Understanding how a child communicates is a delicate process that requires patience, observation, and time. Tragically, a recent study suggests that time has become a major obstacle for the very experts tasked with assessing and assisting children with language difficulties. In a comprehensive survey of 337 U.S. speech-language pathologists (SLPs), only 60 percent reported utilizing language sample analysis during the previous year. Among those who had not used the method, an overwhelming 74 percent identified limited time as the primary barrier preventing them from doing so, according to research published by Wilder and Redmond in 2024.
This systemic deficit means that many students are not being properly assessed in educational and clinical settings. Without a thorough, nuanced understanding of a student’s unique challenges and everyday communication needs, adults are profoundly hindered in their collective efforts to provide well-informed, targeted support. Standardized tests offer a snapshot of a child’s abilities, but they frequently fail to capture the messy, organic reality of how a child actually speaks, listens, and interacts in the real world.
Amid such pressing professional challenges, the critical question remains: How can educators and clinicians properly hear what a child’s everyday communication truly reveals? To better understand the answer to that question and explore potential solutions, an interview was conducted with Yvonne Johansen, a veteran pediatric speech-language pathologist trained at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the founder of SmartFelt Toys.
Johansen’s expansive 35-year career has spanned diverse environments, including Head Start programs, public schools, private practices, consulting roles for California’s Regional Centers, and serving as the Clinical Director of Pathways to Speech. During the discussion, Johansen shed light on the persistent difficulties of assessing children’s language in modern practice, as well as the practical steps adults can take to overcome these hurdles and ensure students receive the specialized support they require to thrive.
The Gold Standard That Slips Through the Cracks
Language sample analysis—a clinical method in which a child’s spontaneous language is recorded during play, casual conversation, or storytelling, and is subsequently transcribed and analyzed—is widely considered by professionals to be the gold standard for assessing children’s communication skills. Yet, despite its high clinical value, it is not utilized nearly as often as it should be.
Reflecting on her early days in the profession, Johansen recalled her introduction to the method. As an undergraduate in the 1980s, she worked for the New York City Board of Education’s Citywide Speech Services while concurrently attending classes. She vividly remembers completing her very first language sample analysis. Immediately, she recognized its immense importance, but the manual labor involved was staggering. Transcribing a standard 50-utterance sample—capturing roughly 50 distinct thoughts or statements made by a child—word for word, and then manually analyzing the linguistic structures, took hours upon hours of painstaking work by hand.
When a professional task is that intensely time-consuming, avoiding it can easily become a temptation. Consequently, many school-based speech-language pathologists let language sampling slip entirely out of their diagnostic battery simply because it falls outside the realistic daily bandwidth of a typical school schedule.
Although modern technology has introduced specialized software designed to assist with transcription and analysis, the initial hurdle of getting the child to talk freely remains a significant challenge. In a standard 30-minute clinical session, a practitioner must rapidly establish trust and build rapport, all while keeping a child engaged long enough to elicit 50 or more meaningful utterances. Furthermore, the clinician has to fundamentally alter how they communicate with the child. This is not a traditional therapy session where instruction flows in one direction, and speech therapists, by nature of their profession, tend to talk a lot. To successfully secure a natural language sample, the clinician has to consciously step back and become the copilot rather than the pilot, a dynamic adjustment that is often surprisingly difficult for professionals to execute.
Why Standardized Tests Fall Short
To appreciate why language sampling remains indispensable despite these logistical hurdles, one must understand the limitations of conventional testing methods. Johansen emphasized that she has frequently worked with young children who were fully capable of answering structured questions correctly on a standardized test, yet struggled profoundly to explain to an adult what had happened to them at school that day or articulate why they were upset.
A comprehensive language sample allows professionals to actually hear how a child uses language in real time to navigate social interactions and express complex ideas. Furthermore, a growing body of research underscores the long-term predictive power of early verbal expression. Studies, including notable work by Griffin and colleagues in 2004, have found that specific qualitative aspects of how children tell stories and explain concepts at the age of five serve as reliable predictors of their reading comprehension abilities by the age of eight.
Beyond predicting future literacy, a natural language sample reveals critical details regarding a child’s mastery of content, form, and use of language. This qualitative insight is essential for accurately determining a child’s legal and clinical eligibility for specialized support services. Beyond eligibility determinations, it provides actionable information regarding what a specific child truly needs and where their individualized therapy program should logically begin.
Overcoming Obstacles Through Play and Engagement
Addressing the practical difficulties of eliciting conversational data requires moving beyond rigid testing frameworks. Throughout her extensive career, Johansen frequently encountered children who refused to speak in a classroom setting, spoke only in whispers, or limited their verbal communication to a very select group of trusted individuals. Through this hands-on experience, she learned that encouraging a child to talk cannot be achieved simply by asking a series of direct questions. Instead, practitioners must identify and leverage something that genuinely engages the child’s interest and draws them in naturally.
With younger children, play consistently proves to be the most effective starting point, provided the clinician can capture and hold the child’s interest. If a child dislikes the specific toys or materials provided during an evaluation, they are unlikely to remain engaged, resulting in sparse linguistic data.
Another crucial lesson Johansen learned is the importance of moderation: adults should avoid demanding too much, too soon from a young child. Practitioners and educators should always start with activities the child can easily manage, and then build upward from there, keeping the interaction comfortably within the child’s personal comfort zone.
Children naturally gravitate toward toys they can physically handle, manipulate, and move around within a simulated environment. A classic dollhouse or a farm playset populated with figures and animals provides children with plenty of active tasks and conversational prompts. In these scenarios, children can readily invent their own narratives, direct the action, and decide what happens next in the storyline. Children who are genuinely engaged in play will talk more spontaneously, providing clinicians with rich, authentic language samples that would likely remain hidden if an adult were simply sitting directly across from them and firing off a barrage of direct questions.
Empowering Parents and Teachers in the Process
The burden of improving language assessment does not fall solely on the shoulders of speech-language pathologists. Parents and teachers occupy a vital frontline position. They are almost always the very first individuals to notice when a child is experiencing difficulties with communication, and their daily observations carry immense weight in the diagnostic process.
Because of this unique vantage point, it is imperative for parents and educators to pay close attention to how a child talks about everyday events, explains a novel idea, or invents their own stories during unstructured play. Crucially, adults should allow children the space to talk freely without overwhelming them with a relentless series of questions. Adults must learn to let the child take the conversational lead while they gently follow along.
If parents or teachers harbor concerns regarding the current level of a child’s language development, they should share their specific observations and concerns directly with a speech-language pathologist, and explicitly ask whether a natural language sample was included as part of the formal evaluation. Ultimately, what matters most in pediatric care is securing a true, real-life picture of how a child communicates with the world around them, rather than relying solely on how they happen to perform on a standardized test.
