Transcript

Sean Pert:

Hello, my name’s Sean Pert. I’m a speech and language therapist. Today I’m going to be talking about children with speech, language and communication needs. I’ve worked for about 19 years in the north-west of England with children with a whole range of speech, language and communication needs, including those who are bilingual and have difficulty learning to speak in their own languages.

Speech and language therapists have in their title both ‘speech’ and ‘language’ and that’s because children have difficulties with either speech – that’s the physical production of sounds, and the mental representation of those sounds, so they might be able to physically say a sound but not have learnt when to use that sound yet – or with language – so that incorporates verbal comprehension and verbal expression. But we also have speech and language therapists who deal with, for example, children who aren’t able to use verbal communication and use computer technology to communicate.

So you might describe it as communication of any modality. When children need to express themselves, particularly the younger children that we see – so I would say children under five – they’re getting their basic messages across. And if you think about the stages of language development, children often talk about what they’re doing; so they’re almost thinking out loud: ‘Look mum, I’m riding a bike’, ‘I’ve got a new hat’ – things that they find exciting about the world around them.

For older children, they tend to start to question how things happen, how everyday events relate to themselves. So they tend to ask more questions: ‘Where does water come from?’, ‘Do birds have television sets?’ – you know, they have all sorts of flights of fantasy, and they start to learn about the real workings of the world. Teenagers start to think about much bigger issues and think about maybe political issues or moral issues.

So the language skills that relate to that are different at different points in the child’s life. So for young children basic sentence structure is really important. Children – seven, eight and nine – are having difficulties perhaps with making friends, with understanding the pragmatic rules and the language skills they need to do things like narrative; so, to talk about what they did at school that day, or if they went on a school trip, the sequence of events and how to explain that to others who weren’t there to see it.

Older teenagers, often labelled as having behavioural difficulties, can turn out to have language impairment, and they have much more subtle difficulties, such as understanding when somebody needs further information to understand their point of debate or to understand their perspective. So they need to understand things like theory of mind and understanding someone else’s perspective, using language to persuade, to question, to probe. So, in that sense, language skills need to mature.