Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a form of learning disorder.  It affects language development and language use.  Children with SLI may find it difficult to learn aspects of language and their use of language may appear “strange” or “awkward” or “wrong”.

SESSIONS FOR CHILDREN WITH SLI

When language learning is challenging, children with SLI might need numerous repetitions when being taught aspects of language. For example, the teaching of regular plurals such as “cat” and “cats” and irregular plurals such “mouse” and “mice” may need some time to be mastered through repeated exposure.

The sessions are heavily focused on getting the child to understand language, especially instructions, multiple instructions and sentences which may be confusing for the child.

Language expression is equally critical. A lot of time will be spent on getting the child to say things correctly. Sentences that are long will take time for the child to learn and use.

Academic learning is usually affected when there is a challenge with language and language learning. Special attention will be given on teaching the child language needed for pre-academic and academic areas so that the child will be better equipped to handle the school curriculum.

THE IMPACT OF SLI

Children who are diagnosed with SLI may or may not have other issues such as autism or ADHD.  Children with autism often have SLI.  My son who is autistic has also been diagnosed with SLI.

The child may take time to develop language understanding and language expression.

He/she may have difficulty learning and forming sentence structures.  Their retention of vocabulary (especially new words) may be impacted. 

Aspects of language which may be difficult may include:-

• Tenses – going, will be going, went, gone, have gone
• Plurals – cat/cats, mouse/mice
• Prepositions – on, in, beside, on top, under, beneath
• Conditional phrases – If you clean your room, we can go watch a movie

Some of the children I taught said these (reproduced here with their parents’ consent):

• “One hou, two house” – child aged 5 years 8 months
• “Your father is there” (“Your husband is there”) – child aged 7 years 3 months
• “I can close any packet of this” (“I can close this packet”) – child aged 4 years 9 months
• “Sometimes when you pluck your dirty teeth then can grow back to clean teeth again, but not only for adult” (“Sometimes when you pull out a bad tooth, a new one might grow but not for adults.”) – child, aged 6 years 8 months
• “I want you to give me a beautiful answer” (“I want you to give me the right answer”) – my own son, aged 13 years 0 month

SLI might be evident even in adulthood.  We may come across adults who struggle to express themselves or they may have some difficulty understanding instructions, verbal stories or long descriptions.

Academic Learning

Children with SLI may have difficulty in school when they are required to read texts and figure out answers which may not be readily available in the text that they have read. 

ENGLISH COMPREHENSION

Below are actual answers from one of the children I taught (reproduced here with the parent’s consent). The child was 6 years 8 months when he wrote these answers.

The text was, “Ginny heard loud music coming from the stage.  She decided to walk towards it to find out what was happening”.

What made Ginny walk towards the stage?

Child’s first attempt at answering, “So she made her way to the front”.

Child’s second attempt at answering, ”The Ginny tried to make to the front”.

The appropriate answer was “Ginny walked towards the stage because she heard loud music coming from it”.

MATHEMATICS

For Mathematics, problem sums which involve reading and understanding of language might be challenging.  For example, 

“Mr Tan had 80 brown eggs and 120 white eggs.  He sold a quarter of the brown eggs and a third of the white eggs. How many eggs did he sell altogether?”

Passages like this can be difficult for a child with SLI to process and understand.

SCIENCE

For Science, understanding the different characteristics of the different types of animals may be confusing because of the many terms that they need to learn such as scales, feelers, gills and fins.  Describing the characteristics of animals may be challenging because explanations require a lot of language.

LEARN BIT BY BIT

Children with SLI might need to learn language in small bite sizes.  For example, when learning tenses, they might be able to learn irregular tenses faster than regular ones.  The difference between “knife” and “knives” may be easier for them to see, read and say than regular plurals such as “bat” and “bats” which look and sound similar.

BREAK DOWN THE LANGUAGE BUT NOT THE MEANING

Deconstructing longer texts into smaller pieces might help them process language better. One paragraph can be broken down by one or two sentences. Have the child read this subset of the paragraph, understand it and then make sure that he is able to answer questions related to these one or two sentences.