Writing Speech Therapy Goals for Syntax

Marisha (00:00)

Hey, it's Marisha and I cannot wait to continue our goal series. This is the last solo episode that I'll be recording for a little while. And we are going to dive into syntax. So here we go. And I know a lot of you might be thinking, don't hit pause just yet. If you're working with preschool, early elementary,

This might still be an impactful area to work on with some students. It's not just an area for older students. And we'll talk a little bit about kind of the norms and what this would look like. And I have come to really, really love this area as like an intervention. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. So like we've done in previous episodes,

I wanna chat a little bit about why we might even target syntax. And like I said, this is relevant even with preschool, kindergarten, early elementary kiddos. So I love this quote from Balthazar and Scott, 2023. Again, I'll link to the articles and citations in the show notes. You can find the syntax.

the resources for this episode at slpnow.com slash 199. But again, the quote from Balthazar and Scott, 2023. So they say, inability to comprehend key sentences in a text will undermine finding the main idea, drawing conclusions, making inferences, or answering many comprehension questions. So, whoa, okay, let's break that down. So syntax, if teachers are,

reporting that students are having difficulty identifying the main idea, like summarizing, making inferences, answering comprehension questions. Those could all be related to syntax. Well, OK. And this could also be true. Like if we're hearing that students are struggling with following directions, syntax could also be an issue. And then Balthazar and Scott also say,

Students are expected to engage in oral discussion of topics and issues where complex ideas require complex sentences to explain, elaborate, and debate. producing compound complex sentences is necessary to express those complex ideas and to understand complex ideas too. So the name of this article is Sentences Are Key.

And sentences really are key. Syntax is a huge component of a lot of the skills in areas that we might see students struggling with. So it might look like they're having difficulty summarizing or making inferences or with comprehension, but maybe syntax is really like that core component that they need support with. I just.

Love that kind of stuff. some skills that we might target include compound and complex sentences, comprehension of clauses, like relative clauses, adverbial clauses, et cetera, et cetera, or production of those clauses. And then we might also look at passive voice. So.

Whew, those are a lot of things. And I will link to some different resources about compound and complex sentences and clauses and passive voice because we don't have time to break those all down in this episode. But I wanted to touch on just some of the developmental expectations because I know that I presented on

Syntax at the summit and I heard a lot of chatter about well, that's a course for older students It doesn't apply to me But it's it's you'll see when we go through the research. It's really interesting to see At what ages these skills start to come into play? so Let's look at some of that data. So when it comes to production of compound or complex sentences and clauses

So Owens et al. 2024 looked at conversational language samples for 196 children ages 5 through 10, and they found that five-year-olds used an average of 1.25 subordinate clauses and 2.05 coordinate clauses. So even five-year-olds are starting to produce clauses in compound and complex sentences.

this number continues to increase with age. then page seven of their article has a really nice table. So again, this is Owens et al 2024. And I'll link to it in the show notes at slpnow.com slash 199. But if we are, even when we're working with five year olds, if we see that they're not using any compound sentences, if they're only speaking in simple sentences,

that might be an indicator that we want to target syntax with those students. And that could look like producing, we could write a goal around producing compound or complex sentences. And again, if we think back to what Balthazar and Scott said, the quotations I shared at the beginning, like this is a key skill. Like this will impact.

So many of the discussions happening in the classroom and the stories that kiddos are telling, they require a lot of complex ideas and students really need those to be able to express themselves, but also to understand all of these concepts that are being taught. And so it is a really integral component even from the early school age years. And like I said, I consider this as a goal if I'm not seeing any compound or complex sentences, they're not using.

any types of clauses and I would see that in a language sample. So this is why it's important to grab a good language sample. And then some other things we might see if students are struggling to express themselves in the classroom. So this might be like they're only writing simple sentences or they're only communicating in simple sentences in the classroom. If they're having difficulty with

classroom discussions or math word problems. Like these are all types of things that we might see. And that's why it's important to use classroom observation, parent teacher report or examples, et cetera, et to get that full picture and not just maybe a subtest of a formal assessment to help us decide our goals. Something else we can do or something, another area we can look at.

is comprehension of clauses. So students might be using simpler sentences, but they might also struggle to comprehend different types of clauses. So when we are looking at narratives and expository texts, we see a lot of temporal and causal, or causal conjunctions and

a lot of adverbial clauses to this is how we connect ideas and we'll see those a lot in directions as well. And so looking at those types of clauses and looking at the comprehension of those types of clauses can be really impactful, especially if we're seeing students struggle in those types of areas. And just another quote from Scott and Balthazar 2010.

They state that relative clauses occur regularly in narrative and expository text throughout the school years. And so again, just more rationale for why we might want to look at that. And if you're like, okay, so how am I going to look at comprehension of clauses? We have some activities in SLP Now membership. If you're a member, you can just search for, we have a syntax section that

has all of the clause resources. But if you're not a member, you can sign up for a trial. I'll include a link in the show notes as well. Or you can just go to slpnow.com. But your trial includes some free downloads if you want to check out some of those resources too. then so we want to look at comprehension of clauses if we're hearing about any of those types of.

challenges in our parent teacher report or in our observations during assessment, etc. The last area that I wanted to touch on was comprehension of passive voice and

They found, so Owens 2016 found that approximately half of five year old children accurately comprehend reversible passive sentences and 90 % of children between the ages of seven and a half. So this is a skill that many like kindergartners are coming in with. And especially as we get into like second and third grade, the majority of vast majority of children.

should be comprehending those reversible passes. And it's a skill that develops early in the school-age years. And it might be worth targeting if students are really struggling with comprehension or following directions because those, yeah, that is coming up. That might be part of the element because there is quite a bit of

passive voice in the books and the articles that students are encountering throughout the school day. And again, if I'm noticing in parent-teacher report, classroom observations, work samples, if I'm noticing that difficulty with comprehension, I might do a quick probe or dynamic assessment to look at comprehension of clauses and or passive voice.

to decide if that might be a worthwhile area to target. And again, we have resources for, we also have resources for passive voice inside the SLP Now membership if you're looking for a quick way to start looking at some of this. so given that information, some goals that we could write are like if we're looking at the comprehension side of things, students will answer questions about

sentences or paragraphs that have those target skills, whether it's passive voice, temporal conjunctions, causal conjunctions, relative clauses, three or more clauses. There's a lot of different ways that we can set that up. and again, check out the show notes, slpnow.com slash one 89 for a written overview of this. And so we just touch on comprehension.

We can also write goals for production where students will produce sentences using passive voice, temporal, causal conjunctions, relative clauses. And we can write goals for, like if they produce, if we collect a language sample and they produce like zero subordinate clauses and zero coordinate clauses, we could write a goal for that as well. That's a little bit higher level.

So we can have like, when given a picture, student will produce a compound sentence. Or we can look at the language sample and see if they're using compound or complex sentences in their spoken language. So there's different ways to piece that up. And it really depends on the student.

what we think is achievable within the goal period and or the IEP and just what would be the most impactful for them as well. So I hope this was a helpful overview. We'll have Mina Reeves on the podcast next week to talk about stuttering and really excited for that conversation. And I hope you have a great rest of your week.