ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the way in which children’s backgrounds and existing abilities need to be taken into consideration when planning for language intervention. It is a cliché that all children are individuals and that good educational and clinical practice must take account of individual differences. However, there is a considerable gap between such an exhortation and an understanding of exactly how this can be achieved. This chapter focuses on those individual differences which are likely to disrupt developmental progress in general, and have direct implications for the acquisition of language. As well as providing guidance with respect to the management of these relatively extreme problems, it is hoped that it will provide practitioners with a more general sensitivity and understanding of individual differences which will assist in the design of intervention programmes for all language-disordered children.
