Exam 12: Language Disabilities in School-Age Children and Youth

Students encounter difficulty in school when discrepancies exist between their language abilities and the language demands of the curriculum.

James heard the sentence "the player who replaced the team captain scored the winning point" and concluded that the 'team captain' scored the winning point.James is exhibiting difficulty with

Students with SLI often present with a homogeneous language profile.

In response to the request "Find the ball that's not blue",the child selected the blue ball.

The speech-language pathologist plans her language assessment for Raymond by learning about the language and processing demands of his curriculum,textbooks and examinations.The speech-language pathologist then compares Raymond's performance in class with the language skills he demonstrates during the speech and language evaluation to develop statements about his strengths and weaknesses and to recommend intervention strategies that will support Raymond's language learning and academic achievement.This approach to assessment is referred to as

Reliance on test scores to the exclusion of other types of information to diagnose language impairment is an example of "best practices."

In planning Hakim's intervention,the speech-language pathologist decides to

The trend in speech-language pathology is to use naturalistic approaches in language intervention rather than structured approaches.

The speech-language pathologist decides to participate in a science experiment on electricity with Thomas' sixth grade class.The speech-language pathologist hopes to gather information about Thomas' language and communication skills as part of an overall assessment process.This assessment procedure is referred to as

Twelve-year old Kevin's conversations contain few specific nouns and many indefinite words and pronouns.He uses the nicknames "Buddy" to refer to all of his friends and uses gestures often when talking.He is doing poorly in school.He is repeating the 5^th grade and has yet to pass a single test in language arts,social studies or science.The speech-language pathologist decides to investigate the hypothesis that Kevin is experiencing a disorder of

Naturalistic intervention approaches teach specific language skills.

The focus of evidence-based practice is to plan interventions that support improved language and communicative functioning.

A primary role of speech-language pathologists is to determine how the language demands of the curriculum either support or interfere with academic achievement,especially for students with SLI.

Hakim's educational team decides that it is important to provide maximum contextual support to enhance his language and academic skills.They decide to use the following

Language assessment guides language intervention.

Hakim is a 12 year old African American boy repeating the 6^th grade.Previously he repeated the third grade.Hakim has not been identified as needing special services but his language problems are evident.He performs poorly on reading comprehension tasks.His receptive and expressive grammatical skills are poor and his vocabulary is limited.His parents are at a loss.Hakim's test scores are not low enough to qualify him for special services and tutoring has not helped.A private speech-language pathologist has been hired to help.Her assessment revealed that Hakim's cultural and language differences interfere significantly with his academic performance.She also found that Hakim exhibits SLI in the areas of vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge and use,sentence processing and narrative production.Moreover,because of repeated failures,Hakim's school performance is hampered by

John performs poorly on tasks of word definitions,identifying synonyms,recognizing the multiple meanings of words and correcting grammatical errors.Further investigation into this area may be enlightening in regards to

The language students encounter in school is as complex as the language students encounter at home.

Students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are more likely to experience SLI than students from mainstream backgrounds.

Juan experiences difficulty with recognizing shifts in conversational topic,managing the turn taking sequence in conversation and making relevant additions to the topic.These difficulties reflect a disorder of