Grammar Trackers - DSS 1-3, Brown's Morphemes, and Verb Tenses

As a language specialist, I know that capturing the progression of language acquisition can feel overwhelming.

These trackers are a set of tools I developed for:

• visually organizing your data collection

• planning for therapy sessions or your modeling targets

• helping parents and other stakeholders ‘see’ what their child has achieved and what is coming next

• keeping informal longitudinal data on acquisition patterns

Use this 20-page set of tracking tools to organize your client’s progress visually and make next steps clearer to parents and other stakeholders!

Digital download allows for unlimited usages for your personal caseload.

Please note: these trackers are not to be used for diagnosis, formal scoring, training in a particular program/framework, or prescriptivist applications of theory. They are not comprehensive trackers for all elements of language. Instead, they are visual methods that draw from qualitative and clinical research to support clinical analysis - not define it. For example, the DSS-informed tracker and the Brown’s-informed tracker provide conflicting information about acquisition patterns because of their different samples. This highlights the importance of clinical interpretation within the context of the child, their unique neural process of language acquisition, and the trajectory of language intervention that is most relevant and affirming to their goals, needs, and quality of life.

Sources:

Blanc, M. (2012). Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum: The Journey from Echolalia to Self-Generated Language. Madison, WI: Communication Development Center Inc.

Brown, R. (1973). A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ebbels, S., & Owen Van Horne, A. (2020). Grammatical concepts of English: Suggested order of intervention. The Informed SLP. https://www.theinformedslp.com/review/the-grammar-guide-you-never-knew-you-always-wanted

Lee, L. L. (1974). Developmental sentence analysis: a grammatical assessment procedure for speech and language clinicians. Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

Payne, T. E. (2011). Understanding English Grammar: A Linguistic Introduction. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.