Contrary to what many seem to believe, language skills comprise more than just the ability to speak well. There are in fact many components to “good” language skills, including, but not limited to: producing speech that can be understood; putting the right words together into coherent sentences and longer constructions; the ability to listen and understand so that you can plan what to say in return (receptive language); an understanding of idiom; and the ability to manage the social norms of communication.

Also contrary to what many appear to assume, a child can be skilled in one area of language but lack sufficient skill in another. Moreover, difficulties with pronunciation or word finding may be readily apparent, yet issues with receptive language remain well hidden.

All this matters because these misunderstandings make speech and language communication needs (SLCN) less likely to be picked up, and when difficulties persist into later childhood and adolescence, they can be even harder to spot. At that point, such difficulties are also likely to be more often labelled as behavioural difficulties.

Why is that? SLCN may result in children who don’t receive proper support simply giving up when faced with a lack of understanding about what is required - I know many teenagers who would rather do that than admit in front of their peers that they don’t understand.

The research supporting the bidirectional link between behavioural difficulties and SLCN is solid. Studies have shown that children with SLCN are more likely to develop behavioural, emotional and social difficulties than their typically developing peers, with prevalence rates as high as 35-50 per cent. And, when viewed in the other direction, there is research suggesting that a large majority of children with emotional and behavioural disorders have significant unidentified language deficits.

The good thing for teachers is that, once we understand this link, there is a lot we can do to support children.

Flowing with the currents

With children who are not carrying out your instructions, you should persist with checking that they understand your instructions. Can they repeat them back to you?

Meanwhile, when working with a child who does not appear to be listening, ensure that they understand the language you are using. It is a common approach among speech and language therapists to explicitly pre-teach core and complex vocabulary either before or at the very beginning of a unit of work. A module on electromagnetic radiation or electricity in my own subject will throw up much new technical language, including some words to which children will assign a subtly or radically different meaning, such as wave or current (to be confused with currant).

Perhaps a child is struggling to tell you why they did something; support them with the vocabulary needed to explain their feelings and actions, and to put a chronology together.

What about those who appear rude by interrupting or making other social mistakes? It can sometimes appear deliberate, but we need to relentlessly teach and model the appropriate social norms around communication and recognise it every time the child gets it right.

And for those children who give up easily, we need to go back and check that they understood what was required in the first place. We could also consider the use of schedules to support independence.

More proactively, it is worth considering the complexity of the questions you are posing to children, too. I find the four-stage framework developed by developmental psychologist Marion Blank to be a really helpful way of pitching questions at a level in line with a child’s language-comprehension development. They are commonly referred to as the Blank Levels, so you might hear teachers, speech and language therapists or educational psychologists referring to a child working at Blank Level 1, 2, 3 or 4. Below, I give an overview of them, but do seek out more information from your Sendco or online. At Blank Level 1, it is about matching perceptions - questions related to objects in the immediate environment. So, for example:

• Naming people: who is this?
• Naming objects: what is this?
• Naming actions: what am I doing?
• Matching: can you find one like this?
• Source of noise: what can you hear?

At Blank Level 2, questions are about the details of objects known to the child, but that are not necessarily visible when the questions are being asked, and require the child to group, describe and understand the functions of objects. For example:

• Describing a scene: what happened?
• Remembering information: who/what/where is…?
• Identifying and describing characteristics of objects: what size/shape/colour is this? How many are there? How does it taste/smell/feel?
• Identifying object functions: which one do we use for…?
• Identifying differences: how are these different?

Blank Level 3 is all about inference, recall of knowledge, identification of similarities and evaluation, and children reordering things. For example:

• Identifying an object that can be used with another: which one can we use with this?
• Describing what might happen next: what will happen next?
• Giving directions: tell me what to do.
• Assuming the role of another: what might he say next?
• Following two-stage directions: do…and then…

At Blank Level 4, questions require problem solving at a higher level of abstraction. The child needs to talk about logical relationships between objects and events, provide explanations, make predictions about events and come up with logical solutions. So, for example:

• Making predictions: what will happen if…?
• Justifying predictions: why do you think that?
• Identifying a cause or causes of an event: why did that happen?
• Providing a solution to a problem: what might you do? (Or, from someone else’s perspective, “what might she do?”)
• Explaining barriers to a solution: why can’t you…?

The scale of changes such as using the above framework, or by adapting practice, as laid out earlier, are not huge, but the impact for children with SLCN can be. Given the significant link between speech, language and communication difficulties and behaviour, and the chances of language difficulties going unrecognised, and therefore unmet, this is one area of our practice that we could all do with learning more about.

Jarlath O’Brien works in a mainstream secondary school and a special school, and is the author of Leading Better Behaviour, published by Corwin Press

This article originally appeared in the 15 January 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Behaviour, speech and language needs”