hi kissingfrogs, you sound like you are doing a great job with dd. i can understand your frustration; our ds's language problems seem to be outwith our salt's area of interest and so most of the support i've had has been from here. also it has been my experience working with pupils who have a hearing loss and additional language problems that even by secondary school, the exact nature of the "additional" difficulties is never pinpointed. we try to overcome this by focussing on what the child's communication needs are rather than what is causing the problem, but it does often feel as though we are rather working in the dark.
i have had nothing concrete from salt in the 18 months we've had one. not one report, just discussions on how ds's language is developing and the suggestion that we "wait and see" how he progresses. when we first visited salt, ds was displaying some asd traits and i think that this can be common with children who have disordered language. from the discussions i've had with salt and lots of discussions on here, my understanding is that my ds is not developing language in the typical way, learning what words mean and applying them in communicative situations, but is more interested in the patterns and sounds of words and will learn whole strings of words without being particularly interested in their meaning or how he will use them to communicate. as his repertoire of memorised chunks became bigger, he was able to use some of them is more and more relevant ways. it was still obvious that they weren't "his" sentences but he was beginning to use them in something approaching conversation. but because he is used to learning words and sentences by the pattern or sound they make, when he tries to recall them now to make his own sentences, it is difficult for him to find the words. he hasn't "filed" them in a useful way. this makes him more likely to stick to repeating the learned lines than to try to put words together himself; it's the easier option for him.
sorry that was a particularly lengthy answer to your question about ds!!
i think you are right about filling in the words for the maternal/reflective approach to reading. as i understand it, you are taking the child's attempts and adding your "scaffolding" to show how their attempts at communication will look in written english.
it sounds as though your dd's visual strengths are affecting her negatively in the same way as my ds's strengths for memorising the prosodic elements of language are affecting him. that is, she might be "storing" the word with too much emphasis on how it looks rather than what it means or how it can be used. do you think it would be useful to do activities with flashcards that perhaps have two or three examples of the same words in different fonts, plus pictures of that word and ask her to match words that are the same with a picture of the word and then find a picture where the word is being used? so for example a few examples of the word "ball" in different fonts, plus the word "hat" or whatever then pictures of these two things, so that dd has to match up all the different ways the word can be represented then find a picture of a hat being worn or a ball being thrown, so that when she is learning the word, she's making lots of associations with it rather than just that one association. hopefully that will make the word easier to retrieve when she needs to use it or when she sees it again?
i'm really not explaining these very well am i?! i tend to work with older teenagers, so am not very experienced with working with kids the same age as our dcs! haven't started with pre-reading skills with ds; i live in scotland so am able to defer his entry to school until he is 5.8. i'm hoping it gives him more time to discover what language is for! he has only just turned 4 (today!) so i'm hoping that by the time he goes to school it will all be more meaningful for him.