My daughter's now in college - what can we do to try to help her with this issue?

casdix

This discussion was created from comments split from: I'm Chris, I specialise in working with children with autism, asperger's and learning disabilities.

casdix

Hi Chris,
My daughter is 16. She was diagnosed at 14 with Aspergers (and also with auditory neuropathy at 10) and at 15 had a SALT assessment which found her understanding of spoken paragraphs to be on 9th centile - she is on 73rd centile cognitively. They said she was having difficulties accessing the curriculum due to the use of age appropriate language in lessons. She's now in college - what can we do to try to help her with this issue?

LondonSpeechTherapy

Hi Casdix,

Huge apology for the lateness in my reply. On her most recent SLT report did it say which 'age appropriate' concepts she found difficult to understand (in the CELF this in the receptive language section: concepts & following directions) - if it did practise these keywords in everyday instructions you gave her. A standard recommendation for children with communication impairments is the pre-teaching of core vocabulary (e.g. National curriculum vocab) so that she has a head start on her peers - ask for a list of the new words for this next term and start to teach her them before they are introduced in the classroom. I use a word-map approach to vocab teaching whereby the student writes the word in their own 'dictionary' and writes clues about what the word means (attributes); gives the example of how the word is used in a sentence and an illustration where possible. With regards to understanding spoken paragraphs your daughter will need paragraphs broken down into manageable chunks: this may not be possible in every lesson and so she could be given the paragraph in written form too so that she is able to break the paragraph down into sections (with support and/or practise) and then complete each section of the paragraph in turn.

I hope that helps


Chris