Discussion

Before a child can begin speech/language therapy, an evaluation must be conducted. Formal and informal assessments are both very valuable when determining appropriate intervention. Formal assessments are typically done in standardized test form. Informal assessments involve collecting data in a more one-to-one fashion via interviews, observations, and/or language samples. Language samples provide a great deal of information related to a child’s language abilities and conversational skills and often contain a number of spoken utterances using various topics. During this discussion you will develop a profile of a child’s bilingual language development. This discussion is intended to show evidence that the student has achieved or is working on the following learning objectives:

• Identify common measures of word use from a spontaneous language sample.
• Identify difficulties in the development of morphology and syntax in late talkers and children with learning language learning disability (LLD) and specific language impairment (SLI).
• Describe clinical applications of morphological and syntactic development.

Directions

• For this discussion, you will review a bilingual language sample and answer questions about it.
• Read the case study below:
• The student is a first grade, bilingual Spanish-English speaking student who was evaluated for a language learning disability (LLD). He has been speaking English for 1 1/2 years. 
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