Effects of speech and language therapy intervention in mainstream school for children with pragmatic language impairments

This paper describes the implementation and effects of an intensive programme of speech and language therapy for children who have pragmatic language impairment (PLI) attending mainstream education in the North West of England. An intervention which focused on aspects of language pragmatic intervention such as conversation, inference and narrative was developed. Six children who have PLI (mean age=7;10 years), all with a statement of special educational needs, participated in a single case study series in which they each received 20 sessions of the speech and language therapy programme in their own school. Guidance and specific training was provided for learning support assistants and classroom teachers. Despite showing heterogeneity in their initial profiles of impairment, progress in conversation skills were seen in all six children and some significant changes in language test performance were found. These findings suggest that intensive speech and language therapy intervention has the potential to produce generalisable gains in language and communication skills in children who have PLI and suggests appropriate outcome measures for effectiveness studies.