Written by: Elizabeth Mui, Speech and Language Therapist

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a condition that is more common than Autism but tends to be lesser known to the public. It comes as a surprise to many when I mention its prevalence of 7-8% of children. This means that in a classroom of 30 students, there would be around 2 students with DLD. However, despite its prevalence, DLD remains relatively unknown to many.
DLD is a condition where children experience difficulties with language development despite having normal hearing and intelligence. Imagine a child who struggles to think of the right words to use, understand instructions, or has difficulties expressing their thoughts – that is the essence of DLD.
Identifying Signs of DLD
It is essential for parents and teachers to recognize the signs of DLD early on. Keep an eye out for children who show difficulties with understanding and using language, have limited vocabulary, struggles with grammar, and has challenges following instructions.
These signs may manifest as difficulty in following directions despite listening. A child might be unable to retell a story that was just read, or rely on copying peers or may remain quiet to mask challenges understanding language. The child may also find it hard to share about their day after school or struggle to make friends and be included in conversations with their peers.
What does having DLD mean in for a child in school?
Children do not grow out of DLD. Speech therapy is the cornerstone of support for children with DLD, and children can continue to benefit from intervention as they grow older. A common difficulty faced by children in primary school is managing the jump in the scope and depth of the curriculum when they hit the upper primary levels. Class sizes get larger, tests are introduced, and higher order language and narrative skills begin to get tested more in school.
Children struggling with DLD may encounter difficulties in tasks such as writing to dictation, taking notes, and recalling subject content when longer sentences are used to convey concepts.
Moreover, DLD affects not just the English subject. It can impact a child's comprehension of comparative and sequential concepts and manifest in challenges understanding instructions related to dates, months, or the order of events, which leads to struggles in subjects like Math and Science.
These are just two examples of a wide range of challenges that may be experienced by children with DLD. Assessments by an SLT can help to identify specific areas of weaknesses.
A Speech & Language Therapist's Role in Supporting Students With DLD
The goal in therapy is to provide individually tailored interventions to improve language skills, boost confidence, and enhance a child’s communication abilities. Early intervention is key – the sooner therapy begins, the better the outcomes for the child.
Early intervention for language typically involves working on goals such as improving grammar (e.g., use of past tense verbs), learning different question types, sentence structures, developing narrative skills, and more.
In therapy with older children, we may focus on learning strategies to help break down tasks (such as storytelling, identifying a main idea) to make them more manageable. We could also work on acquiring strategies for visualizing grammar concepts to help make different word types (e.g., verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and sentences types (simple, coordinated) more understandable.
In my experience, a lot of the children I have worked with who have DLD tend to get referred for therapy later in their schooling years, typically at primary 3 or 4. At times, children who have gone through therapy up till K2 stop intervention as they could cope in kindergarten or lower primary. But then face significant struggles when they progress through the primary school levels. When language demands in school increase, children must acquire new knowledge built on previously learned concepts, answer questions with more complex vocabulary, and analyse longer text. This can be very difficult for children with DLD.
Children with DLD are estimated to experience six times the rate of anxiety compared to their peers without DLD. A student once confided in me, saying, “I hate school. I go to class and hear words, words, words. But I don’t know (understand) anything. I know what you are saying here, but it’s still hard.” Helping students find effective strategies and setting clear goals is crucial in therapy. I ensure that both children and parents understand these goals, design tasks to target specific concepts, teach strategies and set the child up for repeated success. After weeks of persistence, that same student exclaimed, “Oh, I get it now!” Seeing him grasp and apply the concept to his school work brought me so much joy and reminded me of my dedication to all my students, no matter the obstacles we encounter.
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