Supporting Children with DLD

A Picture Book and User Guide to Learn About Developmental Language Disorder

Kate Kempton

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000520569
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Bildung
• Sous-sujet: Bildung Allgemein

This picture book and guidebook set has been developed to help raise awareness of Developmental Language Disorder, and to highlight the impact of DLD from the child's point of view.

Harry's Story introduces a child who faces daily challenges in school due to his language difficulties. It explores how these challenges are made easier by his teachers' understanding and support as he finds new ways to communicate.

Supporting Children with DLD provides essential information, prompts and suggestions for adults to help understand the experience of children with DLD. It offers supportive strategies and activities to help children express themselves effectively and ask for help when they need it.

This resource can be used both directlywith children, aged 6-11, to talk about and explore DLD, and also as a training tool with the parents and professionals who support them. With research suggesting an average of two children per classroom are affected by DLD, this is an essential set for parents and professionals looking to understand the condition.

1. What is DLD?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148517-3

Developmental Language Disorder, or DLD, is a type of communication disorder, which develops during early childhood and affects children’s understanding and use of spoken of language. It has been called different names in the past, including Specific Language Impairment (SLI) but Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is the new term, agreed by an international panel of experts (Bishop et al., 2016, 2017). It is hoped that by universally and consistently using the term ‘DLD’, it will help raise awareness of DLD and provide better support to children and adults with this condition.

Facts about DLD

• There is no known cause of DLD, but evidence suggests that biological environmental and genetic risk factors, can influence whether a child develops DLD (Bishop et al., 2017).
• DLD is not caused by another biomedical condition, such as cerebral palsy, a hearing loss, or autism spectrum disorder (Bishop et al., 2017). Children with these conditions generally do experience language difficulties but would be classed as having a language disorder alongside or associated with the other condition.
• DLD develops during the early years, but a diagnosis is rarely given to children under the age of five. Some children are slower to start talking but catch up spontaneously and have typical language skills by the time they start school. Other children, however, have language difficulties that persist beyond the age of five and this might be an indicator of DLD.
• Children with DLD typically experience difficulties with several different language skills, for example: understanding and remembering instructions; learning and remembering new words; understanding sentences; putting words and sentences in the right order; understanding jokes and sarcasm.
• DLD affects different children in different ways and each child’s strengths and needs will vary. This means it is essential to treat every child with DLD as an individual and find out how DLD is affecting them specifically.
• DLD is a long-term condition which means that people with DLD are likely to experience some challenges with language throughout their life.

Why do we need to raise awareness of DLD?

• DLD is much more common than you might think and affects just over 7% of children which is around two children in every class of 30 (Norbury et al., 2016).
• If more people learn about DLD it might make it easier for teachers and parents to recognise and understand the needs of these children.
• Children with DLD are often good at masking their language difficulties which means their needs may be missed.
• It is important for children with DLD to be identified earlier and given the specific support they need. When appropriate provision is offered, children with DLD can be helped to achieve their social and academic potential and the impact of their DLD can be reduced (Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, 2018).
• It is important that teaching staff know about DLD because these children are at greater risk of social and academic difficulties if their needs are not properly supported in the classroom environment (Catts et al., 2002). Children may struggle to keep up with lessons, if they don’t understand the words or haven’t understood what the teacher has explained to the class.
• It’s important for children and young people to know about DLD too. It may help children with DLD understand their needs and why they find some things more difficult. It might also encourage people who don’t have DLD, to listen and to be more empathetic to those who do.

What is language and why is it so important?

What is language?

• Language is a complex process involving successful integration of several different skills. It refers to how we understand and use words when they are arranged together in sentences.
• Understanding spoken language is referred to as ‘receptive language’. Using spoken language is referred to as ‘expressive language’.
• Children with DLD have primary difficulties with spoken language, however, in most cases written language skills will also impacted.
• Children with DLD experience difficulties learning their own language(s). Bilingual children can also have DLD, in which case they would have difficulties learning both or all the languages they are exposed to.

The following section explains the different skills that we need to integrate in order to communicate successfully with language.

Listening and Attention

Listening and attention skills are the foundations that underpin language and communication development. Children need to be able to tune in and focus on spoken language in their environment before they can begin to understand it. Some children have specific difficulties with attention, and may need individual support to develop this skill.

Children with DLD might appear to have difficulties with attention. It might be hard for a child to listen and pay attention if someone is using too many long sentences that they don’t understand.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics refers to the social use of language and communication. This includes the ability to understand and use gestures, body language, facial expressions and tone of voice. It also includes turn taking and joining in appropriately with conversation.

Many children with DLD are good at using body language and gestures to support their communication, but they may still experience difficulties with social interactions. This is often associated with the language demands of many social situations. For example, keeping up with the pace of conversation in a group, understanding non-literal language, humour and sarcasm.

Working memory

Working memory refers to the ability to hold information in our memory long enough to process it. This can include verbal information such as sounds, words and sentences.

Children with DLD may struggle to hold and manipulate verbal information in their working memory, especially if there are a lot of unfamiliar words. This means it can be more difficult for children with DLD to learn new words or to remember long and complex instructions.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary refers to the words used in a given language. We use the word ‘vocabulary’ to describe the words that an individual understands and the words they use in their spoken or written language. Vocabulary is a crucial part of language development and is found to be significantly associated with academic and reading outcomes (Muter et al., 2004).

Reduced vocabulary knowledge and word finding difficulties are a common feature of DLD (Bishop et al., 2017).

Grammar

Grammar refers to the rules and organisation of language and determines how words and sentences are arranged to show meaning.

Most children learn the rules of language without too much difficulty, but children with DLD typically have persisting difficulties understanding and using grammar (Bishop et al., 2017).

Children with DLD might struggle to understand and use more complex sentence structures and might not know, for example, that ‘the boy kicked the girl’ means something different to ‘the boy was kicked by the girl’.

Inference

Inference relates to understanding the overall meaning of language and filling in the gaps when information is not explicitly given. So, for example, in the following sentence: ‘Lily loved swimming, she went to Little Dolphins every week’, we can infer that ‘she’ refers to Lily and ‘Little Dolphins’ is probably the name of her swimming club.

Children with DLD can struggle to infer meaning or read between the lines, because of their already fragile language skills. This means that they can’t rely on their language skil...