Expanding Expressions

Speech Therapy Strategies for Increasing MLU

Expanding expressions is a foundational technique in speech therapy and a core component of expressive language intervention.

At its core, expanding expressions focuses on increasing a child’s mean length of utterance (MLU) and overall sentence complexity. While the goal may sound straightforward, how you target expanding expressions depends heavily on the child’s age, language profile, and therapy goals.

This page breaks down how expanding expressions look across developmental stages—and how to support them effectively in therapy and at home.

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Expanding Expressions for Late Talkers

For late talkers, expanding expressions typically becomes a primary goal once a child:

Has approximately 10–50 words
Is consistently imitating
Has moved beyond first words

(If a child is still working on imitation or early vocabulary, those skills should be targeted first.)

Once a child has enough words, the focus shifts to combining words meaningfully.

What This Looks Like in Therapy

For toddlers and late talkers, expanding expressions is most effective when done implicitly during play and daily routines.

Common strategies include:

Expansions
Repeating a child’s utterance while increasing complexity by one linguistic unit
Child: “car”
Adult: “red car”
Recasts
A type of expansion that changes the grammatical form or sentence structure
Child: “baby drink”
Adult: “The baby is drinking.”

Because of the child’s age, these strategies are embedded naturally into play and caregiver interactions rather than structured drill work.

Late Talker Hot Tip

When expanding expressions with late talkers, we want to target both:

Vocabulary growth
Sentence structure development

That means modeling meaningful combinations, not just longer phrases.

Instead of relying on phrases like:

“More cookies”
“I want more cookies”

Try modeling developmentally rich but simple structures, such as:

“Eat cookie”
“Bake cookie”
“We bake cookies”

These structures better support early grammar development and lay the groundwork for later expressive and receptive language skills.

Expanding Expressions for Preschool & Elementary Students

Expanding expressions remains important for preschool and elementary-age students, but how we teach it must evolve.

At this stage, students need to:

Understand and produce complex sentence structures
Use grammar accurately for academic success
Generalize skills beyond conversation into structured tasks

A Critical Shift: Explicit Grammar Instruction

While implicit modeling continues to play a role, research is clear:
Grammar must be taught explicitly as children get older.

This means:

Explaining grammar rules directly
Practicing them systematically
Using scaffolding and visual supports

Research (e.g., Finestack et al., 2023) shows that modeling alone is not sufficient for preschool and school-age students. We cannot “model and hope for the best.”

Preschool & Elementary Hot Tip

Expanding expressions at this level should include direct teaching, such as:

“We add -ed when something already happened.”
“We add -ing when something is happening right now.”

This instruction should be paired with:

Structured practice
Visual cues
Gradual fading of supports

Please don’t skip this step—explicit instruction is essential.

What Effective Expanding Expression Materials Should Include

Strong materials for expanding expressions should:

Target a variety of subjects
Expose students to diverse vocabulary
Address multiple sentence and grammar structures
Include built-in cues and supports
Fade supports systematically
Be evidence-based

This is exactly how the materials inside Speech Therapy Talk Membership are designed—so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Expanding Expressions Materials on Speech Therapy Talk

Late Talker Materials

For late talkers, progress depends heavily on caregiver carryover, since most learning happens during everyday routines.

That’s why effective intervention requires:

Parent-friendly handouts
Clear explanations of what to do, how to do it, and—most importantly—why it matters.
Progress trackers
Simple tools to monitor growth, guide goal setting, and keep everyone aligned.
Optional strategy-specific supports
Visuals, scripts, and examples that break each strategy down even further.

These are some of my favorite materials I’ve created—and they’re all available inside the membership.

Access ALL Late Talker Strategies

Members: Log in here!
Non-members: Join here!

Preschool & Elementary Materials

For preschool and elementary students, Speech Therapy Talk includes a wide range of expanding expression and grammar materials.

All resources are:

Systematically scaffolded
Designed to fade cues naturally
Created to support generalization—not memorization

I’ve recently released 100+ new worksheets (in both English and Spanish), adding to the hundreds already available in the membership.

I’ll be sharing a full walkthrough once everything is live—so stay tuned.

References:

About

Hi,

I'm Bridget Giraldo, MS CCC-SLP

I've been a speech-language pathologist since 2006 — in schools, hospitals, preschools, and private practice. I created Speech Therapy Talk because I kept making materials I couldn't find anywhere else: research-based, bilingual, no-prep, and built for real caseloads. Now, I share them here.