The What: Language Goals and Priorities
for Older Students and Adolescents
Because I am based in a hospital outpatient clinic, I
always ask to see the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for
any school-age child or adolescent referred for language
assessment. It is interesting that a small number of goals
appear over and over again in these documents. Some of the
most frequent include 90% correct production of grammatical
morphemes; increase mean length of utterance (MLU); improve
sequencing; follow two-three part commands. The
popularity of these goals would seem to extend beyond my
state of Illinois; Kamhi (2014), in this forum, argues that a
narrow and prolonged focus on Brown’s 14 grammatical
morphemes is inappropriate, and he also questions the common
goal of targeting sequencing as an isolated processing
skill. Wallach (2010) referred to the goals of sequencing and
following two-three part commands as “mismatches frozen
in time” and went on to contrast these (and several others)
with goals that, in her view, stand a better chance of impacting
a student’s performance in the curriculum.
The single common feature shared by school-age children
with language disorders is that they are in school every
day and struggle with academic language in contexts of
listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The gap between
academic language and the language used to implement these
common IEP goals could not be greater. Although many of
these IEP goals could be accomplished with simple sentences,
academic texts by the middle grades contain a majority of
complex sentences. I recently looked at a fourth-grade science
textbook and examined the sentences in a randomly chosen
passage. Of 27 total sentences, only 12 were simple sentences
(one clause). The same exercise in a seventh-grade science
textbook revealed that only four of 32 sentences were simple.
Scott and Balthazar (2010) have written about the sentencelevel
grammatical characteristics of informational language(social sciences, history, science) and the resulting challenges
for school-age children and adolescents. The idea that different
school subjects use language in unique ways that result
in comprehension challenges has taken hold and is now
widely discussed as disciplinary literacy (see examples in
Fang, 2012). Indeed, the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS) recognize the content-specific nature of language
by posting separate standards for language arts, history/
social sciences, science, and technical subjects for Grades 6
through 12.
Intervention goals for children and adolescents with
language disorders should have a positive impact on their
performance in school. Curriculum relevancy is written into
IDEA regulations when determining eligibility for speechlanguage
services, and speech-language pathologists (SLPs)
are encouraged to address the CCSS in their clinical practice
(Blosser et al., 2012). The following sections emphasize
three broad types of language intervention goals with the
potential to make a difference in school performance: complexsentences (two or more clauses), verb structure, and
expository text.