Receptive language therapy

Receptive language therapy is used to support children who have difficulties understanding what others are saying. Receptive language therapy can be used to increase children’s understanding of various aspects of language including vocabulary, the length of a sentence and its complexity. Receptive language therapy can be tailored to suit the exact needs of your child.

Receptive language therapy can help children develop the skills needed to understand what people are saying, this can increase their ability to communicate with others as well as further develop their academic learning.

Receptive language therapy is suitable for any child who has difficulty understanding spoken or written language. Some conditions that receptive language therapy may be suitable for include:

• Aphasia
• Autism spectrum disorder
• Acquired head / brain injury
• High-functioning autism
• Developmental delay
• Down's syndrome
• Learning disability
• Specific language impairment
• Stroke

A child who struggles to understand language, and would benefit from receptive language therapy can often present with the following:

• Difficulty paying attention and listening when people are talking.
• Struggles to follow instructions.
• Difficulty answering a range of questions such as; who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
• May respond to your questions by repeating back what you have said.
• May give unusual responses to questions.
• Finds it difficult to attend to stories and recall information given.
• Struggles to understand changes to a routine.

• Difficulty understanding different concepts such as place, size, colours.
• Difficulty understanding abstract language.
• Difficulty inferring information.
• Doesn’t recognize the meaning behind grammatical markers in speech such as ‘s’ or ‘es’ demonstrates plurals and ‘ing’ and ‘ed’ establishes tense.
• Struggles to understand sentences of varying length and complexities.
• Has a literal understanding of language.

Receptive language therapy would involve working on improving your child’s specific difficulties. Activities carried out would vary according to your child’s abilities, needs and would incorporate their goals and interests in order to make therapy motivating, fun and appealing.

If a young child was struggling to understand certain questions such as ‘who?’ and ‘what?’, the speech and language therapist may decide to work with the child using objects. If the child is older the speech and language therapist may choose to work with pictures, books and comics.

As well as working with the child, the speech and language therapist may choose to work with parents and teachers to change the child’s communicative environment as well as the language parents and teachers may be using with the child.

Receptive language therapy can provide many benefits to your child’s development and daily activities such as:

• Improved ability to understand others around them.
• Improvement in skills needed to communicate effectively with peers and adults.
• Strengthened ability to access the academic learning.
• Increased engagement in classroom.

• Increase in ability to understand others thoughts, opinions and actions.
• Increase in self-esteem.
• Increase in independence.
• Increase in social interaction with peers.

Receptive language therapy can have a range of benefits for your child. It can help provide them with the skills they need to better understand what is expected from them as well increase their ability to understand the environment and actions of those around them.

If you are interested in finding out more information about receptive language therapy, please email office@sltforkids.co.uk or call us on 0330 088 2298.