Trying to understand the evaluation speech and language results for my son?

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My son recently had an independent evaluation and was also tested at the school. He is five years old and entering Kindergarten. On the school ER my son was given the CELF Preschool 2, the results were: Core Language 69, Receptive language 59, Expressive Language 73, language content 63 and Language structure 69. On the subtest it indicated sentence structure 5, word structure 2, Expressive vocabulary 7, Concepts and Following Directions 4, Recalling Sentences 7 and Word Classes 0.

The independent evaluation used the TOLD-P4 test. the scores he received were combined to yeld six separate composites for language. Those Index scores are: Listening 86, Organinizing 72, Speaking 67, Grammar 82, Semantics 65 and Spoken Language 71. I'm trying to make sense of this, and the school district says the results are the same and that there is no difference. Does anybody understand how these test compare and whether they truly are the same. The school agrees there is a language disability but the level of support is in question. Thanks for any help!

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Parent Replies to "Trying to understand the evaluation speech and language results for my son?"

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OK - it did it again. I give up.

I apologize for my crazy response. I typed in the percentile ranks for all of the Celf scores, but the message was truncated. I went back to edit, and scores came off again. Must be some kind of bug. Anyway, here they are:
Core: 2%
Receptive

I can't comment specifically on the scores because we have had several test and the scores are still kind of confusing to me. However, my son is 4 and was in speech therapy for 2 years. When he entered the program, we didn't know what was wrong. When we finally discovered he had speech apraxia, we weren't sure he'd ever speak normally. He graduated from speech therapy on Tuesday! While he still has a way to go for perfect pronunciation, he has come incredibly far. It's important to sit on your SLP (Speech therapy) lessons to learn the ways to help your child learn to speak normally. If you can't do this, ask for detailed notes from your SLP therapist so you can work on the same things at home. Don't be afraid of this diagnosis.. I sure was, it's treatable and the earlier you have caught this, the better. Good for you for having these tests done now!

Yes - mandep is right, the expressive langauge scores are his relative strength. Celf Scores are standard scores, the subtests are scaled scores. Neither are stated as percentile ranks. The percentile ranks would be as follows:
Core Lang 2%
receptive

I would just like to clarify that the CELF scores are standard scores and not percentiles. Also it is important to note that your son's receptive language (i.e., his understanding of language) is slightly lower than his expressive (i.e. his ability to use language to communicate). Therefore, he really needs speech and laugage therapy. Speech therapist usually work on the "articulation" of the words, but your son likely also requires language therapy to build on his understanding of language and developing sentences etc. In regards to his level of support, I would advocate for several sessoins of speech and language therapy a week. He would likely benefit the most from pull-out services in either a one on one or small group setting. If you the school will not provide him adequate support or services, you could also look into him recieving additonal private speech and language services.

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