Staff
& Professionals

How to help young people with Expressive Language Difficulties

General Difficulty expressing themselves

Possbile implications:

• May be very quiet in the classroom and reluctant to answer questions.
• May give very limited answers.
• Limited spoken language will be reflected in the written language.

Useful strategies:

• Give the pupil plenty of time to formulate their ideas and to provide an answer.
• Encourage the pupil to expand his answers by saying for example “I don’t quite understand what you mean.  Could you give me some more information”. 
• Ask open ended questions e.g “what are you doing now?” “How does this work? “ “Why do you think that happened?

Vocabulary knowledge and word finding difficulties

Possbile implications:

• Misinterpreting an explanation, instruction or question due to unfamiliar words.
• Lack of specific vocabulary when speaking and overuse of words such as he, it, thingy, that
• Frustration at not being able to recall the vocabulary that he wants to use.

Useful strategies:

• Teach new vocabulary thoroughly and in an organised way so that this vocabulary can be recalled when needed.
• Introduce a few new words at a time.
• Focus on the vocabulary that is most relevant for that pupil.
• Use a multi-sensory approach to vocabulary learning e.g. mind-maps.
• Give the pupil lots of opportunities to say the new words in order to retain them.
• When a pupil is struggling to recall a specific word give semantic and phonic clues to jog the memory e.g. ‘what do you do with it, tell me something else about it, what sound do you think it begins with?'
• Giving the initial sound will often prompt the pupil to remember the word e.g. It begins with ch..
• Discuss with the pupil which strategies help him to remember words.

Grammatical difficulties 

Possbile implications:

• May make grammatical errors or omit words
• Common difficulties are past and passive tense errors,  incorrect plurals or pronouns, limited range of connectives.

Useful strategies:

• All staff should model the correct grammatical structure e.g.

Pupil: ‘the material catched fire’

Adult models: ‘it caught fire’ (stressing the correct form)

• Consider teaching specific grammatical structures in English lessons if there is a pattern of errors e.g irregular past tense.

• Use close procedure worksheets which reinforce the structure that the pupil is learning.  The pupil can then fill in the gaps with the correct word or word ending.
• Encourage the pupil to self-monitor or reflect on his use of grammar, by saying “Listen to the way you said that… does that sound right?”