Helping High School Students Build Skills for Success Beyond Graduation

Do you work with high schoolers? We get asked this question a lot, and the answer is yes!

High schoolers with language and literacy needs can absolutely benefit from intervention to access and more smoothly navigate the demands of the high school curriculum.

Some students who receive intervention in elementary and middle school will continue to need support as they transition into high school. For other students who "get by" in earlier grades, language and literacy challenges emerge or become more evident as the demands of the curriculum increase in high school.

Consider the varied language and literacy demands of a high school classroom. Students must:

Understand and follow multi-step verbal directions
Attend to and follow along with lectures in class
Read textbook chapters and other grade-level material
Take notes on orally-presented information or reading material
Understand and use complex sentence structures (syntax) and subject-specific vocabulary when speaking and writing
Participate in class discussions and give presentations
Express their ideas in writing, either in short answer or longer-form writing assignments
Study for and take assessments in various formats (multiple choice, short answer, essay)
Navigate social interactions with peers and adults which require perspective-taking, problem-solving, and other social communication skills

Each of the above academic tasks involves multiple areas of language, and language in high school is more nuanced, abstract, and complex than middle school. This is also not an exhaustive list of the tasks requiring language skills in the classroom, meaning high schoolers are utilizing language at all points of their day.

In addition to the increasingly complex language of the curriculum, the explicit and implicit social expectations and the executive functioning demands for students increase as well. For example, students must:

Set short and long-term goals for themselves
Check in with themselves to figure out if they are on track, and adjust their plan if they are not
Attend to lectures and ignore distractions
Recognize when they are distracted and use strategies to redirect their attention
Inhibit the impulse to talk to their friends in class or engage in other off-task behaviors
Break up assignments and long-term projects into individual steps and make a plan for when they will complete each step
Accurately monitor their understanding of material and advocate for themselves if they do not understand

Success in high school requires students to integrate all of these language, literacy, and executive functioning skills both in school and when completing academic work at home. Students with DLD, ADHD, Specific Learning Disorder, and/or other language and literacy challenges may have difficulty with any or all of these skills, which can impact their class participation and completion of grade-level work.

Not only do deficits in these areas impact academic performance, but students who struggle in these areas may also experience feelings of inadequacy or feel misunderstood as a result of their language and learning challenges in the classroom. They may feel uncomfortable participating in certain classroom activities or have difficulty communicating in certain social contexts at school. As such, it is vital to help students build confidence and self-advocacy skills, as well as the necessary underlying language skills, to feel comfortable sharing their ideas and participating in academic and social activities.

At all levels, but especially at the high school level, the student is an active stakeholder in the therapy process. SLPs work with the student to develop and target their goals and make sure that therapy activities are functional. In other words, targeting skills and teaching strategies and tools that will most help the student to be an independent communicator in their everyday life at school and at home.

So how can intervention help high schoolers? SLPs can help students develop skills and learn compensatory strategies for a number of areas, including:

Executive functioning skills (e.g., goal-setting, time management, self-awareness and self-monitoring, working memory, self-advocacy)
Auditory memory and listening comprehension (e.g., note-taking, chunking, rehearsal, distinguishing relevant and irrelevant information)
Reading (e.g., decoding, fluency, and comprehension)
Oral expression (e.g., planning and organizing ideas for presentations, word finding, using subject-specific vocabulary, using complex syntax)
Written expression (e.g., unpacking the prompt, brainstorming, planning/outlining, revising and editing)

High school is a time for students to learn about themselves and look ahead to their futures. For students with language and learning challenges, it is especially crucial to help them develop the language to think about and express their ideas as they navigate increasingly complex academic and social situations. Intervention with high school students helps students bolster any underdeveloped skills, as well as learn what strategies and tools work best for them and how to advocate for their needs in high school and beyond.

Sources:

Buteau-Poulin, A., Gaudreau, N., & Desmarais, C. (2025). Developmental language disorder at adolescence: Links between communication skills and self-efficacy ratings. Disabilities, 5(1), 30. https://doi.org/10.3390/disabilities5010030

Ekström, A., Sandgren, O., Sahlén, B., & Samuelsson, C. (2023). 'It depends on who I'm with': How young people with developmental language disorder describe their experiences of language and communication in school. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 58, 1168–1181. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.12850

Fahy, J. K., & Browning, D. K. (2021). Adolescent language therapy: Syntax and semantics for reasoning and planning. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 6(6), 1327–1342. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_PERSP-21-00017