Case Study – Fluency

Julian is a 12-year-old Native American male whose primary language is English. He occasionally hears Navajo at home, but he does not speak it. He enrolled in a new school two months ago due to his family moving for his father’s job relocation. He participates in an intervention for reading, but he has been progressing with the level of support that he is currently given. He is a high performer in math and often demonstrates frustration when he performs below his expectation. He has demonstrated instances of word and phrase repetitions on occasion in the past; however, in the last three months, he expresses sound, word, and phrase repetitions on almost all messages that he initiates. You observe that once he starts his message, the rest of the message is smooth and fluent. He sometimes coughs at the beginning of his messages if he notices his disfluencies. His participation in class has diminished, especially after he overheard some of his classmates talking about how he coughs a lot when he talks. The team is bringing him to the Child Study team to address his needs.