Speech-language therapy can support your student at any point in their academic career. Language is an essential element of communication and learning at school. Students in nearly all grades and subjects rely on listening, speaking, reading, writing, and social skills. Higher-level language skills, like inferencing, connecting, problem-solving, organizing, and more, become more important as students advance through grade levels. When students have strong communication skills with the adults and children around them, they are much more likely to be successful in school. Here are a few ways in which a speech-language pathologist can help:
Early Academic Skills: Oral Communication
Listening and following directions
Speaking
Pre-literacy
Building friendships
In preschool and kindergarten, children are exposed to structured listening and speaking situations. Students use their language skills to follow simple and complex directions (e.g., routines, projects, group activities), share their ideas (e.g., in circle time, answering questions, in show & tell), and ask for what they want or need. This is also the time when early literacy skills are introduced. Students begin to build awareness of words, syllables, and sounds. Activities focus on rhyming, letter names, and letter-sound associations, all of which build phonological awareness and prepare students for learning to read. Additionally, students use verbal and nonverbal communication skills to begin and maintain friendships. They learn to use and interpret gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and words for various meanings. They also develop social-emotional regulation skills to cope with exciting, upsetting, or disappointing situations. During this time of early academic experiences, children may need support developing one or more of these skills in speech-language therapy.
School-Aged Academics: Reading and Writing
Writing skills
Oral and written narratives
Reading comprehension
Dyslexia
Older students continue to develop strong oral communication skills (e.g., comprehension of directions/questions; answering questions; sharing perspectives) while adding increased written communication skills. Students move through literacy phases that include learning to read, reading to learn new information, analyzing written material, and synthesizing information from texts with other sources and background information. As students advance and their reading skills grow stronger, they will also need to write factual responses to various prompts, organize written compositions, formulate essays, and complete research projects. Additionally, narrative skills are developed by creating their own stories or narratives, retelling stories they have read/listened to, and explaining personal events. Students need to express their ideas clearly and coherently in both spoken and written contexts. Finally, students need to be able to identify story grammar elements from fictional texts (e.g., character, plot, setting), make inferences and predictions, and summarize texts.
All students who struggle with any of these tasks would benefit from speech-language intervention to learn strategies and tools for success. Other students may also have more significant learning difficulties such as dyslexia. Dyslexia is a reading disorder that is diagnosed through interviews, observations, and testing. When a child is diagnosed with a reading disorder, such as dyslexia, they are likely going to have trouble with word-retrieval, expressive formulation, auditory and/or language processing, and phonological awareness and processing. Alongside a reading specialist, your student may work with a speech-language pathologist on efficiently responding to verbal prompts, expressing themselves, processing language and text-based writing they have heard, and address the foundational skills for reading known as phonological awareness skills (e.g., rhyming, sound segmenting, blending).
Executive Functions
Time management
Organization
Self-regulation
Planning, preparing and problem-solving
Time-management skills help a student estimate the amount of time needed for a task, prioritize assignments, and plan appropriate amounts of time needed to complete tasks within a time frame. Organization skills are required when students become more independent with turning in assignments, bringing a take-home folder to and from school, categorizing work by subject, and keeping a tidy workspace. Self-regulation skills, sometimes worked on in conjunction with an Occupational Therapist, are important in helping your student with attention and participation through regulating their sensory systems. Planning and problem-solving skills are required throughout a student’s day as well. Students need to plan and prepare to be ready for each class/assignment/routine, and when they encounter a problem, they require the critical thinking skills to solve it. Speech-language pathologists support executive function skills by teaching direct and compensatory strategies to improve outcomes in everyday life.
Social Skills
Playing with other children
Turn-taking
Conversational skills
Negotiation
Conflict resolution
Humans are social beings, and social development begins at birth. As your child ages and matures, so do their social skills. Children use increasingly complex verbal and nonverbal communication to manage relationships. As students age, they explore different levels of friendships, including situational groups (e.g., school), shared-interest groups (e.g., sports, art, Legos), and selective individuals based on personalities/interests (e.g., 1:1 or small group gatherings). In order to develop and maintain friendships, students must possess various social skills. First, they need the motivation and interest to seek out opportunities to play with and alongside other students. Next, they need social skills to manage and extend interactions. Turn-taking occurs in play and conversation as students learn to take turns choosing games/activities, rotate turns within an activity, and share preferred materials. Finding balance between multiple participants is important for everyone to feel included and valued. Finally, as play schemes mature and eventually develop into conversation-based relationships, students learn more complex negotiation and conflict management strategies along with self-advocacy. Navigating social interactions through adolescence can be murky with changing friend groups, school transitions, bullying, and shifting interests. In summary, numerous social skills are needed to develop meaningful and lasting relationships from early childhood through adulthood. When a child struggles with social interactions, speech-language pathologists are well-equipped to support these skills at all ages.
Now What?
Whenever you are concerned about your child’s social and/or academic progress, it is always a good idea to seek out an evaluation. Parents have several options for assessment and intervention:
School-Based Services: Evaluations through your child’s school will determine whether a child is eligible for school-based supports (e.g., speech-language pathologist, reading specialist, occupational therapist, learning specialist, social worker). Based on your child’s skill level, they may or may not qualify for school-based support services.
Private Services: Independent clinics are not constrained by academic eligibility criteria like schools. Children often see private speech-language pathologists to evaluate and improve their academic skills, either solely or in conjunction with school-based services.
When in doubt, reach out! We’re here to help.
