Raising Awareness of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

Friday 15^th 0ctober 2021

This Friday 15^th October 2021 is Developmental Language Disorder Day.

This is an annual event now in its fifth year, where interested parties e.g. speech and language therapists, teachers, parents, families and other professionals etc inform members of the public about this communication difficulty.

DLD Awareness Day is organised by a group called Raising awareness of Developmental Language Disorder (RADLD) www.radld.org

Developmental Language Disorder is a condition where children and /or adults have difficulty understanding and/or using spoken language.

A child/adult is diagnosed with DLD if language problems:

• impact on ability to communicate effectively in everyday life
• are persistent in nature i.e. likely to continue beyond the age of 5 years and into adult life
• are not associated with a known biomedical condition e.g. autism, brain injury, sensori -neural hearing loss or a chromosome disorder

(see diagram below)

However, a child/person can still receive a diagnosis of DLD if they also have certain other conditions. These include …

• attention difficulties e.g. ADHD i.e Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
• motor problems e.g. Dyspraxia
• literacy difficulties
• speech sound disorder
• behaviour/emotional problems

Some children in Thornfield present with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).

In school we will be running a series of events to support this special day. We will be…

• turning our school notice boards purple and sharing information about DLD
• wearing DLD T shirts
• holding DLD colouring in competitions
• wearing DLD stickers
• posting information about DLD on the school face book page

and

• Mrs Mc Teggart will be running a take over of Twitter on the Royal College of Speech and Lanuage Therapists website ( RCSLT)

To support all children with DLD on Friday 15^th October 2021 there will be lots of activities taking place across Northern Ireland.

Listen/watch local TV news, media platforms and radio programmes to hear speech and language therapists, parents and children talk about their experiences suporting and working with children/people with DLD.

In this way we hope that you too can particiate in and enjoy the day.

With Thanks from the therapy staff in Thornfield.