Language
Intervention
Language is the
ability to understand what others say (comprehension) and the ability to
express thoughts and ideas to others (expression). At school, children need to be able to
understand what others say in order to follow directions, gain new information,
learn to read, and solve math problems.
Children also have to be able to express what they know to help the
teacher determine that they understand what is being taught at school, participate
in activities, and make friends.
When language
skills are impaired, children have difficulty telling others their thoughts and
feelings because they don’t have the words in their mental vocabulary to convey
their thoughts. Children with language difficulties
tend to have very short sentence structure, and eliminate adjectives, adverbs,
or conjunctions in their speech.
Sometimes, grammar is poor because they don’t comprehend the sentence
structure in spoken language. They tend
to be very quiet, hesitant to respond verbally and rarely initiate conversation
with others. When a child has poor
language skills, they tend to have difficulty making friends because they don’t
have a lot to talk about, and the other child loses interest when the child whose
language is impaired is unable to respond, or provides limited responses. Often, children with language difficulties at
school have difficulty categorizing information. This can lead to difficulties with memorizing
information, which is a requirement for learning at school. Oral language impairments can lead to the
child not being able to communicate their knowledge to the teacher, not being
able to understand what the teacher says, and can lead to social isolation at
school and leisure settings.
The goal of
language therapy is to provide experiences and opportunities for the child to
learn to describe, compare, contrast, and analyze objects, people and
events. Children learn to use the
appropriate grammatical structures and the social rules for interacting with
others, while improving oral vocabulary skills. They learn to categorize information so it
can be committed to memory. In therapy,
the activities we do in small groups provide the opportunity to talk and gain
exposure to new vocabulary words. We use
hands-on experiences to motivate kids to use language strategies and
incorporate these into their daily lives.
What you can do at home to improve language
skills: Language
Activities for Home