Language Assessments

What assessments would you suggest? (Read the following case study)

M.J. is a 7 year old male in 2nd grade referred to me by his parents. I know the family from the neighbourhood and they asked me to work with him because he is having difficulties with putting words together. M.J. was a late talker; his mother said he was not really putting words together until he was age three. When he did begin talking, his sentences were immature-sounding and even in kindergarten and first and second grade he was making below-age-level grammar mistakes (referring to females and males) both with the pronoun he; dropping the is verb occasionally; and mis-producing past tenses of verbs, especially the irregular verbs like go-went. He was also having difficulty with syntax (word order), especially question syntax so that when he asked me how that get in there, he meant how did that get in there M.J. also had difficulty with precisely expressing his thoughts in specific words and phrases. This seemed to reflect problems with word retrieval, choosing just exactly the word needed to express his intent, and it also included difficultly organizing his thoughts into sentences that exactly expressed his intent. For example, one day he was describing a birthday party he had attended and he spoke of the birthday boy’s mother putting firesticks on the birthday food thing. When he came to a word or phrase that was hard to retrieve, he substituted a vague word or series of words that negatively affected listener understanding. M.J. was also experiencing difficulty in school with reading comprehension and expression as well as writing, and spelling.