Does DSS need Speech Therapy?

[moominsmummy]

DSS is 12 and just started high school. He had hearing difficulties when younger and whilst he has made loads of progress his speech is still very immature and we struggle to understand him at times.

It seems to have reached a plateau and is not improving anymore - even our 3 year old has better grammatical sentence construction. DSS cannot recognise that he talks differently to other people - he makes words up ("I taked the cake") and this is really showing up in his written work
I just cannot see how he is ever going to get on in written english when he doesn't know the spoken grammar

Does he need a speech therapist, how do we get him assessed for one and could they do anything to help him?

We are so worried that he is going to get picked on more and more by other kids because he sounds so "babyish"

moomins, I am no expert but it does sound like some one-to-one speech therapy would not be a bad idea. There is a thing called verbal dyspraxia which my son has (though he also has autism, which of course affects his speech) but I think the verbal dyspraxia makes his prononciation poor and makes him forget words he has learned. I think it's probably important that you find the right speech therapist as they are expensive and you really needs someone who has dealt with this age group and problem. There is a speech therapist on another thread on MN. Will come back in a sec with her nickname.

Moondog is her name, so maybe you should start a thread asking "moomdog are you there, need some advice?!

Have the school suggested he should be assessed? Did the primary school ever do one?
Ds1 has been having help with speech therapy after a referral through his primary school, and ds2 through his pre-school. I would talk to the school SENCO and see if they can start the ball rolling.

the less said about his current school the better - he was being bullied recently (badly - punched in the head etc) and the school said they would "monitor the situation" and wouldn't do anything more until we threatened to take it to the governers, OFSTED and LEA

he did have an educational psychologist assessment just before leaving primary which noted his extremely short attention span and very poor auditory memory - but his problems are not severe enough to warrant any additional support at his high school. grrrrr!

I agree with aquariusmum. I imagine that if your DS has a poor auditory memory, then that would impact on his vocab/make word retrieval more difficult for him. .