Adolescent Language Literacy: Academically-Focused Intervention Strategies

Creating effective language intervention that is focused on content area learning is a challenge across time. It is a particular challenge at the adolescent level for many reasons including the social and emotional nature of adolescence, the demands and setting of curricular learning, and the way that language disorders manifest themselves in older students. For course one, we will present a three-tiered conceptual framework that introduces participants to methods that will facilitate making intervention choices about “where to begin” and “what to do” with adolescents with language learning disabilities (LLD). Participants will develop a better understanding, starting with the introductory course, about what evidenced-based intervention looks like as we strive to help adolescents access exceedingly difficult curricular content. A three-tiered framework provides a roadmap for effective intervention: (1) Include students’ background knowledge and interests as a start to language literacy learning, (2) Integrate requirements of content-area subjects into language intervention goals, and (3) Balance content and structure knowledge in the search for meaning.