I'm Back for more advice on S&L!

[tootymaloo]

I've linked my previous post about Ds as i had so much good advice and there is such a long background!

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/special_needs/1496474-Whats-wrong-with-DS-Speech-Language

We finally had both sets of language assessments completed by NHS S&lt and independant S&lt.

NHS took an hour, Independant took 3 hours over the morning!

The outcome was that Ds has expressive and receptive language delays and pragmatic language disorder.

Both reports are great and mirror each other and contain a long list of what the school will need to put in place, which is all we really wanted to achieve as we knew he would never cope. Thankfully Ds started to use his random phrases when both S&lts chatted to him. Its the only time i have ever been pleased he has done it! They got to see the world of confusion we live in for themselves

What i am hoping is that someone can help with understanding the scores because they look average to me and even high in some areas. I have tried googling and confused myself

Sentence structure 5th percentile
word structure 63rd percentile
expressive vocab 50th percentile
concepts and following directions 25th percentile
recalling sentences 5th percentile
basic concepts 25th percentile

Both reports state that he performs far better using visual pictures in a book than transferring that language into real situations so they seem to have gone with most of the recommendations based on them trying to chat to him which just wasnt ever going to happen if they wanted a 2 way conversation!

He is also working at a 3 word level, whatever that means. He can definitely string more than 3 words together.

I'm hoping someone knows their way around CELF tests!

Thanks again

Hi - he's an explanation of what 3 word level means, the 3 word is calculated by way of understanding information carrying words in instructions

www.slc.cambridgeshire.nhs.uk/ActivitiesIdeasandInfo/PreSchool/PreSchoolResourcePack/Informationcarryingwordskeywords/tabid/1384/language/en-GB/Default.aspx

sounds like a mixed bag of results. As I recall the bottom of the normal range is 17th centile, so only the sentence structure and the sentence recall fall outside that. Around school age I found these sort of formal tests frustrating, as they didn't really seem to be looking at ability to converse iyswim.

Why aren#t the people who assessed him helping you make sense of these results? That's their job. Have you asked them? Far better to have an explanation from them than random folk online.

I guess the outcome which was delays and pragmatic disorder was the important bit.

I wondered what the numbers meant, which other than percentiles mean nothing to me. They looked like good results to me which confused me

No one in this area can phone and talk to the NHS speech therapist. You leave a message and get ignored!

Independent S&lt has written more about needs which is exactly what we needed for school provision.

Write a letter asking for a meeting to discuss it further as yuuo do not understand the outcomes and cop it into the deapt. manager.
They'll listen then.

Oh, and as you are paying the other one, the least she can do is explain the results.

Most of those scores would be considered in the normal range with the 5th percentile scores being below average.

The numbers mean on the day of the test that say the 5th percentile result as an example that out of 100 children 95 would on average do better.

The reports should really tell you everything you need to know, though.

Oh dear, i really dont think i explained myself very well

Its a terrible habit i seem to have

I was wondering how the results above showed DS had delays and pragmatic language disorder when the CELF results looked quite high on the percentiles.

The reports didnt explain that bit of it, just conclusions, his needs and how he uses and interprets language differently. All of those bits were spot on.

Should have worded it like this the first time around!

Thankyou TLP/Wasup and Moon.

Moondog is right though, both SALTs should be available to answer these sort of questions to you. And it may be worth taking it up higher if NHS SALT consistently fails to return calls at all (as opposed to returning calls a working day or two later).

That's the point we are all trying to make the reports should have made this clear if there was a pragmatic difficulty - you need to go back to the writers of these reports and ask.