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Overview of Needs

What you might notice

Speech

Children may:

  • Have difficulties pronouncing words clearly
  • Produce excessive saliva
  • Stammer
  • Lisp
  • Be unable to say certain sounds
  • Miss out sounds in a world
  • Change one sound/phoneme for another
  • Find longer words with more than one syllable tricky to pronounce

Expressive language

Children may:

  • Not talk very much
  • Have a limited vocabulary
  • Misunderstanding instructions
  • Use words in the wrong context
  • Be selective of whom they talk to and when
  • Give short answers
  • Use short words
  • Struggle to put words into a sentence

Receptive language

Children may:

  • Have difficulties understanding and following instructions, particularly lengthy ones
  • Take longer to understand what you have said
  • Find it difficult to follow the storyline of a book

Social communication

Children may:

  • Find making and keeping friends difficult
  • Appear not to want to communicate with others
  • Misunderstanding gestures and body language
  • Struggle to take turns (or follow other social rules)
  • Have difficulties learning, remembering and using names
  • Find identifying, understanding and expressing emotions challenging
  • Daydream
  • Fallout with friends due to misunderstanding social situations
  • Have concentration difficulties.

Strategies

Speech

  • Model good speech
  • Over-emphasise speech sounds
  • Be careful when correcting
  • Give time
  • Be sensitive about public speaking

Language (expressive and receptive)

  • Think about your instructions
  • Use visuals to support
  • Actively support vocabulary
  • Check their working space
  • Think about your questions
  • Avoid idioms

Resources Interventions and Activities

Interventions and programmes

  • Vocabulary Building – Use of word maps, semantic webs, and pre-teaching key vocabulary.
  • Narrative Therapy – Storytelling frameworks like Colourful Semantics to help structure sentences.
  • Receptive Language Activities – Following instructions games, barrier games, and picture sequencing.
  • Expressive Language Support – Expanding utterances using sentence starters, modelling language, and scripting.

Visual Supports and AAC supports