a broad range of circumstances.

Design Activities Appropriate to Age: Dealing with teenagers or pre-teen students is often difficult. We never use materials or activities designed for younger children with such cases or activities that are too difficult for younger clients.

Make Activities Relevant: It is especially important when dealing with older students that they see the relevance of treatment activities. Topics such as getting a driver’s license, dating, getting a part time job, improving study skills, current events, etc., may be great activities to use in language treatment because the language training can be generalized to other important situations. Typically, materials from the student’s academic program are used in many treatment activities. Conversations about academic areas create a double payoff for the student because this is material that he/she may be tested on at school at a later time.

Parent Involvement and Progress

We encourage parents to become involved in their child’s treatment program. Our clinicians will make sure that parents understand the strategies we are teaching their child so that they can encourage their use during daily interactions. As in all of our cases, parents will be shown progress data at the end of each semester of treatment. It is also important for our clinic to coordinate a child’s treatment program with any goals being addressed by the school setting. Our clinicians routinely participate in staffings or meetings with teachers and speech-language pathologists who work with the child in his/her educational setting to insure the programs are coordinated.