Why Speech Therapy for Teens?
In 2018, I started my career split between an elementary and middle school. I felt fairly comfortable working with elementary kids, but working with junior high school students? To be honest, I wasn’t in a great place emotionally for that first month. I was lost. I found myself diving into resources—skimming through textbooks, reading research articles, scouring websites, and watching online lectures to find best practices on speech therapy for teens. As I deepened my understanding of this age group, I developed a vivid appreciation for the daily challenges teens who receive speech therapy face, both in and outside the classroom.
I’ve wanted to write this article for a long time, and I am excited to finally explain what speech therapy for adolescents involves for curious parents. First, we’ll explore who this article is for, define developmental language disorder (DLD), discuss how this can impact a teen’s school experience, and finally, where to find help.
A Focus on Language Challenges
Adolescents may see a speech-language pathologist for a variety of reasons in a junior high or high school setting. Some of these reasons include articulation issues (speech sound production), stuttering, a language disorder, social skill difficulties related to autism and functional communication skills for students with severe disabilities.
In this article, we will focus on teens with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a condition that impacts a child’s ability to use and understand language. While speech sound errors, stuttering, autism, and severe disabilities are easier to notice, DLD tends to fly under the radar because the signs are often more subtle. But don’t worry - in this next section, we will dive deeper into what DLD is and explore other terms commonly used interchangeably with DLD.
What is Developmental Language Disorder?
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a condition which affects how children learn, understand, and use language across their lifespan. These children may have difficulty using complete sentences and often have smaller vocabularies compared to their typical peers. Although the cause is unknown, many children with this condition have family members with a similar history of challenges with language. Developmental means that this condition appears in early childhood and continues into adulthood. While each child has unique challenges, they often share difficulty with vocabulary, grammar and social communication. Related terms you may come across include:
Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
Expressive and Receptive Language Disorder
Expressive Language Disorder
Language Delay
Language Disorder
While these terms have slightly different meanings, they all share ongoing difficulty with learning, understanding and using language.
DLD is a Moving Target
Preschool and school-aged children with DLD often make noticeable mistakes while they speak. As children with DLD grow, they often outgrow these surface-level errors, sounding like typical peers. However, as language demands increase, deeper challenges in comprehension and verbal expression persist. In other words, DLD evolves as children grow; when language demands change, the disorder appears differently.
Now that we’ve defined DLD, let’s examine why speech therapy for teens is vital to their academic and future success.
The ‘Why’ Behind Speech Therapy for Teens
Classrooms are Language Jungles
Navigating classroom language is much like finding your way through a jungle full of obstacles. Students must grasp complex sentences, tackle unfamiliar vocabulary and draw on background knowledge to thrive in both middle and high school. Without the right tools or guidance, they may lose their way.
Complex sentences are so common that we often don’t notice them. Complex sentences occur when we combine two sentences using words like ‘because,’ ‘when,’ or ‘that.’ Almost every time we share our thoughts, explain ideas, or describe events, we use complex sentences— something children frequently encounter in classroom lessons and textbooks. As children grow, the number on complex sentences they encounter only increases. Consider this example where all complex sentences are highlighted:
Thanksgiving traces its origins to 1621 when the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people [ADV] shared a harvest feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Because the Pilgrims [ADV] had endured a harsh winter, they relied on the native farming techniques which [REL] helped lead to a successful harvest.
For typical children, these sentences challenge their language skills and help them grow. However, for teens with language disorders, these sentences can be a major barrier to learning. With speech therapy, they can master these structures to support their academic and everyday communication.
After fourth grade, children transition from learning to read to reading to learn, a critical period where they begin to learn content from science and social studies texts, rather than focusing on basic reading skills. Some examples of words teens with DLD may find difficult to learn include:
provide
occur
ambiguous
temperate
particle
While typical children expand their vocabulary through reading, teens with DLD often struggle to keep pace due to their underlying language disorder. This can affect their ability to learn and understand words across subjects, making it harder for them to keep up academically. Speech therapy for teens with DLD can drive vocabulary growth to support school success.
Executive Functioning
Executive functioning refers to a set of mental skills that help us manage daily tasks. These skills allow us to plan, organize, focus, solve problems, make decisions and remember information. The development of strong executive functioning skills in teens is essential to stay on top of academic and social demands at school. For many teens with DLD, difficulty with executive functioning skills— especially those related to language, such as making inferences and figurative language.
An inference is a prediction based on past experiences with similar situations. Making inferences involves memory and critical thinking to draw similarities between two ideas. For example, a student may predict something scary will happen in a horror story based on details about a dark passage. For this inference, a typical student may realize that the author wrote more detail than usual about the dark passage. This student recalls from similar stories that authors describe events in detail immediately before something scary or shocking happens. Therefore, the student correctly detects the foreshadowing and excitedly turns the page to see what happens next. Teens with language disorders may miss these clues because they struggle to connect past experiences to the present text.
Figurative language refers to words and phrases that go beyond their literal meaning to create a richer and more imaginative understanding. Types of figurative language include metaphors, similes, proverbs, idioms, humor, and irony. Figurative language relies heavily on verbal reasoning. For example, the idiom ‘break the ice’ requires understanding its literal and figurative meaning and context. In this case, a US history teacher wrote let’s break the ice on the whiteboard on the second day of school. Since it’s the second day of class, context suggests that break the ice is likely about getting to know one another. Teens with DLD often struggle with idioms because of difficulties with verbal reasoning.
Memory and attention are other key areas of executive functioning, and many teens with DLD often have a hard time remembering what is said to them the first time. As a result, they may have gaps in general knowledge. These gaps can make it harder to grasp new content over time, especially in middle and high school. They may also struggle with shifting their focus from one task to another, or sustain attention for long periods of time.
Speech therapy for teens with DLD can build reasoning skills to make inferences and understand figurative language, develop strategies for memory and attention challenges, and ultimately enhance academic success—helping them thrive in school and in life.
Emotional and Mental Health
Teens with DLD often face emotional challenges due to their language difficulties. They may experience low self-esteem, anxiety, difficulty forming and maintaining friendships, social isolation and even behavioral issues. These challenges not only affect their personal growth but interfere with their ability to succeed in school and other social settings.
As they become aware of their learning differences from peers, some teens may act out to class to to avoid difficulty tasks or to gain attention from peers. Others may withdraw from participating in class or speaking up to hide their struggles in fear of being singled out. These adolescents may also develop anxiety and stress due to spending extra time on assignments, making comparisons between themselves and peers, and challenges in forming and maintaining friendships.
Although only a mental health provider is uniquely qualified to address the social and emotional health issues discussed above, speech therapy for teens with language disorders can encourage teens to be more assertive in asking for help from their teachers, develop their language skills to navigate social situations successfully, and provide a safe space to practice social skills with a professional who understands their perspective.
Finding Speech Therapy for Teens
Navigating the challenges of adolescence is tough, but for teens with DLD, it can feel overwhelming. If your teen is struggling with language skills, social interactions, or keeping up academically, speech therapy can provide the support they need. At Precision Speech and Language Therapy, we’re passionate about helping kids of all ages strengthen their communication skills, build confidence, and thrive both in and out of the classroom.
Your teen’s future is important, and we’re here to help them succeed every step of the way. Contact us today to schedule a consultation or book an evaluation or therapy session. Let’s begin this journey together toward better communication, academic achievement, and emotional well-being.
