Is this speech language issue?

[beishan]

My son is 7.5yo and in second grade. He is bilingual but mainly speaks English now even though he continues receiving Chinese lessons once a week. Here is a little background:

 

My son is the only child and we both work. All families are living overseas. We had a nanny who only speaks Chinese to take care of his first year, and then he was in regular daycare all the way up. He started saying few single words at 18 month old and talked in sentence using both languages by age of 3. By age 4, we moved to current town due to school district and his spoken English started to take off during preschool year at local YMCA. When he entered K in public school, teacher first thought that he had good oral vocalbulary but later on found he could not fully express himself using proper language skills and had trouble to retell event in detail order. Therefore, she requested ESL assessment. He was tested at the borderline but we agreed to let him receive the ESL in school. We then gave up bilingual setting at home and use only English. Through the first grade, his ESL teacher has been telling me how good his English is and he does not need the ESL. However, his social skills therapist told me that he has hard time to understand WH-questions. Also his first grade teacher concerns about his slow progress in language art (reading & writing). She is not sure if it's due to bilingual influence or there is any other hidden issue. I hired the tutor (reading specialst from local private school) in summer and seems his reading is catching up and progressing per tutor's comments.

 

I do notice continuous improvement of his language every year but his word usage still not as mature as his native speaking peers, especially trying to explain things as whole. For example, my husband was asking him question about the his morning routine when he is taking the bus from YMCA.

 

He asked "How long do you need to wait after you get off the bus?"

 

He was not responding.

 

Then I revised the question to "After getting off from Y bus, do you wait outside or wait inside the building?"

 

After 30 seconds, he answered, "we do not wait inside the building. We WALKED in the building."

 

Then we asked "So you do not need to wait and go into the building directly?"

 

He said "No, we wait outside."

 

Then we both were puzzling and asked "do you wait outside of your classroo?"

 

He said "No, we wait outside of the building. It's in the back of building"

 

Then I said "do you mean that you walk in the building and then go outside of the building to wait? where do you go outside?"

 

He said "from the back door. We have to wait outside till teacher call our line."

 

It needs quite a few drills before we can figure out the whole situation from him. He does improve than he did before. At least now he is able to answer to the question. When he was in K, he often answered something irrelevent. 

He has not problem in regular day to day communication or socialized language. He also can answer correctly for basic WH-question like "What do you want for dinner?" or "Who sit next to you in the bus today?" But seems having more trouble to express the whole thing when the answer involves multiple sequencing events. Recently we have been practicing event sequencing in writting and he is getting better now. I hope it will eventually help him on his oral language as well.

 

Does this sound normal language ability for a 7.5 yo bilingual boy? All these years, everyone has been telling me it is normal for boy and bilingual children. It will out grow. However, I do not see this happen on my friend's children who also have bilingual background. They are all able to handle both languages well and explain things well at this age. Which direction we should go to sort it out?

[Lecka]

I don't know, but I don't think it could hurt to send a note to school requesting he be screened by the school SLP.

 

Say he has trouble communicating clearly, I guess.

 

I don't really know, though.

[OneStepAtATime]

The person doing an evaluation through a school system may not have nearly enough training to be able to accurately assess what may be happening.  You might want an independent assessment for other issues such as dyslexia and other issues that might be going on.  The bilingual background may be masking other situations that could be occurring.  Not sure where you should start looking, though...neuro-psych and speech therapist?

[OneStepAtATime]

Neuro-psychologist being a separate person from the speech therapist... sorry, I may not have made that clear.

[beishan]

Thanks both. Thta's why I am so confusing. His progress seems swinging at the lower range of normal developemnt chekpoint so it's hard to say if he really has issue or not.

 

I mentioned this situation to his ESL teacher at the end of first grade and she did not think it's big deal. She does not think what he answered is too far from what we asked. She thought it's part of ESL process and understanding WH question is not very easy to ESL students. They did fun card practice for WH during ESL pull out session and he did great. However, in real world conversation, he does not apply those skills automatically and completely yet. It's the same situation in his reading. He knows phonics and rule, and did great in phonics games and word list. But he does not apply automatically when he reads without reminder and many practices. Maybe that is his learning style?

 

We actually had school pyschologist monitored him before as his K teacher had concern on his tantrum and cooperation. Pyschologist does not give me any feedback or followup afterward. I assume she does not suspect anything too abnormal. When he was in first grade, the tantrum disapeared and cooperation situation improved as well. Both his teacher and we concluded it for maturity.

 

I was trying to make appointment in children hospital for evaluation as they have full range of experts and the facility is recommanded by my neighbor who is special ed teacher. In addition, it may be earsier if we need to pull in other experts to do more evaluation. However, their waiting period is like 6 months+ long just to get the assessment appointment. Should I go ahead and wait for 6 months for this appointment or should I go for individual neuro pyschologist clinic for a quick screening?

 

[PeterPan]

Have you thought about looking for a private SLP?  Most will talk with you on the phone, so you could just talk it through with them and see if they think the situation warrants an eval.  A neuropsych would only refer off for the speech problem anyway.  If he is behind on his language and frustrated, that could set him up with behaviors that look like another label and aren't.  (That happens with apraxia, where a dc will get a psych label and lose it after the ST kicks in.)  So I would pursue a better SLP eval unless you have a reason to think there's spectrum or something else going on.  

 

And no, you don't want to go to a place that's fast to get into.  That's your sure sign it's not the best place in town.  ;)  Yes get on the waiting list for the longer place.  You can always cancel when you get closer if you realize you don't need it.

[beishan]

Elizbeth

 

Thanks. I will search for local SLP to see if it is a red flag for speech language issue. 

 

By the way, I think his oral reading fluency is getting better after he got the glasses. Today he is reading tale of Peter Rabbit with his tutor. They had a great session today.