#198: Writing Goals for Grammar

Marisha (00:00)

Hey there, SLP. I'm excited that you're joining me for another episode in the goals series that we're doing here on the podcast. Today we are diving into grammar goals and we're focusing on more foundational grammar skills today. And then next week we'll chat about syntax, which I think that might be a goal area that I'm most excited about!

But I love a good grammar goal too. So let's go ahead and dive right in. As always, I'd like to start off with a little bit of a rationale in terms of why we might want to target grammar with our students and what we want to be thinking about. So Fey et al have a beautiful, beautiful article. It was published in 2003. I'll include a link in the show notes at slpnow.com/198.

But it's, and they have some follow-up articles too, but the 2003 article include, is titled 10 principles of grammar facilitation for children with SLI, specific language impairment. And they have some really great strategies. They've written some follow-up articles with even more strategies. So if you're wanting to step up your grammar intervention, do check out those articles, they're phenomenal. But Fey et al. say that the basic goal of all grammatical intervention should be to help the child achieve greater facility in the comprehension and use of syntax and morphology in the service of conversation, narration, exposition, and other textual genres in both written and oral modalities. So that was a long quote.

It can be easy to get bogged down and nitpick at all the grammar and to get overwhelmed. But our ultimate goal is for students to be able to comprehend sentences and understand sentences and then be able to use grammar to communicate their thoughts and ideas. And so that is the ultimate goal behind all of any goal that we might write. And we're really wanting to help students access their curriculum.

To be able to understand and communicate effectively. And that is the ultimate goal. So let's have that as our lens as we start thinking about goals. And I love this quote by Eisenberg. She says that, is crucial. Students must have a reason for doing the things that lead them to learn and use grammar so they can read, write, and speak better. So I love getting to, because grammar is one of those areas where it isn't a lot of SLP's favorites and not a lot of students' favorites either. But it can be so impactful. And if we can talk to students about why it matters, how it can help them, and we'll get some examples as we go through, especially when it comes to syntax. my goodness, it's so cool.

But if we talk about how it'll impact them, how it can help them and then embed the practice in really meaningful context. We've got some beautiful intervention going on. So some things that we might think about when we're writing grammar goals, we might be looking at like MLU, main clause structure, objective and possessive pronouns, regular and irregular plural nouns, subject verb agreement, regular and irregular past tense verbs, negation, question formulation, all of those types of things. And then, like I said, we'll talk about syntax in the next episode. So those are all of the types of things that we might be looking at and thinking about as we're considering grammar goals. as always, we often are required to administer formal assessments.

And we might have some subtests telling us that students need help with grammar, but we want to look at multiple data sources. So we want to look at that formal assessment data. Yes, we want to look at parent and teacher report, work samples, classroom observations, language samples. We want to take multiple pieces of data to really understand. What are the students strengths and what are their needs?

Because they might have performed poorly on a grammar subtest, not because of grammar skills, but because of executive function, for example. Or maybe it was more of a vocabulary issue or comprehension. So we don't want to just take one piece of data and use that to determine our goals. We want to look at the whole picture and use that to decide what makes the most sense.

That's what we've got there. then in terms of developmental expectations, Guo et al in 2016, again, I'll put the citation in the show notes at slpnow.com/198. But they, Guo et al, looked at language samples for 300 typically developing children.

Check out the article for specific numbers for different age ranges. But for example, six-year-olds produced an average of 90.64% of grammatically correct utterances. So they call that PGU. So 90% on average, I believe the standard deviation was like six. So the majority of kiddos were producing sentences with 80 to 96-ish or 84 to 96-ish percent accuracy, roughly. Check out the article for the specific numbers. That gives us an idea for how many errors we're expecting at that age for six-year-olds, for example.

And the number continues to increase as students get older. So that's just something to keep in mind. That gives us kind of a frame for reference if we're looking at a language sample and deciding if there might be a need for grammatical intervention, for example, especially if parent-teacher report, we're seeing this in their work samples, et cetera. So one goal or a couple avenues for goals, we could keep it very, very general. Going along with the Guo et al study, we can have a goal around students producing X percentage of grammatically correct sentences.

and using that PGU measure using a language sample, which again, check out the Guo et al article. Another way that we can approach this is the percent of grammatical responses. So PGU uses a language sample, and PGR (percentage of grammatical responses) uses pictures and prompts. And then they measure the percentage of grammatically correct responses. And again, this is Eisenberg and Guo 2017. They did the study with three year olds, but they give you the pictures and the prompts. And so that could be an interesting measure to use.

That can be like a really general goal, but we likely want to select specific targets that the students demonstrate needs for. And we like, in order to make progress towards that goal, we would have to target specific structures anyway. But that is one option in approaching our goal of writing.

Another goal would be to identify the specific targets. Whether we're working on comprehension or production. And we can decide what would be most impactful for our students. But.

We would select a target that we want the student to demonstrate comprehension or production of. So, for example, for comprehension of plural nouns, we might give the students some sentences and they have to identify the correct picture. So whether it's singular versus plural. So we might have the doc, the girl is walking the dogs. And then we have a picture of a girl walking one dog versus two dogs. And then they have to identify the correct picture.

That could be one example of a comprehension goal that we set up or for production, we just give the student those pictures and they have to produce a sentence. And that can be one level of it, or we can ask, we can expect them to produce those targets in structured activities and spontaneous speech. There's lots of ways to write these goals, but the basic formula is having a specific skill.

And then deciding how you want to measure it and describing that in the goal. And then these sample goals that I'm giving don't include, again, duration, accuracy, criterion, level of support, baseline setting, et cetera, et So we obviously want to add in elements that are required and that make for a clear, smart goal.

And like I was saying, it makes it a lot easier to write and measure the goal throughout the IEP if we're able to figure out how we want to assess this goal. So whether you're using like a rubric or a probe, just make sure that you have that ready to go to make sure that you're writing a goal that is actually measurable. And then it'll make your progress monitoring and progress reporting a million times easier if you have that ready to go. And then if you can attach anything, any of those types of resources to the IEP, that makes it even more impactful. If the student were to transfer or if they moved to a different SLP for whatever reason, then we'll have that continuity in our intervention and it'll be just beautiful stuff.

Okay, so we're wanting to think about, I'll link to the episodes on grammar intervention and how to embed that in case that makes it easier to think about goal writing too, because that context is important. But in the show notes, I'm also going to list a guide created by the Informed SLP.

It gives a suggested sequence for grammar intervention. There are a lot of skills on this list. But if we are, let's say we collect, so we have formal assessment data. We have our parent and teacher report. We observe in the classroom, we have work samples. We've done some informal assessmentm have that language sample. We have a lot of pieces of data.

And across those pieces of data, we've likely identified targets that the student seems to struggle with, whether they haven't been able to produce them or they've produced them incorrectly. So we can have a working list of targets. And then you can look at the Informed SLP's guide. "OK, I have a list of 10 things, 10 grammar targets."

"How do I decide how to tackle this? Which one do I want to target first? In what sequence do I do this in?" The Informed SLP guide will walk you through that. It's a really nice resource. But I think it is a little overwhelming to look at all those skills. If you don't have any of that data going in, then it might be like, my goodness. But it can also be helpful if you're wanting to do some.

It could guide your assessment too. "I feel like the student is around this level." You can probe some of those skills to decide what you might want to target as well. So there's a couple of different ways to use that. but the main thing that we're looking at are like, what are the common threads across all of these sources of data? What are the parents, teachers saying? What am I observing in the classroom? What do the work samples show?

And really thinking about what's impacting the student's ability to access the curriculum and participate in the classroom. So yes, the suggested sequence is really helpful. But if there's a skill a little bit further down the list that are really, really impacting the student in the classroom, we might want to prioritize that.

Obviously want to think about the whole scope of that and looking at the whole child as we're deciding. which goals we want to write and how we want to tackle all of the different skills. So that's what we've got for our grammar goals. Again, head to slpnow.com/198 for quick links to the articles that I mentioned and also some example goals written out. And then I'll also link to the Informed SLP's guide for the suggested sequence of different grammar targets. And yeah, I'll see you next week where we'll continue the conversation on syntax. Hope you have a good one.