Thoughts of a secondary school SLT

Tag: secondary school

  • Language assessment at secondary school: challenges and solutions

    Assessment can be challenging at any age, but especially so at secondary school level and beyond. Compared to the early years, language growth during older childhood and adolescence is “gradual and protracted” (Nippold, 1998, p.3). It also becomes increasingly individualistic, as students choose their GCSE subjects, take up hobbies and learn new vocabulary related to their interests. This makes it harder to say what “normal” language development looks like, and to identify when there is a problem.

    Despite a growing body of research, there are still fewer assessments for this age group than there are for younger children. Marylin Nippold (1998), a leading expert in adolescent language development has argued extensively that many standardized language assessments designed for teenagers actually assess more basic, foundational skills, and fail to measure more advanced, age-appropriate skills.

    For example, these tests may assess basic sentence structures and core vocabulary, when these skills are typically mastered several years before. On the other hand, important aspects of adolescent language development such as figurative language, understanding and production of a range of advanced syntactic structures, as well as relevant discourse types, such as expository discourse, may not be covered.

    This is likely to lead to the identification of only the most severe and obvious language disorders, whilst more subtle difficulties are missed. In other words, it is quite possible for a student with a language disorder to attain an average score on a formal language assessment.

    You are likely to come across students with a wide range of difficulties at secondary school. Some will continue to display obvious oral language difficulties. But many will have “outgrown” these, only for difficulties with more complex written language or pragmatics to come to the fore. Though subtle, such difficulties still have a considerable impact on classroom learning and social functioning. Yet, they are likely to be missed if standardised assessments are relied on exclusively.

    Done well, assessment at secondary level also requires more from us, as Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs), in terms of our linguistic knowledge. Nippold (2023) points out that many of us are less familiar with the details of later language development, or what to expect at different ages. Yet, if we are to say with confidence which students have language disorders and which do not, then we will need a robust understanding of advanced syntax, including later-developing syntactic structures, such as passives, adverbial clauses and clefts.

    Finding solutions

    There is far too much to say about assessment to fit into one blog post. For more comprehensive accounts, please see Nelson (1998), Larson and McKinley (2003) or Paul and Norbury (2012). The latter very helpfully split language development into four distinct developmental stages: emerging language, developing language, language for learning and advanced language.

    Students with language disorders may well be at stages typically associated with younger children. In my experience, many of my Year 7 and 8 students have been at the “Language for Learning” level typically associated with the older years of primary school. Some of my older ones, and those with more subtle difficulties have been at the “Advanced Language” stage. Meanwhile, a few have had “Developing Language”, normally associated with children aged 2 to 5.

    The  authors provide detailed advice for assessing students at each stage across a whole range of areas, from the “literate” lexicon and figurative language, to comprehension and production of syntax, different types of discourse, pragmatics and the “metas”. Given this wealth of available  information, I just wanted to share a few ideas that I’ve found most useful in my everyday practice. I also try to keep in mind Larson and McKinley’s (2003, p.179) philosophy that assessment should be “descriptive/ explanatory, authentic, dynamic, student-centred, and multidimensional”.

    Despite the criticisms of standardised assessments already mentioned, they can still yield some useful information, and provide a helpful starting point. Importantly, they are often required for determining eligibility for funding and support. Comprehensive test batteries such as the CELF-5 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals), also provide an efficient way of uncovering any glaring difficulties across a wide range of areas. Such difficulties can then be investigated further, and supplemented by informal assessment tasks.

    Student-focused assessment

    You are likely to be familiar with a number of informal assessment measures already used routinely with other client groups, such as client, parent and teacher interviews, as well as classroom observations. One tool I have found particularly useful is a self-assessment checklist sourced from Paul and Norbury (2012, p.541), which I use as the basis for a student interview.

    This assessment lists a number of skills relevant for accessing the secondary school curriculum in a table. It includes items such as “understanding teachers’ lectures”, “finding main ideas in textbooks”, “participating in class discussions”, “taking notes” and “finding time to finish my work”. Students are asked to rate themselves on these skills, ticking either, “I’m good”, “I’m ok”, “I get by”, “I need some help” or “Aah! Help! Help!” (Paul and Norbury, 2012, p.541).

    I have found this to be an invaluable tool for gaining an insight into my students’ understanding of their own difficulties. The checklist can then be compared with their teachers’ views, as well as any formal test scores. Any areas of difficulty can be explored further by getting students to give examples and tell stories of times when they struggled with those specific behaviours. This is often incredibly revealing.

    I have found that beginning the assessment with this checklist also helps to motivate my students, since its relevance to their daily lives is immediately clear. In terms of motivation, Scott and Balthazar (2013) also recommend explaining to your students what you are going to assess, as well as why and how, rather than simply administering the test without explanation.

    You might be surprised at what a difference this student-focused approach can make. I began doing this in earnest a few years ago. Rather than giving a generic explanation, I would refer back to their checklist, saying things like, “You told me that you need a lot of help with understanding your teacher’s lectures. Well, this test looks at your listening skills. It will help me to understand why you are finding your teacher’s lectures hard.”

    There was a noticeable difference in my students’ motivation when I did this: both during the assessment and beyond. I think they could see how the assessment was relevant to the very real difficulties they were experiencing, and why it was important they try their best.

    Dynamic Assessment

    Something else you are likely to be aware of but is still worth mentioning is dynamic assessment. Less a type of test than a philosophy, it is based on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development: the gap between what a learner can accomplish on her own and what she can do with support.

    So whilst traditional assessments do not allow examiners to provide any support (as this would invalidate the standardised scores), dynamic assessment is an interactive process between learner and instructor, focusing on the learning process, rather than the product. The idea is to support learners to complete a given task by teaching strategies, providing modelling and scaffolding that enable them to achieve more than they could alone. A test-teach-retest structure may be used, or it can be less formal than this.

    Dynamic assessment allows us a deeper insight into our students’ learning processes than a traditional test does. It helps us to understand how our students may respond to intervention and the types of strategies that are likely to help them.

    It is very possible to use the approach alongside a formal assessment to gather qualitative information once standardised scores have been computed. When I worked for the NHS, we regularly used it alongside the CELF-5 to work out which strategies most helped particular students. These would then be compiled into lists to be passed onto the teaching staff supporting those students.

    It can also be useful for determining the exact nature of a student’s difficulties when a task relies on a wide range of skills. A poor score on the Understanding Spoken Paragraphs subtest of the CELF-5, for example, may indicate a difficulty with focusing, auditory memory, vocabulary, understanding of sentence structures or text cohesion devices, or higher level skills such as prediction and inferencing.

    Simply computing the student’s scores according to the test manual will give me limited insight into their unique difficulties. But if we read the paragraphs again together, if I probe difficult vocabulary, ask them to paraphrase complex sentences, and rephrase tricky sentences myself as well as asking them what they found difficult about it, then I will get a much better idea.

    Curriculum-Based Language Assessment (CBLA)

    Standardised assessments have also been critiqued for being “decontextualized” and disconnected from real-life language demands. They give us little information about how students process increasingly complex academic language, or how to plan intervention (Nippold, 2023).

    One potential solution to these problems is CBLA. Pioneered by Nikola Wolf Nelson in the 1980s and 90s, generic curriculum-based assessment (CBA) approaches are adapted to focus more specifically on language. So whilst CBA tasks are often constructed by teachers to test how well a student is learning the course content and whether there are any problems, CBLA assesses whether they have the language skills to do so.

    More specifically, CBLA aims to identify the language demands of the school curriculum by using content and materials drawn directly from it. At the same time, it seeks to understand how well a student is using their linguistic knowledge, skills and strategies to access that content (Nelson, 1998). Any mismatch can be used for determining a student’s intervention needs.

    CBLA may involve collecting several types of data, including artifact analysis, classroom observations and participant observations (Nelson, 1998). The former has sometimes been referred to as “portfolio analysis”, since it involves gathering together a “portfolio” of the student’s work.

    This might include lecture notes, classwork, completed projects and written assignments. Students’ work could be analysed for use of vocabulary, sentence structures and organisation, and compared to that of students who are not struggling. Written instructions could also be analysed for complex vocabulary and sentence structures. This “portfolio” of pieces can even be kept as a way of measuring progress later on.

    A lesser known version of a classroom observation is called a “participant observation”. Both involve observing the student. But whilst a classroom observation involves watching from afar, in participant observation, the assessor sits beside the student as they attempt a curriculum task. They act as “co-conspirator” (Nelson, 1998, p402) and attempt to work out the problem with the student.

    A kind of dynamic assessment, participant observation allows the instructor to see at close hand how the student attempts the task. What are the linguistic demands? Are there difficulties with any words or sentences? Is the student using any strategies? What other obstacles come up? Such an activity could easily take place in an isolated clinic room if embarrassment is a factor. You could even ask their teacher for the classwork they would miss by coming to your session, and complete it together.

    Language sampling

    Another difficulty involved in identifying expressive language disorders at secondary school level is that they tend to be more hidden. Even struggling students tend to make fewer overt grammatical errors as they get older (Nelson, 1998). Instead, they are likely to produce utterances that are shorter and simpler for their age, they may struggle with organising their thoughts and generating ideas (Nippold, 1998, Paul & Norbury, 2012).

    For this reason, many experts advocate carrying out language sampling. Marylin Nippold, for example, recommends taking both a conversational and an expository sample (Nippold, 2023), such as explaining a favourite game. This is because sentence length and complexity vary a lot depending on the context and discourse type (Nippold et al, 2005).

    These samples can then be transcribed, analysed and compared to norms. Sentence length and complexity can be assessed with measures such as the mean length of communication unit (MLCU) and clausal density (CD), which is the average number of clauses per sentence. The different types of sentences used could be noted, and attention paid to any lower frequency, later developing structures. Lexical development and diversity could be measured by looking at the number of different words (NDW). Finally, the proportion of maze words can give an idea of the level of dysfluency (Nippold, 2023, p.3).

    Marilyn Nippold (2023) acknowledges that language sampling may feel daunting to many SLTs who worry about the time it will take, and whether they have the linguistic knowledge to confidently analyse such samples. She recommends a computer program called SALT (Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts) for the purpose, since it automatically analyses speech samples once transcribed.

    I have also personally found that even taking a short written sample can be quite revealing of a student’s difficulties: their ability to plan, generate ideas and organise them into paragraphs, as well as the types of sentence structures and vocabulary they are using.

    Assessing comprehension

    Assessing comprehension is arguably even more challenging than assessing expressive language, since it is even more “hidden”. Whilst some standardised assessments do include tests of receptive syntax, these tend to be quite basic. They are unlikely to cover a wide range of later developing structures.

    One very useful way of assessing understanding of different types of sentence structures is with a grammaticality judgment task. This simple task involves giving students a list of sentences, and asking them whether they make grammatical sense or not. One of the benefits of assessing older students is that most will have developed the “meta-skills” to engage with a task like this.

    Paul and Norbury (2012) suggested showing students pictures of an “OK lady” and a “silly lady”, and proceeding to ask them to tell if the sentence was “OK” or “silly” by pointing to the corresponding picture. With this age group, I have found that simply asking students to put a tick by the sentences that make sense and a cross by the ones that don’t suffices.

    An alternative to this is to read/ show students a sentence, and then ask them a direct question about it. An example that tests understanding of relative clauses might be: “The journalist who interviewed the teacher ate his lunch. Who ate his lunch – the journalist or the teacher?”

    A student who answers “the teacher” may be relying on an immature comprehension strategy of assigning the verb to the nearest noun (“the teacher ate his lunch…”), and does not appear to have developed the ability to extract meaning from this syntactic structure alone. Grammaticality judgment tasks can be used to assess any number of sentence types or structures that you suspect may be a problem, such as passive sentences, nominal clauses or clefts.

    Another simple but very effective way of finding out how much a student is understanding of a text is to ask them to paraphrase, one sentence at a time. We could also ask to hear their thoughts using a “think aloud” approach. After the instructor has modelled their own thought processes as they attempt to understand a text, the student is encouraged to do so. This way, we are able to see exactly where any breakdowns in comprehension occur, and whether the student is employing any particular strategies.

    Other assessments

    One final point to add is that in recent years, a few really helpful assessments aimed at this age group have been published. For example, Language for Behaviour and Emotions (LFBE) is a comprehensive toolkit created by Anna Branagan, Melanie Cross and Stephen Parsons in 2020, using the principles of dynamic assessment to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses.

    Helpfully, it includes assessment of some later-developing, age-appropriate skills such as figurative language and higher order thinking skills which are not typically covered by standardised assessments, as we have seen. For example, knowledge of idioms, as well as vocabulary related to behaviour and emotions are tested. Higher order thinking skills including prediction, inference and ability to retell a story are also targeted in their scenario-based assessment and program.

    Final thoughts

    With all these things to keep in mind, assessment of secondary school students may feel daunting. But many experts now agree that assessment should be thought of as an ongoing process, rather than as something that must be “complete” before intervention can begin (Nelson, 1998, Larson and McKinley, 2003, Paul and Norbury, 2012, Scott and Balthazar, 2013). Thought of this way, we only need to gather enough information about a student’s difficulties to make a start and decide on priorities.

    This is what I now choose to do, although I have experienced both extremes in the past. Working at my first school with around 100 students on my caseload, I carried out brief “screenings”, using just three or four subtests from the CELF-4 as the basis for identifying their difficulties and setting targets. To be honest, this did not feel like enough information to go on.

    On the other hand, when I worked for the NHS, assessment was much more comprehensive, sometimes taking as long as three to four sessions. However, the goal was different: many of these students would not be seen for direct therapy, or they might only receive a few sessions with me. Instead, the aim was to gather enough information to pass on to the staff supporting them.

    At my current school, where I am fortunate enough to see students 1:1 or in small groups on an ongoing basis, my assessments usually take place over a couple of sessions. I begin by interviewing them about their difficulties and getting them to tell me their “stories”. I tend to carry out some core subtests from the CELF-5, and perhaps others based on the reasons they were referred. Using dynamic assessment alongside usually gives me a solid place to start. Alternatively, I might use the scenario-based assessment from the LFBE toolkit.

    As we continue working together and I find I need more information, I might speak to their teachers to see how things are going in class, carry out a grammaticality judgment task to assess their understanding of certain sentence structures, or use the “Crazy Phrases” test from the LBFE toolkit to assess their knowledge of idioms and non-literal language.

    Once more obvious oral language difficulties have been resolved, I might take a sample of written language, or ask to see some of their classwork or assignments, perhaps even attempting some tasks together in a participant observation. My practice is by no means perfect. But I hope that some of these ideas resonate, and that this snapshot into my daily practice gives a useful insight into assessment at secondary level.

    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.

    Nippold, Marilyn A., Linda J. Hesketh, Jill K. Duthie, and Tracy C. Mansfield. “Conversational Versus Expository Discourse: A Study of Syntactic Development in Children, Adolescents, and Adults.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 48, no. 5 (2005): 1048–1064. doi.org.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

    Scott, Cheryl M., and Catherine H. Balthazar. 2013. “The Role of Complex Sentence Knowledge in Children with Reading and Writing Difficulties.” Perspectives on Language and Literacy 39 (3): 18–30. [1, 2]

  • Difficulties with text cohesion: Why some students struggle to understand connected text

    Some time ago I was asked to assess a new student who was having trouble at school. He misbehaved in all his lessons and was rude to his teachers, meaning that he spent most of his time in detention. Fortunately, staff members wondered if he might have some undiagnosed difficulties that were causing him to act in this way, so he was referred for a Speech and Language Therapy (SALT) assessment with me.

    Contrary to the reports I had heard, he was kind and polite one to one, even wishing me a good day at the end of the assessment. But the interview was illuminating. When we talked about how school was going, he told me that he understood “nothing” in his lessons, so there was “no point” in behaving.

    I suspected a language disorder, so used the CELF-5 (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals) standardized assessment to find out more. As expected, he had mild difficulties across a range of areas such as vocabulary and ability to follow instructions. But most concerning was his performance on the Understanding Spoken Paragraphs subtest, when he answered only one question correctly.

    The task involves the assessor reading several short paragraphs aloud before asking students questions about them. I like to use it because I think it reflects quite well how much a child may understand in class, but the skills it assesses are quite broad. A low score might indicate difficulties in a number of areas such as with paying attention, auditory memory, vocabulary knowledge, understanding of sentence structures as well as ability to predict and infer.

    As I tried to delve deeper, we read the paragraphs again and I asked my student to paraphrase some of the sentences. To my surprise, his sentence level understanding was not bad. Yet he still struggled to say what the paragraph was about, and to answer the text-level questions. What he appeared to be struggling with was understanding how the sentences hung together as a whole, to form a “text”.

    As Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs), we are used to supporting our students with some aspects of text level discourse. It is common to work on inference, understanding of different levels of questioning, as well as teaching a range of general reading comprehension strategies such as summarizing, finding the main idea, and perhaps visualizing.

    One area that is not so well researched, perhaps even neglected in our field despite being closely linked with comprehension abilities is that of text cohesion. Simply put, this is the “glue” that connects sentences together and distinguishes a unified text from a series of unrelated sentences.

    The concept was first introduced and formalized in the seminal work of Halliday and Hasan (1976). According to the authors, for a passage of information to be regarded as a text, certain features must be present. We are talking not just about the organizational macrostructures that characterize different genres (although these do add to the “texture”), but the “cohesive ties” that connect individual sentences to each other grammatically or semantically (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).

    Simply put, cohesion occurs when one element of a passage can only be understood in reference to another. In the text, “A man in a blue anorak wandered over Tower Bridge. He stopped to admire the view”, the word “he” can only be understood by referring back to “a man in a blue anorak” in the previous sentence. Cohesion may go in either direction: when you have to refer backwards, as in the previous example, it is called anaphora. This is by far the most common type of cohesive tie. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).

    It is also possible to refer forwards, e.g. “When he got home, John went straight to bed” and “I couldn’t believe she did it: Sarah won the marathon”. In both examples, pronouns are used early on to refer forward to information that comes later. So in the second example, “it” refers forward to “the winning of the marathon”. This is called cataphora. Interestingly, this is the primary function of a colon: as a kind of visual arrow pointing forwards (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).

    Halliday and Hasan (1976) classified cohesive devices into 5 categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. According to them, the first three are grammatical in nature, whilst the last is semantic, with conjunction being a combination of the two. However, they were quick to note that there is no sharp dividing line between categories and some examples may be on the borderline (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Other researchers have organized them in different ways.

    Reference involves replacing a specific entity in the text with another, as in the man in the blue anorak example. Common reference items include the personal pronouns, “he”, “she”, “they”, “it”, etc, as well as the demonstratives “this” and “that”. The definite article “the” also plays a role, so named because it denotes something definite, or specific.

    In the text, “A stray cat appeared on my doorstep this morning. The cat looked hungry, so I gave it some food”, we understand that the cat being mentioned in the second sentence is the same as in the first, since “the” is frequently used to link back to a noun that has already been introduced. Reference mainly involves replacing nouns, though this could be people, animals, places (e.g. there) or objects. In extended reference, whole paragraphs may even be replaced, e.g. “considering all this”.

    In substitution, a word or phrase is also replaced with a filler word, but something is added that contrasts with the original idea (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). For example, in the text, “My pen has run out of ink. I need to buy a new one”, “one” substitutes for “pen”. But we are not talking about the exact same pen; we want a new pen. Substitution may be nominal, verbal, or even clausal. Common examples include “one”, “any”, “same”, “do  so”, “not”, etc, “Is James coming to the party? I hope so”.

    Ellipsis is similar to substitution, but redundant information is removed instead of being replaced. Halliday and Hasan (1976) called it “substitution by zero”.  So in the text, “There were ten laptops available in the shop yesterday. Now there are only three”, we can only understand what “three” is referring to by looking back to “laptops” in the previous sentence.

    Conjunctions and adverbial conjuncts can also be used as cohesive devices, since they link different propositions together across sentences and make the relationships between them explicit. These relationships may be additive, adversative, causal, temporal, explanatory, or other, e.g. “furthermore”, “despite”, “anyway”, etc.

    Finally, sentences may be linked together using vocabulary in lexical cohesion, which can be further subdivided into reiteration and collocation. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), nominal reiteration is very similar to pronominal reference, grammatically speaking, since the original noun is replaced by something else.

    However, instead of a personal pronoun being used, this “something else” may take the form of a synonym, superordinate, subordinate or general noun (or simply the same word repeated). For example, in the text: “The neighbour’s tiny puppy was left outside in the freezing rain all night. The poor thing was shivering uncontrollably when we found it”, “the poor thing” refers back to the puppy.

    As well as acting as a cohesive device it allows writers to share more information or a personal feeling about their subject, whilst avoiding repetition. It is a tool relied on heavily by journalists in newspaper articles. This is also one of the examples that falls on the borderline between categories according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), having both a syntactic and semantic element.

    With collocation, the linkages between sentences are of a more general nature. Here, we are not focusing on a particular referent. Instead, the presence of related words found throughout the passage tie it together. The more likely the words are to be encountered in the same context, the more cohesive the passage will be. So the words “surgeon”, “craniotomy”, “procedure” and “incision” will give a certain type of “texture”.

    Some types of anaphor are easier to understand than others. A simple cohesive tie connects one sentence with the preceding, and is probably the easiest to understand. More remote ties that span several sentences will be more difficult because they tax working memory capacity (Irwin, 1986). Equally, nominal reference is thought to be easier than verbal reference to understand, whilst replacement of whole clauses and paragraphs of information is thought to be the hardest.

    In her work on later language development, Marilyn Nippold (1998) observed how understanding and use of a range of cohesive devices continues to develop throughout the school-age and adolescent years. But according to Nelson (1998), this is something that many with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) struggle with. Indeed, young children with DLD are known for having difficulty with pronominal reference, and inconsistency with this is something I have noticed even at secondary school age.

    However, an even greater concern has been some of my students’ difficulties with lexical reiteration. A student with these types of difficulties might easily imagine several different characters in a text where only one is being referred to by different nouns. If a text contains the sentences, “The doctor walked into the emergency room. The surgeon grabbed the scalpel. The specialist began to work”, a struggling student might imagine three different characters. Such a difficulty will clearly have a profound impact on text level comprehension.

    To sum up, despite production and comprehension of text cohesion devices being a common area of difficulty for students with DLD, there is currently little information about this in our field compared to others such as education and linguistics. Although the student I mentioned earlier also had broader inferencing difficulties, poor understanding of text cohesion devices, especially lexical reiteration, was a notable problem for him. In future posts I hope to share some practical ways to help students navigate these difficulties.

    Notes

    Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. London: Longman, 1976.

    Irwin, Judith Westphal. Understanding and Teaching Cohesion Comprehension. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1986

    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.

  • What makes sentences complicated?

    Preadolescents and adolescents with language disorders struggle to understand the types of sentences they are exposed to at secondary school. Academic language, or informational language is characterized by long, complex sentences and technical vocabulary, used to express higher level ideas (for more information about this type of language, see my blog post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/).

    Many students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have restricted vocabularies which impede their understanding of this type of language. They are also likely to have weaker, or nonexistent knowledge of certain grammatical structures that cause no problems for their peers, such as passives and object relative clauses (Scott, 2009, Montgomery et al, 2021).

    However, not even their typically developing peers can be expected to understand all of the sentences they come across at this age, since not all adults achieve complete mastery of certain sentence structures. For example, in one study, Nippold et al (2020) found that only 25% of the supposedly typical young adults in their sample were able to produce past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences perfectly, and only 50% were able to understand them all the time.

    Aspects other than linguistic knowledge also affect our understanding of such sentences. For example, Leonard et al (2007) found that 62% of the variance in children’s composite language scores was down to nonlinguistic factors, such as Verbal Working Memory (VWM) and processing speed.

    According to Balthazar and Scott (2023, p.567), “syntactic complexity carries a processing cost for all speakers across all modalities”. You might imagine that written language would be less affected by factors such as VWM than oral language which must be interpreted in the moment. However, this has not been found to be the case, probably because the reader still has to use their inner voice to “re-auditorise” the sentence and move parts around.

    Researchers such as Scott, Balthazar and Nippold have spoken in detail about exactly what makes sentences more complex and harder to process. Scott (2009) highlights factors such as the number propositions and embeddings, the sentence order as well as the distance between the main elements. In a later article, Balthazar and Scott (2023, p. 565) defined sentence complexity as “any structure that adds to, interrupts, or changes the subject–verb–object (SVO) order within a clause or adds clauses within a sentence and can be reasonably predicted to increase the processing “load” of the sentence”.

    Firstly, then, a long sentence made up of multiple clauses is harder to process than a simple sentence made up of just one main clause. By definition, a sentence becomes “compound” or “complex” when coordinated or subordinate clauses are added. Syntactic complexity is not just about the length of the sentence, but also the “clausal density” or “subordination index”; in other words, the average number of clauses per sentence.

    Similarly, it is not just about the number of clauses, but how they are arranged. Academic text tends to feature “different levels of subordination” to express a hierarchy of ideas. Conjunctions such as “unless”, “despite” and “otherwise” are used to give weight to certain ideas over others and are capable of expressing subtle relationships between different parts of a sentence.

    This contrasts with oral, conversational language where conjoined clauses of equal value connected with simple conjunctions such as “and”, “but” and “so” are more common (see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/how-are-oral-and-written-language-different/  for more about the differences between oral and written language).

    A particularly complex form of subordination is called “embedding”, where one clause is placed within another, and acts as a noun or adjective in that sentence. Central embedding is considered particularly difficult to understand, and “nesting”, where one clause is placed within another within another even more so. When this exceeds three levels, the sentence quickly becomes unintelligible, e.g. “the dog the cat the mouse bit chased barked”.

    Syntactic complexity can also be increased through elaboration of noun and verb phrases. In one study, Leonard et al (2013) found that when adjectives were added to different nouns, e.g. “the happy yellow dog washes the little pig”, children with language disorders quickly became confused about who was the agent and who was the patient (Leonard et al, 2013, p. 12).

    Cheryl Scott (2009, p. 186) also compares the simple sentence “the amendment was a disaster” with the more complex sentence, “the thoroughly rewritten and meaningless amendment that was inserted by the aide was a disaster.”  Whilst both sentences contain the same subject, amendment, the second has been expanded through the use of modifiers which come before the noun, “pre-modifying” it, as well as a relative clause which comes afterwards, “post-modifying” it.

    Sentences such as this, where a large amount of information precedes the main verb, can also be referred to as “left-branching”. According to Marilyn Nippold (2023, p.44), the entire noun phrase must be held in working memory until the reader/ listener reaches the main action, “was a disaster” and finds out what the sentence is about, increasing processing demands. Other structures which may feature in left branching sentences include adverbial clauses, prepositional phrases and appositives.

    English is also a language with a strict subject-verb-object (SVO) order, and anything which disrupts this is thought to make sentences harder to understand. As mentioned, pre- and post-modification of the noun phrase can do this by creating gaps (long distance dependencies) between elements which are typically close together. However, any sentence which is not in canonical (typical) order, such as passives and clefts (Scott and Balthazar, 2013) may cause difficulties, since certain elements need to be moved around in the mind.

    One further point is that students with DLD may also be overly reliant on immature comprehension strategies such as order-of-mention and context cues. Referring back to the last example sentence, a student with a language disorder may mistakenly connect the predicate “was a disaster” with the immediately preceding noun, “aide”, leading them to the conclusion that the aide was the disaster rather than the amendment. This mistake of believing the nearest noun to be the subject of the sentence is not uncommon (Scott, 2009, Scott and Balthazar, 2013).

    Finally, studies have shown that sentence complexity impacts working memory performance differently across different languages. In English, syntactic complexity had the greater impact, whilst in Hungarian, it was the increased morphological complexity of words (Kail and Csépe, 2006). This is likely due to the distinguishing features of the different languages.

    To sum up, some sentences are so complex that they challenge the processing limits of any listener or reader. As students progress through secondary school and beyond, they are increasingly exposed to this type of academic language. Knowing exactly what can make sentences hard to understand, for all of us, not just those with language disorders will make it easier for us to support our students.

    Notes

    Balthazar, Catherine H., and Cheryl M. Scott. “Sentences Are Key.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 33, no. 2 (2023): 564–579.

    Kail, Michèle, Valéria Csépe, F. L. C. C. 2006. “Effects of Sentence Length and Complexity on Working Memory Performance in Hungarian Children with Specific Language Impairment: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison.” [International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders] 41, no. 6: 713-731.

    Leonard, Laurence B., Patricia Deevy, James W. Miller, Chrystal Rameela, Robert Schwartz, and J. Bruce Tomblin. “Speed of Processing, Working Memory, and Language Impairment in Children.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50, no. 2 (April 2007): 408–428. 

    Leonard, Laurence B., Patricia Deevy, Marc E. Fey, and Shelley L. Bredin-Oja. “Sentence Comprehension in Specific Language Impairment: A Task Designed to Distinguish between Cognitive Capacity and Syntactic Complexity.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 56, no. 3 (June 2013): 937–949.

    Montgomery, James W., Ronald B. Gillam, and Julia L. Evans. “A New Memory Perspective on the Sentence Comprehension Deficits of School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Implications for Theory, Assessment, and Intervention.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 52, no. 2 (April 2021): 449–466.

    Nippold, Marilyn A., Abigail Nehls-Lowe, and Daemion Lee. “Development of Past Tense Counterfactual Sentences: Examining Production and Comprehension in Adolescents and Adults.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 63, no. 10 (October 2020): 3474–3484.

    Nippold, M.A. (2023). Grammar guide for speech-language pathologists: Steps to analyzing complex syntax. San Diego: Plural Publishing.

    Scott, Cheryl M. “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40, no. 2 (2009): 184-191.

     Scott, Cheryl M., and Catherine H. Balthazar. “The Grammar of Information: Challenges for Older Students With Language Impairments.” Topics in Language Disorders 30, no. 4 (2010): 288–307.

    Scott, Cheryl M., and Catherine Balthazar. “The Role of Complex Sentence Knowledge in Children with Reading and Writing Difficulties.” Perspectives on Language and Literacy 39, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 18–3

  • Is poor working memory the cause of comprehension difficulties in older students with language disorders?

    Students with language disorders have difficulties that extend beyond language. There is an extensive research literature linking weaknesses in broader cognitive skills such as attention, processing speed, executive functioning, short term and working memory with language disorders (Leonard et al, 2007, 2013, Henry and Botting, 2017).

    Short term and working memory have received particular attention. Whilst some studies have identified weaknesses in the nonverbal component, suggestive of domain-general impairments in this population, deficits in verbal short term memory (VSTM) and verbal working memory (VWM) have been more consistently reported, and found to be 2-3 times larger (Vugs et al, 2013). What’s more, poor performance on nonword repetition tasks, widely used to test VSTM, is even considered a clinical marker for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (Bishop et al, 2016).

    VSTM and VWM are often used interchangeably, but VSTM might be more accurately considered a component of VWM. VSTM refers to the ability to hold information just heard in mind for a short period of time before it “decays” and has historically been thought of as a “storage space” with limited capacity. Indeed, most people are only able to keep three or four chunks of information in their heads at once (Montgomery et al, 2021).

    Meanwhile, VWM involves manipulation as well as storage of information, and is increasingly being thought of more as a “mental workspace”. Others have spoken of VWM in terms of a set of cognitive processes that include sustained attention, inhibition of irrelevant information, and the ability to switch simultaneously between maintenance of stored information and processing new information (Marton et al, 2007, Leonard et al, 2013).

    Various theories of working memory have been proposed in the past, one of the most influential being Baddeley and Hitch’s multicomponent model, made up of two passive storage systems: the “phonological loop” (or VSTM) and “visuo-spatial sketchpad”, as well as a “central executive” and “episodic buffer” (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974, Baddeley, 2000).

    According to this, the phonological loop stores speech-based and verbal information (and could be considered what we refer to as VSTM). Whilst information typically fades away after a couple of seconds, it is possible to keep it in an active state for longer through silent repetition (such as when you repeat a phone number or code to yourself). The visuospatial sketchpad stores visual information in a similar fashion, whilst the central executive acts as the control centre, dividing and switching attention between different tasks. Meanwhile, the episodic buffer binds the information together, and acts as an interface between short and long-term memory.

    VSTM and VWM are considered essential to learning in the classroom, from following lengthy instructions and understanding what’s going on in lessons, to keeping the steps of a task in mind and recalling the details of a story. Working memory has been found to be a more powerful predictor of academic achievement even than IQ (Alloway and Alloway, 2010). Students with poor VWM may appear inattentive, forgetful or careless, when really they are struggling to retain what was said.

    VWM is also considered to be intrinsically linked to comprehension of complex sentences, since certain elements have to be kept in mind, and even moved around whilst the next part is processed. Long, complex sentences require more processing time than simple sentences, and are not as easily understood (e.g. Marton et al, 2007), suggesting that increased VWM capacity is required to understand such sentences. Montgomery et al (2009) argued that comprehension of both simple and complex grammar is a mentally demanding task for school age children with and without language disorders that requires significant working memory resources.

    Other authors such as Balthazar and Scott (2023) have spoken at length about the various elements that can increase the processing “load” of a sentence. This includes the number of clauses, long distance dependencies (gaps), as well as (in English) anything that disrupts the subject-verb-object order such as passive constructions and post-modification of the noun phrase (see my post for more information).

    Take the following example sentence given by Marilyn Nippold (2010) from a science text book: “organisms that eat living corals, such as the crown-of-thorns sea star, can greatly damage reefs”. In this sentence, post-modification of the noun “organisms” with the phrase “that eat living corals, such as the crown-of-thorns sea star” results in an extended gap between the main subject and verb. This whole phrase must then be stored in VSTM (or the phonological loop according to the Baddeley model) until the reader reaches the main action, “can greatly damage” and understands what the sentence is about.

    For a student with a language disorder and limited VWM, this is likely to be challenging. Other studies have shown that adolescents with DLD do not understand complex sentences as well as their typically developing peers, despite similar performance for simple sentences (Montgomery et al, 2009). Some researchers have even gone so far as to argue that VWM difficulties, rather than poor language knowledge are the primary cause of receptive language difficulties in older students (Larson and McKinley, 2003).

    However, recent research suggests that the reality may be more complex. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that complex sentences are processed in different ways by those with and without language disorders, with working memory playing an unequal role in each. In a large scale study of 117 children with DLD and 117 typically developing peers aged 7-11, Montgomery et al (2021) investigated how a range of measures were connected with comprehension of simple and more complex sentences.

    They found that fluid reasoning and language knowledge residing in long-term memory (LTM) indirectly influenced comprehension of complex, non-canonical sentences in typically developing students. For those with DLD, on the other hand, controlled attention (an important facet of working memory), was more important (Montgomery et al, 2021).

    On the back of this research, they came up with a new memory model, the GEM (Gillam-Evans-Montgomery) model, where VWM serves as a conduit for fluid reasoning, controlled attention and long-term language knowledge. They argued that listeners face the challenge of a rapid incoming stream of speech in different ways (Montgomery et al, 2021).

    According to them, repeated experience with language allows most people to build up linguistic representations in long-term memory (LTM). Typically developing listeners are able to activate these patterns, some of which may take the form of multiword templates, to anticipate the types of words that are likely to come next, as well as to “chunk” the speech stream into noun phrases, verb phrases and even whole clauses. This information is then stored as chunks, reducing the demands on working memory capacity, before being reintegrated into a coherent whole (Montgomery et al, 2021).

    They hypothesized that students with DLD may have weaker, or non-existent representations of certain grammatical structures. This means that they will be unable to segment the speech stream in the same way as their peers, resulting in word by word processing which places enormous pressure on an already overstretched VWM. Accordingly, sentence processing is much more effortful for those with language disorders (Montgomery et al, 2021).

    This theory seems to be backed up by a review of the literature. Karavasilis et al (2023) found inconclusive evidence of a link between VSTM/ VWM and complex sentence comprehension in typically developing individuals. On the other hand, there was a consistent link between working memory and sentence comprehension in those with DLD. The authors concluded that, at least for children with DLD, a processing component is involved in comprehension of complex sentences.

    According to Montgomery et al (2021), the solution is not to attempt to improve students’ VWMs (which, in any case, has had limited success), but rather, to support their language representations in long-term memory.

    Notes

    Alloway, Tracy Packiam, and Ross G. Alloway. “Investigating the Predictive Roles of Working Memory and IQ in Academic Attainment.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 106, no. 1 (May 2010): 20–29.

    Baddeley, Alan D., and Graham J. Hitch. 1974. “Working Memory.” In The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, edited by Gordon H. Bower, Vol. 8, 47–89. New York: Academic Press.

    Baddeley, A.D. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 417-423.

    Baddeley, Alan. 2003. “Working Memory: Looking Back and Looking Forward.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4, no. 10: 829–39.

    Balthazar, Catherine H., and Cheryl M. Scott. “Sentences Are Key.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 33, no. 2 (2023): 564–579.

    Bishop DVM, Snowling MJ, Thompson PA, Greenhalgh T, CATALISE consortium (2016)

    CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0158753. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158753

    Haebig, Eileen, Christine Weber, Laurence B. Leonard, Patricia Deevy, and J. Bruce Tomblin. “Neural Patterns Elicited by Sentence Processing Uniquely Characterize Typical Development, SLI Recovery, and SLI Persistence.” Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders 9, no. 1 (2017): 22.

    Henry, L. & Botting, N. (2017). Working memory and developmental language impairments. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 33(1), pp. 19-32.

    Karavasilis, Gavriil, K. Diakogiorgi, and D. Papadopoulou. 2023. “The Role of Working Memory in the Comprehension of Syntactically Complex Sentences in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A Literature Review.” Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society 28 (2): 205–222.

    Larson, V.L. and McKinley, N.L. (2003) Communication solutions for older students. Thinking Pub. 

    Leonard, Laurence B., Patricia Deevy, James W. Miller, Chrystal Rameela, Robert Schwartz, and J. Bruce Tomblin. “Speed of Processing, Working Memory, and Language Impairment in Children.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50, no. 2 (April 2007): 408–428. 

    Leonard, Laurence B., Patricia Deevy, Marc E. Fey, and Shelley L. Bredin-Oja. “Sentence Comprehension in Specific Language Impairment: A Task Designed to Distinguish between Cognitive Capacity and Syntactic Complexity.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 56, no. 2 (April 2013): 577-589.

    Marton, Klara, Richard G. Schwartz, Lajos Farkas, and Valeriya Katsnelson. “Effect of Sentence Length and Complexity on Working Memory Performance in Hungarian Children with Specific Language Impairment: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison.” International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 42, no. 6 (2007): 691–711.

    McCauley, Stewart M., and Morten H. Christiansen. 2015. “Individual Differences in Chunking Ability Predict On-line Sentence Processing.” In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, edited by D. C. Noelle et al., 1550–1555. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. 

    Montgomery, James W., and Julia L. Evans. 2009. “Complex Sentence Comprehension and Working Memory in Children with Specific Language Impairment.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52, no. 2 (April): 269-288.

    Montgomery, James W., Ronald B. Gillam, and Julia L. Evans. “A New Memory Perspective on the Sentence Comprehension Deficits of School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Implications for Theory, Assessment, and Intervention.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 52, no. 2 (April 2021): 449–466.

    Newman, Sharlene D., Evie Malaia, Roy Seo, and Hu Cheng. “The effect of individual differences in working memory capacity on sentence comprehension: an fMRI study.” Brain and Language 125, no. 3 (2013): 269-277.

    Nippold, Marilyn A. 2010. “Back to School: Why the Speech-Language Pathologist Belongs in the Classroom.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 41 (4): 377–378.

    Vugs, B., Cuperus, J., Hendriks, M., & Verhoeven, L. (2013). Visuospatial working memory in specific language impairment: A meta-analysis. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 34(9), 2596-2597.

  • Why do so many students with language disorders also struggle with literacy?

    There is a significant overlap between language disorders and literacy difficulties. 50% of young people with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are unable to read simple texts, and more than 80% struggle to understand what they read (RCSLT et al, 2023). When a survey of children attending a special school for those with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) was taken, 75 out of 82 had reading difficulties (Haynes and Naidoo, 1991, cited in Bishop and Snowling, 2004).

    There is also evidence of oral language difficulties in those with dyslexia. In one study of 110 children diagnosed with specific reading difficulties, just over half scored more than one standard deviation below the mean on the CELF-R (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – Revised: a language battery designed to identify language disorders) (McArthur et al, 2000, cited in Bishop and Snowling, 2004).

    In another landmark study, Scarborough and Dobrich (1990) monitored a small group of children diagnosed with “early language difficulties” over the years. Although their deficits grew milder over time and appeared to naturally resolve by the age of 5 or 6, when they were followed up again 3 years later, 3 out of 4 had severe reading difficulties.

    Bishop and colleagues observed a similar pattern with older students. 60 children with language disorders were identified at age 4, and reassessed at different times over the years. Strikingly, at ages 15-16, 52% of the resolved group, and 93% of the continuing poor outcome group scored below a twelve year old level on a reading test (Bishop & Adams, 1990; Bishop & Edmundson, 1987; Stothard, Snowling, Bishop, Chipchase, & Kaplan, 1998 cited in Dale et al, 2014).

    Bishop (2014) points out that since oral and written language difficulties have traditionally been dealt with by different professionals (Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) and Educational Psychologists/ Specialist Dyslexia Tutors respectively), this overlap has not always been appreciated. However, as our understanding of these conditions has evolved, the sharp dividing line between them has been questioned.

    Some have gone so far as to argue that DLD and dyslexia are not two separate conditions, but one, presenting at different points on a continuum, or at different points of development. This has even led to some researchers adopting new terms, such as “language learning impairment”, or “language learning disorder” to encompass oral and/ or written language difficulties (Bishop and Snowling, 2004, Paul and Norbury, 2012).

    The reconceptualization of dyslexia has contributed to this converging. Historically known as “word blindness”, dyslexia was seen as a visual processing disorder where words would appear to “jump” out of the page, and students would mix letters up or reverse them. However, most cases of dyslexia are now considered to be linked to poor phonological awareness, which is the ability to recognize, segment, blend and manipulate sounds in words.

    Those who see DLD and dyslexia as part of a continuum point to the presence of similar phonological processing difficulties in some students with language disorders as well as other shared underlying difficulties. For example, some studies have highlighted difficulties with auditory perception (the brain’s ability to make sense of sounds), as well as poor performance on nonword repetition tasks (repeating made up words) in both groups (Bishop and Snowling, 2004).

    Given the degree of overlap between DLD and dyslexia, it seems likely that there are some shared etiologies. However, Bishop and Snowling (2004) argue that talking of the two as one is an oversimplification, and that it is useful to keep the categories separate. The signs of classic dyslexia look quite different to the main behaviours that characterize DLD.

    For one thing, a significant proportion of those identified with poor phonological awareness and decoding (word reading) ability do not have any major problems understanding text (Bishop and Snowling, 2004). In fact, there is some evidence that these “poor decoders” develop more advanced reading comprehension strategies and exploit their background knowledge to compensate for their difficulties (Catts et al, 2006, Snyder and Caccamise, 2010).

    This is in direct contrast to many students with DLD, and those known as “poor comprehenders” who often struggle to understand text despite being able to read it (although some students with DLD may be in the unlucky position of struggling with both decoding and understanding). (See my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/why-do-some-students-struggle-to-understand-what-they-read/ for more information.)

    For students like these, poor vocabulary and knowledge of advanced syntax may lead to difficulties with understanding, especially at secondary level, when the complexity of written language increases significantly. (See my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/ for more information about this type of academic language.) As Paul and Norbury (2012, p.410) put it, “reading is a language-based skill, and understanding meaning through reading makes use of all the same processes used to extract meaning from oral language”.

    There may also be other reasons for the apparent overlap between the two disorders. Students with dyslexia who lack the ability or motivation to read age-appropriate texts will not be exposed to the same range of vocabulary and sentence structures as their peers, potentially causing them to fall behind with their language skills.

    Conversely, certain areas of language may be more connected to decoding and spelling than they appear at first glance. Students with language disorders with a weak grasp of grammatical morphology (the awareness of how words are made up of smaller, meaningful units, called “morphemes”, including prefixes, roots and suffixes), for example, may struggle to spell.

    To sum up, DLD frequently occurs alongside other neurodevelopmental disorders, including literacy difficulties. As SLTs, we’re likely to have many students on our caseloads who are struggling with their reading and writing for a variety of reasons. As specialists in language, we’re being increasingly expected to play a role in supporting our students with these difficulties, and are well placed to do so (Paul and Norbury, 2012). But first we need to understand the exact nature of our students’ difficulties if we are to help them.

    Notes

    Bishop, Dorothy V. M., and Margaret J. Snowling. 2004. “Developmental Dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment: Same or Different?” Psychological Bulletin 130 (6): 858–886. 

    Bishop, D.V.M. (2014). Ten questions about terminology for children with unexplained language problems. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 49(4), pp. 381-415.

    Catts, Hugh W., Suzanne M. Adlof, and Susan Ellis Weismer. “Language Deficits in Poor Comprehenders: A Case for the Simple View of Reading.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49, no. 2 (2006): 278–293.

    Dale, Philip S., Angela J. McMillan, M. E. Hayiou-Thomas, and Robert Plomin. “‘Illusory Recovery’: Are Recovered Children With Early Language Delay at Continuing Elevated Risk?” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 23, no. 3 (August 2014): 437–447.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

    Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT). “A Vision for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) for the UK” London: RCSLT, 2023. https://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/A-Vision-for-Developmental-Language-Disorder.pdf. 

    Scarborough, Hollis S., and Wanda Dobrich. “Development of Children with Early Language Delay.” Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 33, no. 1 (1990): 70–83.

    Snyder, Lynn, and Donna Caccamise. “Comprehension Processes for Expository Text: Building Meaning and Making Sense.” In Expository Discourse in Children, Adolescents, and Adults: Development and Disorders, edited by Marilyn A. Nippold and Cheryl M. Scott, 13–39. New York: Psychology Press, 2010.

  • What is literate language and how is it relevant at secondary school?

    By the time they start primary school, most children have a robust lexicon of words that they are able to employ for different purposes (Benson, 2009). However, as they progress through the years, they begin to learn more and more words, slowly acquiring a rich and varied vocabulary, capable of expressing great subtlety in meaning.

    This includes more abstract and technical terms, as well as low frequency, subject-specific “Tier 3” words. Many of these words will be multisyllabic and morphologically complex, containing a root word and at least one affix (a prefix or suffix) (Nippold, 2018). This stage of vocabulary acquisition is typically associated with literacy development and increased exposure to written materials which contain more of these “literate” forms.

    Written language differs from oral language in a number of ways, but chiefly in the amount of contextualization or abstraction (Benson, 2009). Whilst oral language is supported by non-linguistic information such as the speaker’s use of gesture and tone of voice, as well as the physical surroundings in which the interaction takes place, written language must stand alone (Rubin, 1987). (For more information about the differences between oral and written language, see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/how-are-oral-and-written-language-different/)

    This results in a particular style of language that is denser, with a more specified lexicon and advanced syntactic structures (Benson, 2009) to convey complex thoughts and relationships between ideas. This style, used in the “literate activities of reading, writing, listening to lectures, talking about language and thought and mastering the school curriculum” has been termed “literate language”, or the “literate lexicon” (Nippold, 1998, p.21).

    Words included under this umbrella are a wide range of conjunctions, adverbs of likelihood and magnitude, factive and non-factive verbs, metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs, polysemous and double function words, as well as adverbial conjuncts and derived nominals and adjectives (Nippold, 1998).

    Whilst simple coordinating conjunctions such as “and”, “but” and “so” are relied on in casual conversation, written and instructional discourse, especially at secondary level, is characterized by a wider range of subordinating conjunctions, including “whereas”, “unless” and “provided that”, to express more complex relationships between ideas (Balthazar et al, 2010).

    Although words such as “possibly”, “somewhat” and “barely” may not seem complicated, adverbs of likelihood and magnitude such as these are also key components of literate language, since they enable precision of thought that goes beyond simple, concrete descriptions.

    Certain types of verbs also contribute to the abstract nature and linguistic specificity of written discourse. Factive and non-factive verbs, such as “know”, “realise”, “believe” and “imagine” reflect different mental states and distinguish between concepts of truth and uncertainty. Metalinguistic verbs such as “assert”, “imply” and “concede”, as well as metacognitive verbs such as “hypothesise”, “infer” and “doubt” are also crucial for academic reasoning and constructing arguments.

    On a related note, polysemous and double function words such as “cold” or “sweet” require advanced metalinguistic awareness to understand that the same word can have different meanings depending on the context. Whilst many words have a casual, everyday sense that even young children will know, academic texts frequently feature the more abstract sense which won’t be learnt until later on (Nippold, 1998).

    At secondary level, adverbial conjuncts such as “consequently”, “subsequently”, “conversely”, and “ultimately” are also used increasingly (Nippold, 2016) in essays and other high level expository texts as a way of “signposting” information for the reader. These words connect ideas across sentences, rather than within sentences as conjunctions do.

    Other examples of literate words include derived nominals and derived adjectives. Derived nominals are nouns formed by adding suffixes to verbs, e.g. “condensation” from condense, whilstderived adjectives come from nouns e.g. “categorical” from category. Words such as these are commonly found in subjects such as science, mathematics and English literature (Nippold, 2018).

    In one study, Nippold examined a range of textbooks for the aforementioned subjects to see how often these types of words occurred. Out of a total of 16,028 words, she found 254 derived nominals and 273 derived adjectives. Although this may not seem like a huge number, she argued that they occurred often enough that any student who struggled with them could easily misinterpret key parts of the text (Nippold, 2018).

    Literate language also extends beyond the lexicon to certain types of sentence structure. Written sentences tend to be longer and more densely packed with information, with subordinate clauses arranged in hierarchical rather than linear fashion to highlight importance of ideas (Balthazar et al, 2010).

    According to Marilyn Nippold, these two features develop in tandem, in what she called the “lexicon-syntax interface” (Nippold, 2014). For example, she highlighted how the use of meta-cognitive verbs drives the use of nominal clauses, e.g. “she assumed that he would arrive” (Nippold, 2014). Elaborated noun phrases are also commonly used in subjects such as science to introduce specialist vocabulary, e.g. “sedimentary rocks, layers of compacted sand and marine shells, are formed over millions of years” (Balthazar et al, 2010).

    To reiterate, most children gradually develop an awareness of literate language features through repeated exposure to and engagement with complex written and instructional materials. Whilst young children tend to learn new words orally through informal conversation, this shifts around the fourth year of primary school (Nippold, 1998), as they move from the “learning to read” to the “reading to learn” stage.

    Older school children learn new words in three main ways: through direct instruction of curriculum vocabulary in their lessons, as well as employing the metalinguistic strategies of contextual abstraction and morphological analysis to their own independent reading (Nippold, 2018). These strategies entail working out the meanings of new words encountered in text from the context and from their constituent parts, respectively.

    Learning new words in this way requires not only metalinguistic awareness and knowledge of a range of different root words and affixes, but also a substantial amount of time spent reading challenging texts on a regular basis (Nippold, 2018). Research has found that active, proficient and motivated readers who are interested in a wide range of topics develop much larger vocabularies than struggling readers. (Nippold, 1998).

    Unfortunately, students with language disorders often fall into the latter category; many struggle to read at a basic level, or to understand what they read (Nippold, 2018). What’s more, those who did not manage to establish a solid basis in oral language skills earlier on in their schooling will have enormous difficulty engaging with more challenging literate language (Benson, 2009).

    Students with language disorders also tend to be less strategic learners (Nippold, 2018), with poorer metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness. Whilst this makes them less likely to use the aforementioned strategies, metalinguistic awareness is also intertwined with literate language on a deeper level, since words are chosen carefully to reflect nuances in meaning (Benson, 2009).

    Difficulties with literate language may appear subtle compared to more obvious oral language deficits. However, familiarity with this style is vital for academic success (Benson, 2009), and any difficulties will affect students’ ability to understand explanations in lectures and textbooks, to write essays and reports, and engage in debates. Ignorance of certain types of words such as derived nominals and adjectives may also hinder success in STEM related subjects and access to those fields (Nippold, 2018).

    For more information about the purpose and distinctive features of academic language, or “expository discourse”, please see my next post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/

    Notes

    Balthazar, Catherine H., and Cheryl M. Scott. “The Grammar of Information: Challenges for Older Students with Language Impairments.” Topics in Language Disorders 30, no. 4 (2010): 313–327.

    Benson, Susan E. “Understanding Literate Language: Developmental and Clinical Issues.” Contemporary Issues in Communication Science and Disorders 36 (Fall 2009): 174–78.

    Nippold, M.A. (1998) Later language development: The school-age and adolescent years. 2nd ed. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

    Nippold, Marilyn. (2014). Language Intervention at the Middle School: Complex Talk Reflects Complex Thought. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 45. 153-156. 10.1044/2014_LSHSS-14-0027.

    Nippold, Marilyn A. “Back to School.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 47, no. 4 (2016): 269–71.

    Nippold, Marilyn A. “The Literate Lexicon in Adolescents: Monitoring the Use and Understanding of Morphologically Complex Words.” Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups 3, no. 1 (2018): 211–221.

    Rubin, Donald L. “Divergence and Convergence between Oral and Written Communication.” Topics in Language Disorders 7, no. 4 (1987): 1-18. 

  • What is expository discourse and how is it relevant at secondary school?

    Expository discourse, or “informational language”, as suggested by the name, is language used to explain, inform and describe (Ukrainetz, 2024). Also known as “the language of the curriculum”, it is the academic language used in class lectures and textbooks, and required in student presentations, essays and reports. It’s also used when explaining how to bake a cake, in a textbook explanation of photosynthesis, or in an essay describing the causes and consequences of a historical event.

    There are different varieties of exposition, such as description, enumeration, causation, and comparing and contrasting; each has its own particular organizational structure and distinguishing features. What connects these disparate activities is an intent to convey factual or technical information in an abstract, generalized way (Ukrainetz, 2024).

    Whilst conversation and narrative discourse tend to be more personal and social in nature, often referring to specific people and events, informational language tends to relate to more general concepts and processes. Although specific events or experiences may be mentioned, they are typically transcended to focus on “what generally happens”. This is reflected in the use of the present and infinitive tenses, compared to the narrative past tense (Ukrainetz, 2024).

    Whilst narrative discourse predominates at primary school, and continues to develop at secondary school, expository discourse comes to the fore. Although less familiar, it is central to teaching and learning at the secondary level, and students are expected to spend a large part of their day reading and listening to expository discourse (Scott, 2009).

    Worryingly, expository discourse is also one of the hardest genres to understand (Nippold, 2017). In one study, primary school children were found to have consistently poorer understanding of expository texts than narratives (Snyder and Caccamise, 2008). Correspondingly, Cheryl Scott (2009) notes that informational sentences written by adults tended to be longer and more complex than narrative sentences.

    In another landmark study, Marilyn Nippold and colleagues recruited 120 typically developing individuals from ages 7 to 49 in order to compare conversational and expository speech samples across different ages. The conversational samples were based on common subjects such as participants’ friends, families, school, or work. For the expository sample, they asked participants to explain the rules of their favourite game or sport (Nippold et al, 2005).

    The results revealed greater syntactic complexity for the expository samples compared to the conversational samples across all age groups. Nippold argued that the increased cognitive demands of the expository task had compelled the subjects to use more advanced sentence structures (Nippold et al, 2005). In a later article, she asserted that “complex thought encourages complex talk” (Nippold, 2014).

    So what exactly makes expository discourse more complex, and harder to understand? In a general sense, since its object is to convey new information, exposition is inherently more challenging (Nippold, 2017). More specifically, there are numerous lexical, grammatical and structural features that distinguish expository text and make it more challenging for the average person, let alone those with language disorders.

    Firstly, expository texts have a higher proportion of content words (nouns, adjectives and verbs) than narratives or conversational discourse (Balthazar et al, 2010). Compared to the small, familiar lexicon of casual conversation, exposition is distinguished by a richer, more varied vocabulary through which to convey its various concepts. Words tend to be more precise, abstract and technical, as well as multisyllabic and often morphologically complex. According to Beck’s three tier hierarchy, advanced Tier 2 words as well as low-frequency and specialized Tier 3 words are more commonly found (Beck et al, 2013; Ukrainetz, 2024).

    Informational sentences also tend to be longer and more complex, involving multiple subordinate clauses structured in a hierarchical rather than linear fashion so as to highlight the most important information (Balthazar et al, 2010). Specific grammatical features of exposition that may be particularly difficult to understand include nominalization and pre- and post-modification of the noun phrase (Ukrainetz, 2024).

    Nominalisation is the process of turning a verb into a noun, and is commonly used in both science and history, e.g. “evaporation” (from evaporate), “neutralization” (from neutralize) and “colonisation” (from colonise). It is useful for writers since it allows them to pack more information into a sentence, but harder for readers because it hides the agent and action, making sentences feel denser and more abstract.

    Pre- and post-modification refers to adding words before or after a noun to add detail, creating a noun phrase. Again, it is commonly used in science and can serve a useful function as a way of teaching new vocabulary (Balthazar et al, 2010), e.g. “Chlorophyll, a pigment that causes plants to be green, is vital for photosynthesis”, and “the microscopic capillaries connecting the smallest arteries to the smallest veins”.

    In the first sentence, the noun “chlorophyll” is modified by following it with the appositive, “a pigment that causes plants to be green”, creating a noun phrase with a definition embedded. In the second instance, the pre-modifier “microscopic” and the following participial phrase, “connecting the smallest arteries…” give clues to the meaning of the word “capillary” in terms of size and location.

    These structures provide a useful way of teaching new information without using too many words. However, a student with poor syntactic knowledge would struggle to decipher sentences such as these and might miss out on the explanations. (For a more detailed look at some of the linguistic features that distinguish expository discourse, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.com/2026/04/25/what-is-literate-language-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/)

    As touched on briefly earlier, exposition encompasses a wide range of different subgenres, each with their own distinguishing features, and this too, makes it difficult to engage with. Whilst a student can rely on the familiar structure of a narrative, many different rules have to be learnt for exposition, and some varieties have almost no structure (Ukrainetz, 2024).

    Ultimately, understanding and expression of expository discourse is a complex task requiring a rich and varied vocabulary, advanced grammatical understanding, awareness of different organisational structures and topic knowledge as well as other cognitive skills such as adequate working memory. Unfortunately, students with language disorders tend to struggle in all of these areas.

    Notes

    Balthazar, Catherine H., and Cheryl M. Scott. “The Grammar of Information: Challenges for Older Students with Language Impairments.” Topics in Language Disorders 30, no. 4 (2010): 313–327.

    Nippold, Marilyn. (2014). Language Intervention at the Middle School: Complex Talk Reflects Complex Thought. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 45. 153-156. 10.1044/2014_LSHSS-14-0027.

    Nippold, Marilyn A. 2017. “Reading Comprehension Deficits in Adolescents: Addressing Underlying Language Abilities.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 48 (2): 125–131.

    Nippold, Marilyn A., Linda J. Hesketh, Jill K. Duthie, and Tracy C. Mansfield. “Conversational versus Expository Discourse: A Study of Syntactic Development in Children, Adolescents, and Adults.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 48, no. 5 (October 2005): 1048–64.

    Scott, Cheryl M. “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40, no. 2 (2009): 184-191.

    Snyder, Lynn, and Donna Caccamise. 2008. “Comprehension Processes for Expository Text: Building Meaning and Making Sense.” In New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches, edited by M. A. Nippold and C. M. Scott, 13–39. New York: Psychology Press.

    Ukrainetz, Teresa A. “Evidence-Based Expository Intervention: A Tutorial for Speech-Language Pathologists.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 33, no. 2 (2024): 654–675.

  • How are oral and written language different?

    Written language is not just oral language “written down”, but is different in both style and function. Whilst oral language is typically less formal, with concrete, familiar words and simpler sentences, written language tends to be denser and more information-heavy, with specialist vocabulary and complex sentence structures (Benson, 2009).

    These differences can be traced back to the different functions of each type of language, and the contexts in which they occur. Whilst oral language is typically face to face, with communication partners who are known well to us, written language is more solitary, to an unknown readership. It follows that oral language tends to communicate more personal and social content, whereas written language tends to convey more logical and informational content. (Rubin, 1987).

    Writing may take place over an extended period of time, whereas oral language is typically more spontaneous. When you speak, the words disappear, but writing leaves a permanent visual trace, which “serves as an adjunct to short- and long-term memory” (Rubin, 1987, p.2), allowing the writer to reflect on and revise the ideas generated.

    Having briefly outlined the broad differences between the two modes, I will now detail the resulting differences in structure and style. Much of the content for this post was drawn from Rubin’s still highly relevant article, “Divergence and convergence between oral and written communication” (Rubin, 1987).

    Firstly, the face to face context of oral communication results in language that is less precise, with  a smaller, more familiar lexicon. Since speakers are typically in the same place at the same time, and may share a whole range of common experiences and associations, they may refer to objects in the surrounding environment, or discuss “in jokes” more obliquely. Prosody and other non-verbal communication also support the oral message, allowing speakers to be less specific (Rubin, 1987).

    The spontaneous nature of oral communication also influences its informal style, filled with hesitations, interjections, false starts and self-corrections. Since speakers must invent their subject matter in real time, language tends to be more fragmented and less cohesive with more tenuous connections. Sentences tend to be more basic as well as redundant, joined by simple connectives such as “and”, “but” or “so” (Rubin, 1987).

    This repetitive, more simplistic style of communication not only takes the pressure off the speaker, but also serves a role for the listener. Since they have no control over how fast or clearly their communication partner speaks, or any distracting environmental stimuli which may further affect the message, these integral elements of oral communication can help them to interpret the message the second time around. What’s more, immediate feedback allows any misunderstandings to be cleared up immediately (Rubin 1987).

    Writers, on the other hand, share no common physical or temporal context with their readers and cannot assume any prior understanding on their behalf. Unlike oral communication, writing is unsupported by any nonlinguistic clues and must stand alone. For the message to be understood, language must be precise, with referents clearly specified, using more advanced, technical terms and a greater range of vocabulary to clearly delineate meaning (Rubin, 1987).

    Since writing also allows time for reflection, it encourages greater creativity and higher level thought, which require more complex means of expression. This results in more elaborate language distinguished by longer clauses, advanced syntactic structures and a wider range of connectives as well as greater use of subordination as different propositions are organized in hierarchical fashion. Revision also allows writers to pack information more tightly and avoid repetition (Rubin, 1987).

    To support readers to understand this more complex, written language, writers need to ensure that their texts are cohesive, and appear as a unified whole. Writers also use organizational cues, such as transition statements, and orthographic markers such as punctuation and splitting ideas into paragraphs to support their readers to decipher their messages (Rubin, 1987).

    Rubin (1987) is quick to note that oral and written language are not completely distinct from one another, but overlap, and exist on a spectrum. At times, oral language may appear more “literate”, as in the prepared, formal speech of a barrister, whilst written language may contain more “orality”, as in a first person narrative, where we really “hear” the character’s voice (Rubin, 1987).

    He observes how the written language of novices is often not that far from their speech. But with repeated exposure to written text, students begin to develop an awareness of the differences between written and oral communication. Intent on exhibiting this distinction, some insecure writers may attempt to write in a hypercorrect way, in an unrealistic stereotype of what they think written language is. However, “for those who develop into expert, practiced writers… writing and speech reconverge” (Kroll, 1981 cited in Rubin, 1987, p13).

    As Speech and Language Therapists, knowing the differences between oral and written communication may help us in better understanding our students’ needs. Working in a secondary school context, I come across many who are competent oral communicators, but who struggle with the more technical vocabulary and advanced sentence structures characterized by the written form. These students will need our support to access the curriculum as they progress through school and are expected to engage with increasingly complex written materials.

    For more information about expository discourse, the heavily literate language of secondary school, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/

    Notes

    Benson, Susan E. “Understanding Literate Language: Developmental and Clinical Issues.” Contemporary Issues in Communication Science and Disorders 36 (Fall 2009): 174–78.

    Rubin, Donald L. “Divergence and Convergence between Oral and Written Communication.” Topics in Language Disorders 7, no. 4 (1987): 1-18. 

  • Why do some students struggle to understand what they read?

    Reading comprehension is not a single skill, but a complex task underpinned by a range of different abilities and knowledge (Catts, 2021). To understand a text, students must first have adequate sight reading and decoding abilities, as well as fluency in reading. They will need to have adequate background and vocabulary knowledge, and be able to use a range of metalinguistic strategies to work out the meanings of new words as well as to monitor and repair any gaps in understanding.

    They will also need adequate working memory to keep the relevant information in mind and piece it all together into a coherent whole. On top of all this, to truly engage with a text, students will need to infer, reason, compare and contrast, summarise information, problem solve and interpret. Given the complexity of the task, some have gone so far as to call it, “thinking guided by print” (Catts, 2009).

    Catts (2021) emphasized the particular importance of background knowledge in understanding a text. Whilst we may think of reading as a way of learning new information, research has shown that our prior knowledge of the general domain of the text greatly influences comprehension. In one study, poor decoders who were knowledgeable in the subject matter (baseball) outperformed good decoders with poor understanding of the subject (Catts, 2009).

    This may be because new information needs something to hook onto: an anchor (Catts, 2021). When we read a text, we are not so much learning new information, as we are integrating it with our own prior knowledge to create a dynamic “situational model” (Catts, 2009). Having an awareness of the topic can also prevent us from going off on the wrong track, and guide us in making inferences. It is likely that having some background knowledge will also allow students to think more deeply about the topic, due to freeing up working memory space (Catts, 2021).

    Another important aspect of reading comprehension which has sometimes been overlooked, yet is especially relevant to Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs), is sentence comprehension. In her article, “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension”, Cheryl Scott (2009) argues that many reading comprehension problems are actually the result of undetected sentence processing difficulties. There is a fair amount of evidence for her position.

    Traditionally, students with “literacy difficulties” have been split into two camps: “poor decoders” and “poor comprehenders”. Poor decoders are those who struggle to translate letters into sounds, to blend them together to make words, to read fluently: those who could also be described as “dyslexic”. Poor comprehenders, on the other hand, have no problem with the reading process itself, but they struggle to understand the meaning of a text. Approximately 5-10% of school children could be said to fit into this category (Catts et al, 2006).

    A range of studies have found evidence of weak underlying language abilities in this group. For example, Catts’s group of poor comprehenders scored near the 20% percentile for receptive vocabulary, and near the 30th percentile for grammatical understanding. He observes that although mild, and “subclinical”, these difficulties may be enough to have a significant impact on complex reading comprehension tasks. Whilst these difficulties were often present from kindergarten, only a small percentage of these children had met the criteria for a language disorder, with very few receiving support from an SLT (Catts et al, 2006).

    Despite these findings, reading comprehension interventions have traditionally prioritized the teaching of generic strategies over targeting any underlying language deficits. But Cheryl Scott (2009) observes that if a student is unable to parse individual sentences to derive meaning from them, then they will struggle to understand at text level. Marylin Nippold (2017) also questions how we can expect students to grasp the main idea, or to summarise a passage if they have not understood the individual sentences it is composed of.  Although reading comprehension strategies may be useful to some students, they are unlikely to be effective unless underlying language deficits are addressed first.

    Given the myriad skills required by the task of reading comprehension, it is no wonder that students with underlying language difficulties struggle so much. Besides having poorer vocabularies and syntactic ability as mentioned previously, some of these students may have associated difficulties with working memory and literacy. They are also likely to have poorer background knowledge by dint of their reading difficulties and possible reluctance with reading. Thus, a vicious cycle is born, where students see their difficulties compounded.

    As SLTs, it may be worth paying particular attention to the overlooked role of syntax (Nippold, 2017): something we are very specifically qualified to address. This is particularly relevant to the secondary school years, as students are expected to understand increasingly complex sentence structures (see my post). Indeed, it is no coincidence that a group of “poor comprehenders” typically emerge at this time (Scott, 2009). Unfortunately, there is still a great need for research in this area (Nippold, 2017).

    Notes

    Catts, Hugh W., Suzanne M. Adlof, and Susan Ellis Weismer. “Language Deficits in Poor Comprehenders: A Case for the Simple View of Reading.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49, no. 2 (2006): 278–293.

    Catts, Hugh W. “The Narrow View of Reading Promotes a Broad View of Comprehension.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40, no. 2 (April 2009): 178–183. 

    Catts, Hugh W. “Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension.” American Educator 45, no. 4 (Winter 2021-2022): 26–33. 

    Nippold, Marilyn A. 2017. “Reading Comprehension Deficits in Adolescents: Addressing Underlying Language Abilities.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 48 (2): 125–131.

    Scott, Cheryl M. “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40, no. 2 (2009): 184-191.

  • What are the main challenges of secondary school for students with language disorders?

    The move to secondary school (age 11 in the UK) is difficult for any Year 7 student, but especially so for those with language disorders. On a basic level, secondary schools are typically much bigger than primary schools. The number of students to a class can double in size, and there are large, confusing buildings to navigate.

    At primary school, most pupils have one main classroom teacher who is with them for all their subjects, with whom they can form a more intimate relationship. But at secondary school, students usually have a whole range of teachers for different subjects. Timetables become more challenging to follow, as students have to find their way to different classrooms. Since teachers have so many students, they may struggle to get to know them on an individual basis, and any learning difficulties are more likely to go unnoticed. In short, it is easier to get lost in secondary school.

    Expectations also increase dramatically. Students have to contend with a wide range of subjects involving advanced concepts and specialist vocabulary. They are required to complete higher level tasks, such as analysing literature, writing extended essays and reports, preparing presentations, undertaking research, engaging in critical thinking and debate, and preparing for and sitting exams.

    Workloads increase. To succeed, students must learn to work independently and to manage their time effectively, as well as follow the (often unspoken) rules and routines of school (Nelson, 1998). All of this can feel like something of a shock following the friendly, informal context of primary school.

    On top of all this, these young students must learn to navigate a new social landscape and to find their place in the world, away from the family unit. At a time when their bodies are beginning to change and social interactions are becoming more complex, preadolescents and adolescents must attempt to forge new friendships, find their “group”, avoid being the subject of bullying and attempt to establish a personal identify (Larson and McKinley, 2003).

    Secondary school also brings with it a couple of important, unique challenges which are worth expanding on further, since they particularly affect those with language disorders. The first is a shift which begins in Years 3 and 4, but becomes more pronounced in secondary school, from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” (Balthazar and Scott, 2010).

    One of the main goals of the primary school years is the acquisition of literacy, achieved through regular phonics classes, individual reading and whole class storytelling sessions. At secondary school, it is assumed that most students are able to read and write fluently, so the same level of support is not offered to those who continue to struggle. (Although, positively, some of the better equipped schools I have worked for have offered an online literacy program called “Lexia”).

    Not only will students still struggling with literacy find themselves unsupported, but in the “reading to learn” stage they are now expected to learn new information through their reading. They must move beyond a basic understanding of the text, to draw inferences, analyse, compare and contrast, synthesise and summarise information and think critically (Balthazar and Scott, 2010).

    Clearly any student who has not yet mastered basic decoding skills or reading fluency, who may not even fully understand what they’re reading, will struggle enormously with these higher level tasks. Unfortunately, given the considerable crossover between language and literacy difficulties (see my post for more information), many students with language disorders will fall into this category. Since most subject teachers are unable to dedicate time within the busy classroom to support these students, many will struggle to access the curriculum.

    What’s more, whilst young children typically learn new words through oral exposure, most secondary school students are learning more and more words through their independent reading (Nippold, 1998). Those who avoid reading or who read texts below their cognitive capacity due to residual reading difficulties will have reduced exposure to new vocabulary and linguistic structures. This in turn can negatively impact their language development, leading to the “Matthew effect”, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Snyder and Caccamise, 2008)

    So far, I’ve hinted at the increasing complexity of the language used and demanded at secondary school but have not fully discussed its nature and causes. Firstly, the shift from oral to written communication is more fundamental than a change in medium. Written language is not just oral language “written down”, but is different in both style and function (Rubin, 1987, Nippold, 1998). (For more information about the differences between oral and written language, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/how-are-oral-and-written-language-different/)

    Broadly speaking, oral language tends to be less formal, with more familiar vocabulary and simpler sentence structures (Benson, 2009). Written language by contrast tends to be more formal, precise, and information-dense, characterized by a wide range of vocabulary that is richer, more technical and specific in nature, as well as more complex use of syntax (Rubin, 1987, Benson, 2009). Marilyn Nippold also termed this style of language and vocabulary, “literate language”, or the “literate lexicon” (Nippold, 1998). (See post for more details).

    Closely connected with these points, is the emergence of a new type of discourse at secondary school. Whilst narratives predominate in primary school, and continue to develop at secondary, other types of discourse come to the fore: most notably, “expository discourse”, or “expository text”.

    Expository discourse is the language of the classroom, of lectures, textbooks and essays. It is language used to explain, define, inform or instruct. Since its main purpose is to convey new information, it is inherently difficult to understand (Snyder and Caccamise, 2008). And once again, those with language disorders will find it particularly challenging since it tends to be dense, information heavy, with complex vocabulary and syntax (Paul and Norbury, 2012) (See my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/ for more information).

    Despite the move to secondary school being such a challenging time, it has traditionally been when many students with language disorders have been discharged from caseloads (Larson & McKinley 2003). Plenty of recent evidence also indicates that support falls away quickly after primary school (RCSLT, 2023). Given what is at stake, some experts in the field recommend at least supporting students through this difficult transition (Larson & McKinley, 2003).

    You could say that this stage of development also brings with it unique opportunities. There is some evidence that subsequent periods of brain growth occur during the adolescent years, bringing opportunities for growth that may not have been possible earlier on (Larson and McKinley, 2003). What’s more, the increasing cognitive and linguistic demands of the secondary setting can drive further development (Nippold, 1998, 2014) when students are supported effectively. In other words, secondary school is not too late; it may be the perfect time to intervene.

    Notes

    Balthazar, Catherine H., and Cheryl M. Scott. “The Grammar of Information: Challenges for Older Students with Language Impairments.” Topics in Language Disorders 30, no. 4 (2010): 313–327.

    Benson, Susan E. “Understanding Literate Language: Developmental and Clinical Issues.” Contemporary Issues in Communication Science and Disorders 36 (Fall 2009): 174–78. doi.org.

    Larson, V.L. and McKinley, N.L. (2003) Communication solutions for older students. Thinking Pub. 

    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, Marilyn. (2014). Language Intervention at the Middle School: Complex Talk Reflects Complex Thought. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 45. 153-156. 10.1044/2014_LSHSS-14-0027.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

    Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT). “A Vision for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) for the UK” London: RCSLT, 2023. https://www.rcslt.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/A-Vision-for-Developmental-Language-Disorder.pdf. 

    Rubin, Donald L. 1987. “Divergence and Convergence between Oral and Written Communication.” Topics in Language Disorders 7 (4): 1–18.

    Snyder, Lynn, and Donna Caccamise. 2008. “Comprehension Processes for Expository Text: Building Meaning and Making Sense.” In New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches, edited by M. A. Nippold and C. M. Scott, 13–39. New York: Psychology Press.

  • What does “illusory recovery” mean?

    The term was originally coined by Scarborough and Dobrich (1990) in their renowned article, “Development of children with early language delay” (Scarborough and Dobrich, 1990). The authors were trying to reconcile two slightly contradictory findings in the literature: that “late talkers” (“children with limited expressive vocabulary at 18-24 months” (Bishop et al, 2016)) often recover by age 5 or 6, and simultaneously, longer term studies showing that many experience residual language and literacy difficulties in later childhood and beyond.

    Scarborough and Dobrich wondered whether apparent recovery followed by longer term difficulties might occur within the same child. As part of their research, they compared four children with “early language delay” and a control group of twelve children at ages two and a half and five, and then followed them up three years later. The language abilities of the first group seemed to naturally improve over time, and at age five they were judged to be “near normal”. However, when they were followed up in Year 2, three of the four had severe reading difficulties.

    Scarborough and Dobrich (1990) thought that this could be explained by their theory of “illusory recovery”. They observed that the language of the typically developing children did not develop evenly, but in a stepwise manner, with a series of growth spurts and plateaus. They proposed that as most children reach a plateau, the “delayed” children may seem to “catch up” temporarily, only for their underlying difficulties to show up again at the next developmental stage.

    The authors acknowledged that it would be difficult to generalize from their small sample, and some have contested their results. In a large scale study, Dale et al (2014) found that children with “early language delay” were at no greater risk of long-term difficulties than those without a past history, but with similar scores at age 4. There is now a consensus that early language skills are highly variable and outcomes are difficult to predict (Bishop et al, 2016).

    Regardless, some children clearly do appear to catch up temporarily, only for their difficulties to re-surface later. As a secondary school Speech and Language Therapist (SLT), this got me thinking about my own students. Those who I see tend to fall into one of three camps: those with recognized difficulties, who have received statutory support throughout their schooling, those who saw an SLT when they were younger, only to be discharged as their difficulties “resolved”, and a final group who had never even been flagged up before.

    I’m continually surprised by the numbers who show up in my office with severe language disorders, some having been discharged a few years earlier, and many having never been seen before. Can it be that so many struggling students were missed at primary school? Does Scarborough and Dobrich’s logic apply to some of these students? Or could there be other reasons why difficulties may seem to re-emerge at this point, or even emerge for the first time?

    Scarborough and Dobrich were not the first to propose that language develops in a stepwise fashion. In Walter Loban’s (1976) groundbreaking longitudinal study, he followed 211 pupils from kindergarten into early adulthood and documented their progress. He observed a similar pattern beyond early childhood and into secondary school, although the exact stages depended on the measures he used.

    For example, in terms of the average number of words used per communication unit, he noted that for his “random” group, a year of growth was almost always followed by a year of plateau, or what he also called a “consolidation phase”. There were even crossover points on some of his graphs, which seemed to show his low group catching up with his high group. Again, this was only true for certain measures, such as the number of dependent clauses used per sentence.

    However, when Loban studied them further, he found that his high ability group’s writing samples were actually of much higher quality, despite the data looking similar. The ability to create multiclausal sentences may well be a sign of linguistic growth, but as children mature further still, they actually learn to be more concise, replacing cumbersome clauses with less frequent syntactic structures such as appositives, and infinitival phrases.

    What Loban’s graph showed, then, was not the low group catching up as the high group reached a plateau, but rather, the high group reaching the next developmental stage which was characterized by different markers. How we read the data, and how we measure growth, then, is important.

    Researchers in the field have cautioned how some assessment tools for older students only assess relatively basic skills. A student with more subtle difficulties is likely to be missed. Whilst these factors may contribute to some cases of “illusory recovery”, there are likely to be additional elements involved.

    In Cheryl Scott’s article, “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension” (Scott, 2009), she argued that many reading comprehension difficulties are linked to sentences increasing in length and complexity throughout school. As students reach secondary school, they are expected to understand much harder written texts, with language beyond what they would encounter in casual conversation. It is no coincidence that many “poor comprehenders” emerge at this point.

    (See my post for further information about the challenges of academic text, or “expository discourse”: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/what-is-expository-discourse-and-how-is-it-relevant-at-secondary-school/ .)

    It may be, then, that some deficits are mild enough to go unnoticed throughout early childhood and the more informal context of primary school, only to become painfully apparent in the more serious environment of secondary school where expectations are much higher. Larson and McKinley (2003), too, observed that difficulties are likely to re-emerge as the linguistic and cognitive demands of a new context increase, such as in the transition to secondary school.

    (For more information about the challenges of secondary school, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/what-are-the-main-challenges-of-secondary-school-for-students-with-language-disorders/. )

    Another confounding factor, is that whilst language disorders are chronic, they are not stable. So, an early difficulty with oral language may evolve into more of pragmatic difficulty, or a difficulty with reading and writing later on, as in the Scarborough and Dobrich study (1976). Someone with a surface level understanding may consider the initial language disorder resolved, only to be replaced by a separate reading difficulty.

    It is more likely that these are different manifestations of the same, underlying condition. Some areas, such as vocabulary or basic syntax may improve due to internal shifts, or external factors such as successful intervention (hopefully!), only for other challenges to come to the fore for the reasons already discussed.

    I hope to have shown how relevant the concept of “illusory recovery” is to older students. In my experience, many students arrive at secondary school with language disorders which were deemed to have “resolved”, or were never even picked up before. They may have seemed to have gotten better in the past due to successful intervention efforts, the naturally evolving nature of their condition, or possibly the use of inappropriate or insensitive assessment tools. Their underlying difficulties then appear to re-emerge with the increasing demands or secondary school, or possibly as other students move on from a developmental plateau, leaving them behind.

    For more information on whether language disorders persist, please see my article:

    Do language disorders go away?

    Notes

    Bishop DVM, Snowling MJ, Thompson PA, Greenhalgh T, CATALISE consortium (2016). CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0158753.

    Bishop, D.V.M., Snowling, M.J., Thompson, P.A., Greenhalgh, T., and the CATALISE-2 consortium (2017). ​ Phase 2 of CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study of problems with language development: Terminology. ​ Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(10), pp. ​ 1068–1080.

    Dale, Philip S., Andrew J. McMillan, Marianna E. Hayiou-Thomas, and Robert Plomin. “‘Illusory Recovery’: Are Recovered Children with Early Language Delay at Continuing Elevated Risk?” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 23, no. 3 (August 2014): 337–46.

    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.

    Scarborough, Hollis S., and Wanda Dobrich. “Development of Children with Early Language Delay.” Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 33, no. 1 (1990): 70–83.

    Scott, Cheryl M. “A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40, no. 2 (April 2009): 184–91.

  • Language Disorders: Is there a difference between disadvantage and disorder?

    There has been some debate over the years around whether a language disorder should be distinguished from language disadvantage. The link between low socio-economic status (SES) and language difficulties is well established. In some deprived areas, as many as 50% of children do not have appropriate language skills for their age (Roy & Chiatt, 2013). This far exceeds the generally quoted prevalence rate of 7% across the population.

    How can this be? The environments we grow up in strongly influence our own development, and it seems reasonable that poor linguistic input from parents could lead to language difficulties in their children. Indeed, one study found that pre-schoolers’ language patterns closely mirrored that of their parents, from the range of vocabulary they used, to their interaction styles (Roy and Chiatt, 2013).

    This has led some to ask: if these children’s difficulties are down to their environments, rather than some innate difficulty with language learning, is it still appropriate to diagnose a language disorder? Could some of these children have the potential for normal language development, but have lacked the opportunity or language experience? And finally, are language difficulties caused by these kind of external factors different from those caused by internal ones?

    Surprisingly, some patterns of difference have been observed. Some studies revealed that certain areas of language, such as vocabulary and multi-clausal sentences were more affected by SES than other areas, such as basic syntax (Roy and Chiatt, 2013). Other measures, such as non-word and sentence repetition, and use of grammatical inflections also appear to be less influenced by upbringing and are sometimes considered to be more reliable predictors of language disorder.

    Some researchers have accounted for these differences by theorizing that certain aspects of language development may be more “in-built” than others. Basic syntax, and the non-word repetition tasks mentioned earlier may rely more on innate language processing abilities, and where there is no internal deficit, these skills may develop normally. On the other hand, building a rich vocabulary is a more knowledge-based endeavor, which relies on repeated exposure to a wide range of words in the environment.

    Whatever the truth, in practice it is hard to differentiate between language difficulties caused by internal versus external factors, since risk factors tend to co-occur and interact. Social deprivation may lead to poorer language outcomes through the quality of language and interactions that children are exposed to in their environments. Or it may be due to heritable aspects which have been overlooked.

    In 2016, a group of international experts concluded that there was no particular language profile associated with social disadvantage, and that the aforementioned trends are not an adequate basis on which to classify children (Bishop et al, 2017).

    For more information on the causes of language disorders, please see my post:

    https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/what-causes-language-disorders/

    Notes

    Bishop DVM, Snowling MJ, Thompson PA, Greenhalgh T, CATALISE consortium (2016)

    CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0158753.

    Bishop, D.V.M., Snowling, M.J., Thompson, P.A., Greenhalgh, T., and the CATALISE-2 consortium (2017). ​ Phase 2 of CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study of problems with language development: Terminology. ​ Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(10), pp. ​ 1068–1080. doi:10.1111/jcpp.12721​

    Roy, P. and Chiat, S. (2013). Teasing apart disadvantage from disorder The case of poor language. In: Marshall, C. R. (Ed.), Current Issues in Developmental Disorders. Current Issues in Developmental Psychology. (pp. 125-150). PSYCHOLOGY PRESS. ISBN 9781848720848

  • Are there different subtypes of language disorder?

    Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a broad category that encompasses a wide range of problems (Bishop et al, 2017). Some students may struggle to formulate complex, or even simple sentences; they may miss off grammatical inflections indicating verb tense or number, or experience other grammatical difficulties. For others, a small vocabulary, alongside difficulties learning new words and understanding the connections between words seems to be the main issue.

    Other students may have trouble following instructions, or remembering and understanding large amounts of spoken information, even though they know the individual words contained within it. Some may have good understanding and sentence formulation skills but have specific difficulties in the area of pragmatics.

    I have one student, for example, with weak inference skills, who struggles to make himself understood, even though his oral sentences are basically okay. When he speaks, his thoughts come out in a jumble, and he fails to consider what his conversation partner is likely to know already, either giving too little, or too much information.

    Do all of these students have the same problem? Or is the nature, and cause of their difficulties diverse? There have been attempts over the years to identify different subgroups within the broader category of DLD. You may have used the terms “receptive language disorder” or “expressive language disorder” yourself. The term “Pragmatic Language Impairment” has also been used to describe children with social and pragmatic difficulties who do not meet the criteria for Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

    However, when a group of international experts met in 2016 to attempt to reach a consensus on a range of issues, they were unable to agree on different subgroup classifications. They observed that the categories of receptive and expressive language disorder were rather “gross” and that subcategories were not stable over time (Bishop et al, 2017).

    In some longitudinal studies, researchers attempting to classify children into different subgroups found that those children moved fluidly between those groups over time (Paul & Norbury, 2012). So a child who was originally placed into a vocabulary group or a receptive language group might have ended up in a group for children with expressive language difficulties by the end of the study. This brings into question the integrity of these subcategory classifications, and the utility of imposing them on the broader category of DLD, at least given our current understanding.

    What these results do seem to suggest, is that whilst language disorders are chronic, the way that they manifest appears to change over time. This is likely due to a mixture of internal shifts as well as external factors such as successful intervention, combined with the increasing demands of new contexts, which may reveal difficulties across other areas.

    So, a child initially identified with oral language difficulties may gradually overcome those, only for difficulties with more complex written language to emerge as they grow older. Instead of treating these as two separate difficulties, it seems more likely that they are different manifestations of the same underlying problem.

    Finally, just as language disorders do not divide neatly into different subtypes, the boundaries between different neurodevelopmental disorders such as DLD, dyslexia and ASD may be less clear-cut than is commonly assumed. Until we fully understand the underlying mechanisms beneath these conditions, we are limited to what we see on the surface.

    For more information on whether there is a difference between language disadvantage and language disorder, please see my next post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/03/06/language-disorders-is-there-a-difference-between-disadvantage-and-disorder/

    Notes

    Bishop DVM, Snowling MJ, Thompson PA, Greenhalgh T, CATALISE consortium (2016) CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0158753.

    Bishop, D.V.M., Snowling, M.J., Thompson, P.A., Greenhalgh, T., and the CATALISE-2 consortium (2017). ​ Phase 2 of CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study of problems with language development: Terminology. ​ Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(10), pp. ​ 1068–1080.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

  • Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): A brief history of terminology

    There has been a myriad of terminology used within the field of Speech and Language Therapy (SALT), and until recently, there was no agreed upon label for unexplained language difficulties (Bishop, 2014). Dorothy Bishop found that between 1994 and 2013, 132 different terms were used in the literature, with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) being the most common. By contrast, the term “dyslexia” was used in 93% of research papers to describe reading and writing disorders, rising even higher, to 99% later on (Bishop, 2014).

    She points out that this lack of consensus creates confusion and contributes to poor public awareness, as well as impeding research and even access to clinical services. Having multiple possible search terms for a particular condition makes it difficult to synthesise research, whilst the different diagnostic criteria associated with a range of labels risk inadvertently excluding deserving individuals from services.

    Of course, such inconsistency not only to causes confusion, but also probably reflects the existing confusion in the field. The words that we choose for certain concepts reveal how we think about those concepts. And this changing terminology mirrors our evolving understanding of the nature of these conditions, and what we consider to be the most salient aspects at a given moment.

    Older terms such as “developmental dysphasia”, for example, likely reflected the thinking of the time, which drew parallels between aphasia, the acquired condition suffered by adult stroke survivors, and the developmental difficulties observed in young children. The term “language delay”, which has sometimes been applied to young children hints at the possibility of them “catching up”, but was recently rejected by a panel of experts as “confusing and illogical” (Bishop et al, 2017).

    As mentioned earlier, the term “Specific Language Impairment”, or SLI, was until recently applied quite widely to language disorders which were deemed “specific” in nature, i.e. unrelated to another biomedical condition or to overall intelligence. In fact, getting an SLI diagnosis required a “discrepancy” between a child’s language abilities, and their non-verbal IQ scores. (See my post on “cognitive referencing” for more information: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/03/13/what-is-cognitive-referencing-and-should-speech-and-language-therapists-slts-use-it/)

    Inherent in this label was an assumption that language difficulties occurring in isolation are somehow intrinsically different from those forming part of a more general pattern of delayed development. This is far from clear, and in any case, “pure language difficulties” appear to be the exception, rather the rule in clinical practice (Bishop et al, 2016/7). The term has now been rejected as “not reflecting clinical realities”, whilst the word “specific” was considered misleading. Such a narrow definition has also likely led to many being denied services that they sorely needed.

    Given this confusing state of affairs, a panel of experts from a range of English-speaking countries met in 2016 and 2017 to resolve some of these disagreements and arrive at a consensus regarding terminology and diagnostic criteria. They agreed on three separate terms relating to language difficulties.

    “Language disorder” was proposed as an umbrella term for language difficulties likely to persist into middle childhood and beyond, significantly impacting on everyday interactions and educational progress, and unlikely to resolve without specialist support (Bishop et al, 2017). A child who is a second language learner and is struggling to learn the local language due to lack of experience would not be considered language disordered, unless they were also struggling in their mother tongue. The word “disorder” was chosen over “impairment” to emphasise the serious nature of the condition.

    The term “language disorder associated with X” applies to language disorders with a “differentiating condition”. According to the panel, this would be a biomedical condition with a genetic or neurological cause, where language difficulties occur as part of a more complex pattern of impairment, for example, traumatic brain injury, Down’s Syndrome, ASD or intellectual disability. They reasoned that different intervention pathways would be needed for such individuals in order to take into account the other features of their conditions (Bishop et al, 2017).

    Finally, the term “Developmental Language Disorder” applies to language disorders with no known differentiating conditions, yet to be explained. The word  “developmental” was chosen to emphasise that these difficulties occur during the course of development, rather than being acquired. The panel also stressed that in contrast to previous SLI diagnoses, a large discrepancy between verbal and nonverbal scores would not be required. So, hypothetically, a child with low nonverbal scores who did not meet the threshold for Intellectual Disability could still qualify for a diagnosis of DLD.

    As SLTs, this newfound agreement and clarity is welcome and long overdue. Still, Bishop (2014) cautions us not to “reify our labels”, since without fully understanding the biological basis for DLD, they are really just a collection of temporarily useful constructs. They may well change again in time, as our understanding of the nature and causes of these conditions evolves. Other researchers have advocated spending more time working on finding solutions, rather than focusing overly on labels. That’s something I’m happy to get behind.

    For more information about what a language disorder is, please see my blog post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/01/02/what-is-developmental-language-disorder-dld/

    Notes

    Afasic, NAPLIC, RCSLT and Speech and Language UK (2023) A vision for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) for the UK. ​

    Bishop, D.V.M. (2014). Ten questions about terminology for children with unexplained language problems. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 49(4), pp. 381-415.

    Bishop DVM, Snowling MJ, Thompson PA, Greenhalgh T, CATALISE consortium (2016)

    CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0158753.

    Bishop, D.V.M., Snowling, M.J., Thompson, P.A., Greenhalgh, T., and the CATALISE-2 consortium (2017). ​ Phase 2 of CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study of problems with language development: Terminology. ​ Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(10), pp. ​ 1068–1080.

  • Later language development: what Speech and Language Therapists need to know about the secondary school years

    Until relatively recently, the topic of later language development had been somewhat neglected. Whilst early childhood is seen as a time of rapid linguistic growth, later language development has been described as “gradual and protracted” (Nippold, 1998, p.3). Still, recent research has elucidated the many important advancements that occur during this period, calling into question the myth that language development is complete by school age.

    What’s normal?

    Whilst the early period is still considered the time of primary language acquisition, there is now a consensus that language development continues into adulthood and has no fixed end point. In the case of vocabulary, for example, even older adults may learn new words as they pursue different hobbies and read widely. On the other hand, some adults never master all grammatical structures, especially if they did not continue on to further education, where more scholarly forms are in more common usage (Nippold, 1998).

    Wide variation is thus characteristic of language development in the later years. As students begin secondary school, choose certain subjects, drop others, and take on extra-curricular activities, they also develop increasingly specialised vocabularies to match their interests: language becomes ever more individual to the student (Nippold, 1998). What’s more, with slang terms, hesitations, and non-specific phrases such as “like” and “stuff” increasingly common in adolescent language, even typical development may appear disordered (Larson and McKinley, 2003). Nippold (1998) points out that even well-educated adults make grammatical errors from time to time.

    These factors make it more difficult to set guidelines and to define what is “normal” during the adolescent years. And because change is slow and gradual, we may need to compare students across very different age groups to see the differences (Nippold, 1998, p.3).

    Walter Loban (1976) was the first person to document language growth into early adulthood through a longitudinal study comparing a low language ability group with a high language ability group. Since then, various other experts in the field have written about the topic, and a body of research now exists in the area. I have drawn mainly on the amazing work of Marylin Nippold in writing this blog post, particularly her book, “Later language development” (Nippold, 1998).

    Vocabulary

    One important development that occurs during the later years is the expansion of vocabulary. Whilst a 6 year old knows roughly 18,000 words, this increases to at least 60,000 in early adulthood (Nippold, 2024). As students progress through school and participate in the “literate” activities of reading, writing, academic discussion and accessing the curriculum, they begin to acquire more technical and specialist vocabulary, as well as concepts such as adverbs of magnitude and likelihood, and metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs (Nippold, 1998).

    Learning a word is also a gradual, rather than an all or nothing process (Nippold, 1998), and many qualitative improvements occur over time. As we encounter words in different contexts, semantic representations strengthen, and new meanings are added to words already in the repertoire: whilst a young child will typically know the physical meaning of a “double function” word such as “cold”, it is only later that she will learn its psychological meaning, and understand how these different meanings overlap (Nippold, 1998, p.15). Slowly, an organised semantic network develops, as connections between similar words are strengthened (Nippold, 1998).

    The way that we learn words also changes. When we are young, we learn words incidentally, through oral input, but when we begin secondary school, a lot of curriculum vocabulary is taught directly in class. Another important source of learning at this age is the written word, as students are exposed to more unusual, abstract and complex vocabulary and structures through their independent reading. Many young readers learn to utilise morphological and contextual clues to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words they encounter, supported by developing metacognitive skills and a greater awareness of derivational morphology (Nippold, 1998).

    Syntax

    Syntax also develops in various, subtle ways. Considerable growth occurs at both the intrasentential1 and the intersentential2 levels. Individual sentences increase in length, complexity, and density of information (Nippold, 1998). Loban (1976) observed small, but regular increases in sentence length throughout the school years, although Nippold (1998) cautions us that the length of utterance depends very much on the context. All speakers tend to use shorter sentences when communicating in informal, conversational contexts, and longer sentences in more formal contexts, or when required to explain and give detailed information, such as when telling the rules of a game (Nippold, 1998, 2014).

    Clausal density is another sign of mature development. Whilst a 5 year old may be able to form grammatically correct sentences containing a range of subordinate clauses, the ability to construct longer sentences containing multiple, embedded subordinate clauses to express increasingly complex and abstract thoughts continues to develop into adulthood (Nippold, Mansfield, Billow and Tomblin, 2009). Improved understanding and use of a range of subordinating, coordinating and correlative conjunctions goes alongside this (Nippold, 1998).

    Certain types of clause, such as nominal, adverbial and relative clauses are also used increasingly (Nippold, 2024); the latter, in particular are a common sign of maturing language (Loban, 1976). For a detailed look at these, and other aspects of advanced grammar, I highly recommended Nippold’s book: “A grammar guide for Speech-Language Pathologists” (Nippold, 2014).

    Still, a long, clunky sentence is not necessarily a sign of mature language skills when the message could be expressed more succinctly. Loban (1976) found that during the later stages of adolescence, his low language ability group unexpectedly appeared to catch up with his high language group at one point, in terms of the average number of dependent clauses used per communication unit. However, upon deeper analysis, he found that the higher language group were using more sophisticated sentence structures which enabled them to be more concise.

    Rather than continuing to add on further clauses, sentences may be expanded in other ways, such as elaboration of noun and verb phrases through the use of appositives, infinitives, gerunds, prepositional phrases, and others. Indeed, the presence and combination of low-frequency syntactic structures such as these is another characteristic of mature language (Nippold, 1998). Students also learn to link different sentences together using adverbial conjuncts and other devices to produce cohesive discourse (Nippold, 1998).

    Discourse & comprehension

    Narratives are the most dominant type of discourse throughout primary school, and young children already know a lot about storytelling. At secondary school, students learn to construct longer, more detailed and organised narratives containing multiple episodes, whilst giving more space for their characters’ feelings and motivations. At the same time, other types of discourse, such as expository discourse3, persuasion and negotiation come to the fore (Nippold, 1998).

    Comprehension also improves slowly, and older children develop the important ability to process larger units of discourse (Nelson, 1998). Still, Larson and McKinley (2003) caution that we should not expect pre-adolescents and adolescents to understand everything we say to them, since some grammatical structures may not even be understood by adults. Anyone who has read complex academic prose can tell you that some sentences are just harder to understand than others.

    Figurative language & pragmatics

    Abstract thought, and with it figurative language such as similes, metaphors, idioms and proverbs also develops over time. Research has found that preschoolers have some awareness of this type of language, but that deeper understanding emerges during the school years and adolescence. Similarly, jokes, slang and ambiguous language become increasingly important, since they are linked to students’ self-esteem and peer-acceptance (Nippold, 1998). Conversational and pragmatic skills also develop, with older students more able to adapt their communication to different contexts (Nippold, 2024).

    Whilst many linguistic achievements appear to be “built in”, we have seen how school itself, and the contexts in which students find themselves can influence language development. Similarly, the increasing demands of formal education, which typically include reading challenging material, and extended written assignments sometimes requiring independent research may push forward cognitive and linguistic growth (Paul and Norbury, 2012, Nippold, 2024). As Nippold says, “complex thought encourages complex talk” (Nippold, 2014).

    Final thoughts

    Despite the amount of research now available, later language development is still widely ignored. Larson and McKinley (2003) found that very few university programs across the USA offered modules on this topic, and my experience at a UK university in 2012 was similar. In a small survey that I carried out last year, around half of my fellow SLTs did not feel they had the knowledge to work with this age group, with a further 25% feeling unsure, suggesting that perhaps not much has changed. I hope this summary has helped; for a more in-depth look at later language development and a deeper understanding of grammar, I highly recommend Marilyn Nippold’s excellent books (Nippold, 1998, 2023).

    To find out more about what a language disorders might look like in the later years, please see my post: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/01/07/what-is-developmental-language-disorder-dld/

    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., Mansfield, T. C., Billow, J. L. and Tomblin, J. B. (2009) ‘Syntactic development in adolescents with a history of language impairments: a follow-up investigation’, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18(3), pp. 241–251. 

    Nippold, Marilyn. (2014). Language Intervention at the Middle School: Complex Talk Reflects Complex Thought. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 45. 153-156. 10.1044/2014_LSHSS-14-0027.

    Nippold, M.A. (2023). Grammar guide for speech-language pathologists: Steps to analyzing complex syntax. San Diego: Plural Publishing.

    Nippold, Marilyn. (2024). Language Development in School-Age Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults. 10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00374-4.

    Paul, R. and Norbury, C. (2012) Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Communicating. 4th edn. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.

    1. Within sentences ↩︎
    2. Between sentences ↩︎
    3. Discourse aiming to explain or inform; this is the language of the classroom, of lectures, textbooks, reports, etc.  ↩︎

  • In at the deep end

    I began my Speech and Language Therapy journey sobbing in the Additional Learning Needs room in the autumn term of 2014. It was the beginning of the academic year and I’d just gotten my first job as a Newly Qualified Practitioner (NQP) at an “academy” in a deprived borough of London. Unusually for a mainstream secondary school, they’d hired a private Speech and Language Therapist – me! – to manage their huge caseload of around 100 students with language and communication needs. And I didn’t seem to be handling it all that well…

    “I get on well with teenagers”, I’d said during the interview, “and since everyone’s so focused on early intervention, I think they can get forgotten about. But I feel they deserve to be supported too…” That’s how I found myself leading (in the loosest sense of the word) seven Speech and Language Therapy sessions a day – for groups of disengaged young people who seemed keener on throwing the bean bag I’d brought as a “talking stick” at each other’s heads than in doing any of the activities I’d carefully planned.

    It didn’t help that I’d never worked in a secondary school before, let alone had a placement in one. Or that my postgraduate course back in 2012 had covered early language development, before moving swiftly onto acquired adult conditions, all but skipping the adolescent period. Although research into this age group is slowly building, it’s still only a fraction of what’s available for early years. You could be forgiven for thinking that language development ends at 5, and there’s nothing left to be done…

    On the contrary, as student after student came through my door for their assessments, a staggering level of need emerged that I’d never have expected to find in this ordinary secondary school. Many were struggling with basic sentence structures and vocabulary, yet they were expected to analyse Shakespearean tragedies and compose essays. The gap between where my students were and where they were expected to be seemed insurmountable – was it really my job to help them cross it?

    Meanwhile, as the only SLT at school, I had to wait for my weekly supervision session at the clinic for a sighting of one of my colleagues. This made for a slightly strange and isolating first year. And without anyone to ask advice on a daily basis, my students became a mirror for how I was doing. The reflection wasn’t always flattering. They’d often “act out” or refuse to come to my sessions. This was tough, but looking back, it was some of the clearest and most honest feedback I ever received.

    I only ended up staying at that first school for a year, but I did stick with the age group. Over the next decade I went on to work at a range of mainstream secondaries around London, mainly privately, but also as a locum for the NHS.

    Slowly, things started to get better, and I began to see my own progress reflected in my students. Their annual CELF-5 scores improved. They’d tell me that they were understanding more in class; that they were finding it easier to follow their teachers’ instructions. A memory strategy helped one remember his mum’s PIN so he could help her with the shopping (so he said!). Another would proudly show me his conduct card at the beginning of every session with admittedly fewer infractions than the previous term.

    But most of all, my students began showing up more – physically and mentally – to my sessions. And overwhelmingly they did so without complaining; it was almost as if they thought it was helping!

    I’m not a researcher or academic – just an ordinary SLT who’s been in the extra-ordinary position of having time, week in, week out, to try out a range of interventions with my students to see what worked. It’s taken a lot of trial and error, digging out random books and taking obscure courses to get to a point where I feel like I’m truly serving my students’ needs.

    My practice is by no means perfect, but I wanted to start this blog to pass on what I’ve learnt, and to share a window into my practice for anyone who’s interested. Whether you’re a student, SLT or another professional interested in finding out more, I hope this helps.

    Tawna

    You might like to start here: https://secondaryschoolslt.wordpress.com/2026/01/07/what-is-developmental-language-disorder-dld/