Content and Procedures for Facilitating Children’s Language Development

Children with language impairment (LI) show an overall immaturity in grammatical structure. This includes difficulties with basic sentence constituents, pronouns, verb form elaboration, negative and interrogative sentences, noun phrase elaboration, and complex sentences. This article describes explicit instruction and scaffolding strategies, based on a review of current research, that can be used to expand the range of grammatical structures produced by children with LI. A plan for combining explicit instruction drills and use of scaffolding within embedded therapy activities is suggested. Research is needed to test the efficacy of this recommended approach.