If you are used to working with younger children, you may feel unsure about how to recognize a language disorder at secondary school. When I got my first job, I had little idea about later language development, or what a language disorder at this age even looks like. Please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/01/09/later-language-development-what-speech-and-language-therapists-need-to-know-about-the-secondary-school-years/ for more information.
Language disorders in older students may be harder to spot, and are likely underdiagnosed. In previous posts, I have talked about how later language development is “gradual and protracted” (Nippold, 1998, p.3), as well as increasingly individualized. Both factors make it harder to tell apart a student with a language disorder from one who is developing normally.
What’s more, whilst the speech of younger children with DLD typically contains obvious grammatical errors, many older students will have outgrown these, leaving subtler, residual deficits. They may also choose to communicate using shorter, simpler sentences, effectively masking any difficulties they have with more complex language (Nelson, 1998).
Comprehension difficulties may also be hidden by students’ apparently error-free speech, and put down to poor concentration, motivation or laziness (Nelson, 1998). But whilst the difficulties of older students with DLD may be less noticeable to the untrained eye, they can still have a very detrimental effect on these students’ lives and their ability to access the curriculum.
Since the oral language and literacy skills that many of these students developed during the primary school years are likely to be “wobbly” (Paul and Norbury, 2012), they will have a weak foundation on which to build advanced language skills. So whilst they may function adequately in everyday, informal contexts, underlying difficulties are likely to become painfully apparent when engaging in more challenging school work.
Such students are likely to have been flagged up as struggling academically. Those who “act out” to disguise their difficulties may come with a label of “behavioural difficulties”. Since many of these students will struggle more with complex written language, some will have been diagnosed with literacy difficulties. Yet all three groups may well have underlying language disorders.
So what exactly are older students with DLD struggling with and how can we identify them? To understand more about their difficulties across different areas of language, please read on.
Comprehension
Like younger children, many older students with DLD struggle to follow multistep oral instructions (Larson and McKinley, 2003, Paul and Norbury, 2012) and to understand the complex language of the classroom. Difficulties following what is going on in lessons may be one of the more obvious signs of a language disorder, and one of the reasons students are referred for assessment.
Some students will have difficulty understanding particular syntactic forms and later developing sentence types such as passives, relative clauses and negation (Larson and McKinley, 2003, Paul and Norbury, 2012). In my experience, advanced structures such as appositives, reduced relatives and complex noun phrases have also caused problems.
According to Paul and Norbury (2012), many older students with language disorders rely on immature comprehension strategies such as “probable event” and “word order” strategies as a short cut to extracting information from complex sentences. With the former, students rely on their general knowledge of “what normally happens” to work out the meaning of the sentence.
Use of the latter may lead to misinterpretation of an instruction such as “before collecting your test tubes and Bunsen burners, put away your books”, as students may mistakenly complete the first part of the instruction first. Students who perform poorly on the Following Directions subtest of the CELF-5 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals) might also be relying on such strategies.
Although typically developing children move beyond these strategies at 4 to 5 and 7 years of age, respectively, there is evidence that students with language disorders continue using them into the school age and adolescent years (Paul and Norbury, 2012).
Other students may understand individual sentences as well as their peers, but they may struggle to integrate meaning across sentences. (Paul and Norbury, 2012). Difficulties with text cohesion devices may contribute to such problems. Please see my blog post for more information: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/06/26/difficulties-with-text-cohesion-why-some-students-struggle-to-understand-connected-text/
Finally, students with language disorders are highly likely to struggle with reading comprehension, and it is not hard to see why (Paul and Norbury, 2012).
Vocabulary
Just as young children with language disorders often have limited vocabularies and struggle to learn new words, so do older students. But whilst most will have acquired a basic vocabulary by this stage, they are likely to have trouble with more “literate” language (Paul and Norbury, 2012).
This refers to the increasingly complex language required to access the secondary school curriculum, and to engage in the “literate” activities of reading complex materials, completing extended writing tasks and listening to classroom lectures. See my post for more information: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/04/25/what-is-literate-language-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/
The “literate lexicon” includes precise terms, abstract nouns, and technical, often morphologically-complex, subject-specific words, e.g. “photosynthesis”, “condensation”, “endothermic” and “omnipotent”. Students with DLD are likely to have difficulty acquiring such words (Nippold, 1998, 2018, 2023).
Other words that may cause difficulty include the later developing metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs, factive and non-factive verbs, adverbs of likelihood, words with multiple meanings, as well as advanced adverbial conjuncts (Paul and Norbury, 2012, Nippold, 2023). Poor facility with the latter will have an impact on extended writing tasks.
Overall, secondary aged students with DLD tend to overuse a limited vocabulary of concrete, non-specific, and low information words (Larson and McKinley, 2003, Paul and Norbury, 2012). What’s more, the quality of stored information may be poorer; connections between words and knowledge of semantic category is often less well developed, leading to potential word finding difficulties (Larson and McKinley, 2003, Paul and Norbury, 2012).
Speaking
At secondary school level, most students with language disorders now have a grasp of basic syntax and have mastered simple sentence structures. They also tend to make fewer errors in their spontaneous speech as they get older (Nelson, 1998, Paul and Norbury, 2012).
However, their speech may appear simple and immature compared to their peers, their sentences shorter and less complex. They may rely on simple connectives, use less subordination, elaboration and embedding in their sentences, and fewer prepositional phrases and relative clauses. Their ability to express themselves may also be more rigid (Nelson, 1998, Paul and Norbury, 2012, Nippold, 2023).
Secondary-aged students with language disorder also make some errors in their speech. Error rates were found to decline from 11% to 3% between the ages of 8 and 11 (Paul and Norbury, 2012, p. 401). Most of these errors are morphological in nature, such as difficulties with the third person singular “s” morpheme. This has been my experience, although I have the occasional lower level student who has more basic difficulties such as with tenses.
Alternatively, older students with language disorders may ramble and find it hard to get to the point. Their speech may be fragmented and disorganised (Larson and McKinley, 2003, Paul and Norbury, 2012). One of my students, M, struggles to order his thoughts, using false starts and getting caught in linguistic tangles as he tries to express himself.
Although linguistic tangles, or “mazes” are a feature of everyone’s speech, they are more prevalent in the speech of students with language disorders, and, in excess, can make it hard to understand what was said (Nippold, 2023). Conversely, students like M may actually use longer sentences than their peers, since they have not learnt the syntactic forms to express their ideas more concisely (Loban, 1976, Paul and Norbury, 2012).
Writing
Whilst the difficulties of many secondary-aged students with DLD may no longer be obvious in informal conversation, they tend to resurface when confronted with the more challenging, “literate” activities of reading and writing (Nippold, 2023).
At secondary level, students with DLD tend to produce writing samples that are brief, lacking in information and of poorer quality than their peers’. Many find it hard to generate and organise their ideas, resulting in little to no macrostructure. They may also have poorer awareness of the needs of their reader, or the requirements of the genre they are writing in (Paul and Norbury, 2012).
As with their speech, sentences tend to be shorter and simpler, but unlike their speech, their writing may contain multiple errors. Grammatical errors with tense, subject-verb agreement, possessives and other inflections are common. They may also struggle with capitalisation, punctuation and spelling, as well as typos. Overall, their writing is likely be closer to Year 2 or 3 than secondary school standard (Paul and Norbury, 2012).
When I look over my students’ work, it is not uncommon to find very short pieces of writing with little to no structure, all their ideas simply condensed into one paragraph, with many of the aforementioned errors. When I ask students to complete a writing sample as part of the assessment, they rarely plan or edit their work unprompted.
Other difficulties
As older students with DLD outgrow some of their more basic difficulties (perhaps as a result of successful intervention, or the natural course of their development), others are likely to come to the fore. Typically developing students in this age group are developing their knowledge of figurative language, and honing their metacognitive, metalinguistic and pragmatic abilities (Nippold, 1998).
But students with DLD are likely to struggle in these areas. So a student with figurative language difficulties will find it hard to infer the meanings of similes, metaphors and other linguistic devices found in his curriculum texts. He may also find it hard to engage with the slang and word play used by his peers, making it harder to be accepted by them (Paul and Norbury, 2012).
For some, pragmatic difficulties will be the main area of concern. Many students with DLD are poor listeners, and may violate the rules of conversation. The language they use may be seen as “more hostile, less assertive, less persuasive, less polite and tactful, and less clear and complete than that of peers” (Paul and Norbury, 2012, p. 402). They may find it harder to clear up misunderstandings, and to adapt their communication to different contexts and people.
Students with DLD may also have a harder time following classroom rules and understanding different types of discourse beyond conversational discourse. This includes the language of the classroom, or “expository discourse”. For more information on this, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/
Final thoughts
Identifying DLD at secondary school may require us to dig a little deeper. Whilst more obvious language difficulties are likely to have resolved by this age, older students with language disorders often have subtle, residual difficulties which significantly affect their understanding and engagement with classroom materials as language becomes increasingly complex. For some ideas about how to identify these hidden difficulties, please see my post on assessment:
Notes
Larson, V.L. and McKinley, N.L. (2003) Communication solutions for older students. Thinking Pub.
Loban, W. (1976) Language Development: Kindergarten through Grade Twelve. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Nelson, N. W. (1998) Childhood Language Disorders in Context: Infancy Through Adolescence. 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Nippold, M.A. (1998) Later language development: The school-age and adolescent years. 2nd ed. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Nippold, M.A. (2023). Grammar guide for speech-language pathologists: Steps to analyzing complex syntax. San Diego: Plural Publishing.
Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.
