Supporting students with Developmental Language Disorder

In a webinar, speech pathologist Vanessa Leaver talked about DLD, how it can affect children and young people at school, and how to support students with DLD in the classroom. Below are the key insights from the webinar.

What is DLD and how common is it?

Developmental Language Disorder is a disorder that relates specifically and solely to language difficulty that is unrelated to anything else such as autism, dyslexia, or a hearing issue (although DLD and other language disorders often co-occur with these things). It is developmental because it is from birth, and it is also for life. DLD pertains to language, which is what we say, or the content and ideas that we express through our vocabulary and the sentence structure that we use. It is not related to speech, which refers to the sounds we use, articulation, and fluency. This type of language disorder occurs in about one in every 14 children, or between 7 % and 16 % of people, and it is very often undiagnosed and unrecognised.

How does DLD affect children and young people, and what might teachers notice?

In very young children, teachers might notice a limited vocabulary or children not using as much vocabulary as their peers, but it is important to bear in mind that between the ages of two and four, the rate of language growth is highly differential, so it can be difficult to identify the difference between a language issue and a slightly slower rate of development. In four and five year olds, teachers would start to notice poor understanding, and sometimes the inability to retell stories or talk about their day, and quite limited vocabulary. A good indicator in younger students is the use of non-specific words like ‘thingy’ and ‘stuff’. Moving up through the primary school years, students may have a poor memory for things they’ve been told and struggle to keep up with multiple instructions. By the time students reach secondary school, the limits on their vocabulary will be even more noticeable, particularly in relation to subject-specific vocabulary, and they will struggle to keep up with the content of different subjects. Teachers might notice behavioural indicators in students with language difficulties such as off-task, disruptive, or disengaged behaviours. Because they struggle with both comprehension and expressing themselves using language, they are likely to also be reluctant to ask for help, because they lack the language to do so. They may also have poor executive function skills, which means they will struggle to know how to problem-solve, and choose to avoid the task instead. One way to identify whether the challenge may be specifically language related rather than perhaps an attention issue (such as ADHD), is to offer additional support for attention, and then  assess whether they have the vocabulary to express themselves once some of the distractions of the classroom have been reduced.

How DLD can impact learning

The impact on students’ literacy will be significant, as they are less likely to pick up or understand words from reading, which makes reading harder and less appealing (creating a cycle of not reading, therefore limiting their reading development and access to vocabulary even further). Over time, this limits students’ access to the curriculum because, the more that course content is accessed through reading, the less they engage with it. A primary school student is expected to start school with about 2500 words, while a secondary school student should have between 40,000 and 50,000 words. The differences for a student with DLD will be noticeable at primary school, but can be huge by the time they reach secondary school. Students with DLD may also struggle with collaborative and group work because they find it difficult to participate, and may become disruptive. DLD can also often co-occur with other learning difficulties such as reading and writing difficulties, social challenges, and attentional difficulties (as noted above), further compounding the impact on learning.

How can DLD impact on children’s social relationships with their peers?

We communicate with language to be social and to form relationships, and this begins in the very early years of life. As children reach primary school, they may miss key parts of conversations, jokes and sarcasm, or the social nuances of conversations. That can sometimes lead to ostracism and even bullying. Once they reach secondary school, where peer relationships are so crucial, the social impact of DLD can be severe. Sometimes students with DLD will find each other, so it can be helpful to notice who they form friendships with, because it shows who they feel comfortable communicating with.

How DLD can impact students’ mental health and their wellbeing?

Even in primary school, students are keenly aware of how well they are doing relative to others in their classroom, and if they perceive that they are not doing well, it impacts their wellbeing. They may also be impacted by noticing that their peers are making more progress or finding things easier than they are. An important thing for teachers to notice in primary school is students engaging in negative self-talk, saying things like ‘I’m not good at this’.  By the time students get to secondary school, this negative self-talk often becomes internalised, and students then become anxious and may start avoiding school and learning altogether.  

What strategies can teachers use to support children in ECE and the early years of primary?

The strategies that will benefit children with DLD in the early years are beneficial for all children, so there is no need to differentiate strategies at this level. A good approach is to use lots of gestures, visuals, and clues to scaffold understanding. The more support we give them, the more they are able to succeed, and then those scaffolds can be reduced as they are needed less. Good routines are really helpful because they reduce the cognitive load around the uncertainty of what is happening next. Using short, simple sentences and pauses to allow time to process all the information, and limiting instructions to one to two, is also helpful. Rich vocabulary can be introduced in a playful way, and home languages included. In the early primary school years, where the shift from language purely for communication to language for learning starts to occur,  teachers can focus on comprehension strategies by pre-teaching important topic vocabulary, giving students as much context as possible for new words, providing descriptions rather than definitions, making connections, and using lots and lots of repetition and exposure to the vocabulary in different ways. Task scaffolds such as cloze activities rather than blank sheets can also be helpful to begin with, and removed over time as they are needed less. Rhymes, songs, mnemonics and repetition are all great for supporting working memory and helping learning transfer to long-term memory, even for older students.

What strategies can teachers use to support students throughout primary school?

In the upper years of primary, teachers tend to start to release students to become a little bit more independent, but students with DLD need those scaffolds from the earlier years of primary school to remain in place. Strategies like a buddy system can help students stay on task and complete their work, as well as helping build the social network of the classroom. It is also helpful to be really explicit about the goal of the lesson or activity, and to offer some idea of the expectation for the task (such as a model or sample piece of work). Supporting them to remember the instructions and to explore the new and relevant vocabulary with word webs and visuals is also beneficial.

What strategies can teachers use to support students in secondary school?

It is important to start by being aware that students with undiagnosed or unsupported DLD may have lost a lot of learning during their primary school years because they haven’t had the same access to the curriculum as their peers who picked up vocabulary more readily. They may need additional resources in terms of supporting their acquisition and understanding of subject-specific vocabulary, although it is important to do this without stigmatising the student. It is also important to acknowledge the enormous cognitive load that comes with changing classes, subjects, and teachers multiple times throughout a day and a week. Trying to navigate the norms and expectations for many different classes throughout the day is extremely challenging for students with DLD, so the more that teachers can work together to provide a level of consistency in the classroom context, the more students can focus their attention on the differences in content across their different subjects. Collaboration among teachers and learning support staff is highly beneficial. On top of that, using similar strategies to primary school in terms of pre-teaching vocabulary, modelling goals and expectations, reducing cognitive load, and supporting executive functioning (see below) all continue to be beneficial for students in secondary school.

Is there any value in having a diagnosis of DLD?

A diagnosis should not be essential if teachers are given enough knowledge to notice and respond to particular challenges related to language that students may be experiencing. However, as with other forms of neurodivergence, a diagnosis supports the understanding of what that student is going through, particularly as DLD is for life. It can be empowering for students to understand why it’s difficult for them to learn, and lowers the emotional cost of the shame they may feel about why they find it so difficult to learn. It can also support them to self-advocate and others to advocate for them, and help with access to appropriate learning support.

How can supporting the development of executive functioning help?

Executive functioning skills are the CEO of the brain. They sit in the frontal lobe and dictate the ‘how’ of what we do. Skills like listening and paying attention, getting started on a task, maintaining our attention on the task, having a goal that we’re working toward, knowing how long it’s going to take to reach that goal, and planning and organising to complete that goal in a timely manner are all executive functioning. They are foundational to learning, and explicitly modelling and scaffolding these skills in the context of the classroom can really help students to develop them. For example, teachers can be very explicit with instructions and task expectations, provide scaffolds for starting a task or learning activity (such as sentence starters for written tasks), and model aloud how to plan and organise a task. All students will benefit from executive functioning support, and it is particularly beneficial for neurodivergent students.

Resources

Click here to read Vanessa’s guides on DLD.

Click here for The Education Hub’s resources on executive function.

Click here to learn more about executive function on Vanessa’s website.

Click here to access the CELF screening tool that Vanessa mentioned during the webinar.