General good practice strategies to support children with SLCN in ‘communication supportive’ environments may include:
- An audit of the environment
- Knowledge of language development, language levels of the children and the language demands in the environment
- Adapting adult language so it is not a barrier to learning or communication
- Facilitating opportunities for children to interact and use language in different situations, with different people at an appropriate level
- Creating an ethos where it is acceptable not to know and teaching children how to monitor their own understanding. Research suggests that raising children’s awareness of how to interact productively leads to more inclusive activity and to individual learning gains
- Raising children’s awareness of their strengths and needs. This is an important principle for children with SLCN
- Ensuring children can participate and be involved in decision making concerning them
- Careful planning and information sharing between staff at times of transition.
Specialist interventions
Creating a communication supportive environment is beneficial for all children. However, it is important that the environment and any indirect intervention by SLTs undergo careful evaluation to determine the benefits for children with SLCN. In addition, it is important to acknowledge that there is a continued need for highly skilled direct interventions delivered by appropriately experienced professionals, where
necessary. Children with SLCN are a complex and heterogeneous group and as such, there continues to be a need for research into a variety of effective language interventions in schools.
However, a number of specific interventions
targeting different elements of speech, language and
communication with primary aged children have provided
evidence of effectiveness and examples include:
- school based interventions, which have facilitated changes in approaches used by teaching staff and in children’s language
- phonological awareness training, targeting the speech-processing deficit, to effect an
efficient system-wide change
- strategies for teaching receptive vocabulary word-finding training and grammar
- developing narrative skills in children with delayed language, teaching story grammar knowledge and boosting story comprehension
- developing language repair skills,and conversational skills intervention for children with pragmatic language impairment
- teaching reading comprehension, for children with language difficulties
- developing communication skills with children excluded or at risk of exclusion.