LANGUAGE RED FLAGS: A SCREENING CHECKLIST

By Alice Thomas and Glenda Thorne

Receptive Language
____	As a young child, frequently mis-sequences sounds or syllables in words (mazagine, ephelant)
____	Tunes out in conversation more than his/her peers
____	Has trouble following verbal directions (spoken or written)
____	Need for having verbal instructions repeated
____	Problems understanding questions
____	Difficulty concentrating in verbal settings but not in other settings
____	Late acquiring reading decoding skills
____	Concrete interpretation of abstract or figurative language (For example, "Like a fish out of water.")
____	Poor reading comprehension past the 4th grade
____	Trouble learning a foreign language
Expressive Language
____	Non-verbal
____	Excessive use of simple, declarative, and incomplete sentences
____	Hesitant, slow speech (dysfluency)
____	Excessive use of pause words such as ummm, you know, like, etc.
____	Use imprecise or incorrect sequencing in stories or events
____	Forgets plural endings or uses incorrect or omit correct verb tense endings
____	Uses inflection instead of syntax in forming questions (For example, "The dog is gone?")
____	Poor use of cohesive ties (but, and, so, next, then, etc.)
____	Lack of verbal participation
____	Poor written expression
____	Brevity, failure to elaborate
____	Redundancy of vocabulary and/or ideas
____	Struggles to invent alternative endings to stories
____	Avoidance of pronouns, with frequent repetition of proper nouns
____	Tendency to misjudge prior knowledge of the listener
____	Weak revision skills
____	Excessive syntactic and morphological errors
____	Difficulty arranging events or ideas in the right order
____	Word retrieval problems (dysnomia)
____	Frequent "circling" around a word - circumlocution (For example, saying "the thing that you step on to stop the car" instead of "brake")
____	Avoidance of written work