What is DLD and How DLD impacts reading
- DLD is a disorder that occurs when a person has difficulty producing or understanding language compared to their peers, and can not be explained by another disability or condition.
- Children with DLD often have poor phonological awareness, which in turn causes poor spelling and word reading.
- Students with DLD often make grammatical errors and use short simple sentences.
- Comprehension is often a weakness for students with DLD, especially when trying to understand figurative language as well as learning new words.
References
Curran, M., & Hogan, T. (2023). Developmental Language Disorder What it is and Why it Matters. In Handbook on the Science of Early Literacy (pp. 325–335). essay, Guilford Publications.
Recommendations for instruction
- Students impacted by a DLD need opportunities to work with language in different ways. They need explicit instruction, guidance, and scaffolding to practice listening, speaking, reading, and writing with immediate feedback.
- Students need a strong foundation rooted in systematic and explicated instruction to build phonological awareness and an understanding of the alphabetic principle.
- Sentence structure instruction is often helpful for students with a DLD to help them understand and comprehend the passage fully.
References
Adlof, S. M., & Hogan, T. P. (2019). If we don’t look, we won’t see: Measuring language development to inform literacy instruction. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(2), 210–217.
Zipoli, R. P., & Merritt, D. D. (2022). Structured Literacy Interventions for Oral Language Comprehension. In Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (pp. 136–161). essay, Guilford Publications.
Sample lesson plan
Assessment data that has been gathered about Ben shows he is having trouble in a couple different areas. The majority of Ben’s reading problems appear to be related to the language comprehension strands of Scarborough’s reading rope. While he has good foundational reading skills, his weaknesses have begun to show more now that he is in upper elementary. They have been shifting from learning to read to reading to learn, which is consistent for students with DLD (Adlof & Hogan, 2019). This intervention is appropriate for him because it is focusing on decoding multisyllabic words. However, this is not the only area that Ben’s intervention needs to focus on. He also has trouble with comprehension, especially with sentences that have complex structures. I believe that with several adjustments to the Word Connections lesson plan it would address his weaknesses better.
I would make the following adjustments to the Word Connections lesson plan to better match them to Ben’s current needs.
- Within Word play, during the Build-A-Word activity, students will be adding prefixes to words. The teacher then uses these words in sentences and they discuss the meaning of the word. This would be a great opportunity to easily pull in some skills that aid comprehension such as sentence structure or inference based on the sentences used, even if the example needs to be modified (Zipoli & Merritt, 2022).
- Depending on the size of the group, there could be a lot of practice for some kids while they follow along during Beat the Clock, while others receive no practice. I would eliminate this activity from the intervention and find a few minutes at a later time to have kids read this list of words. This would allow time to work with Ben on targeted grammatical skills or targeted sentence-combining exercises, both which have been shown to increase comprehension (Adlof & Hogan, 2019).
- The Write Word activity is a good starting point, but I would like to make the syllable division a little more explicit to ensure Ben has a clear understanding of this concept (Curran & Hogan, 2023). One way to do this could be to use a series of small dry erase boards. Students would then write one syllable on each board and then push them together to create a word.
- While I like that the intervention includes practice with reading, I would change the Let’s Read section of the intervention. It would not be hard to create a short passage that corresponds to the prefixes introduced, but also provide an opportunity to work on some comprehension skills such as making inferences and identifying sentence structures as well. As Zipoli & Merritt (2022) point out, it would still be important that the words in this passage are decodable so that Ben does not focus on decoding, but instead on comprehending the passage.
The following aspects of the Word Connections lesson are ones that I would continue to include because they are aspects that match Ben’s current needs well.
- The Affix Bank activity is a good activity because it clearly and explicitly explains what an affix is and begins introducing students to prefixes (Zipoli & Merritt, 2022). For this particular lesson the affixes dis, un, and sub are taught. The teacher starts by saying the affix (dis), writes it on the board, and then hasthe students repeat it. Then the meaning of the affix is discussed and the teacher provides an example of the word using the affix and discusses how adding that affix changes the base word’s meaning. This is followed by a time for students to think of words using dis. Finally, dis is added to the student’s individual record of affixes, an affix bank book. Then the routine is repeated with the other 2 affixes for the day. This clear and explicit routine will benefit Ben as he begins to make sense of bigger words.
- I believe the Warm Up activity is designed well and could remain as it is written. I like that it uses nonsense words since Ben is able to decode most one syllable words. This will allow him to show that he can apply his phonics skills to all words, not just words he is familiar with. This activity can continue to improve Ben’s word decoding skills and strengthen this component of the simple view of reading (Adlof & Hogan, 2019).
With the adjustments listed above, along with the components that are remaining, I believe that this would be a good lesson for Ben to continue to work on improving his multisyllabic decoding skills as well as his comprehension skills.
References
Adlof, S. M., & Hogan, T. P. (2019). If we don’t look, we won’t see: Measuring language development to inform literacy instruction. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(2), 210–217.
Curran, M., & Hogan, T. (2023). Developmental Language Disorder What it is and Why it Matters. In Handbook on the Science of Early Literacy (pp. 325–335). essay, Guilford Publications.
Zipoli, R. P., & Merritt, D. D. (2022). Structured Literacy Interventions for Oral Language Comprehension. In Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K-6 (pp. 136–161). essay, Guilford Publications.