Foundational Language Skills Needed for Self-Advocacy

Written By Christin Sanders

I talk about self-advocacy a lot here—why it’s important, how I teach it. As I’ve mentioned before, it can be difficult to figure out the intersection between working explicitly on self-advocacy scenarios and making sure students have the foundational skills needed to understand and respond to them.

As I add to my knowledge base for how to effectively work with students on self-advocacy, I wanted to compile the foundational skills that I notice lacking and tend to target in sessions. These skills will take your student beyond “I need help,” or “Can you help me?” and help them learn to advocate through explanation and dialogue. Ultimately, these are the skills they’ll need to advocate with flair and use the “Tell Them, Ask Them” approach to its fullest effectiveness. I’ll continue to add to this list as I develop it more fully. And stay tuned for a bank of IEP goals targeting these skills!

Semantic Skills Needed to Self-Advocate

  • Basic verbs that express wants and needs

  • A robust lexicon of other school-related action verbs

  • Recognition of tier 2 and tier 2 vocabulary words (nouns and verbs)

Syntactic Skills Needed to Self-Advocate

  • Ability to form statements

  • Ability to form (and answer) questions

  • Ability to form complex sentences, especially ones that demonstrate causal, temporal, and conditional relationships

  • Ability to break down sentences, especially the compound and complex sentence structures that regularly form directions and questions

Executive Functioning Skills Needed to Self-Advocate

  • Ability to ask self-monitoring questions to check for understanding

  • Inhibitory control to check initial understanding and answers

  • Strategies to remember details about the task and what they’ve already tried

  • Metacognitive strategies to analyze the situation or task and their judgments/responses to it

Pragmatic Skills Needed to Self-Advocate

  • Knowledge of how to gain attention appropriately

  • Ability to have a back-and-forth of asking and answering questions

  • Awareness of their feelings/perspectives and others

Christin Sanders
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A Two-Step Framework for Teaching Self Advocacy