Grammar Intervention Content and Procedures for Facilitating Children’s Language Development

Children with language impairment (LI) show an overall immaturity in grammatical structure. This includes difficulties with basic sentence constituents, pronouns, verb form elaboration, negative and interrogative sentences, noun phrase elaboration, and complex sentences. This article de-scribes explicit instruction and scaffolding strategies, based on a review of current research, that can be used to expand the range of grammatical structures produced by children with LI. A plan for combining explicit instruction drills and use of scaffolding within embedded therapy activities is suggested. Research is needed to test the efficacy of this recommended approach. Keywords: child language, language therapy, syntax AN IMPORTANT FOCUS for therapy forchildren with language impairments (LI) is to address deficits in the grammatical sys-tem. Children with LI produce higher rates of errors on grammatical morphemes than chil-drenwith typical language (Eisenberg, Guo, & Germezi, 2012; King & Fletcher, 1993). They also show an overall immaturity in grammat-ical structure, producing shorter, less elabo-rated sentences and fewer complex sentences than their age peers (Fletcher, 1991; Leonard, 1998). This article focuses on therapy procedures that can be used to increase the range of gram-matical forms produced by children with LI beyond the 14 grammatical morphemes iden