It’s late afternoon and the sun is slanting through the window. Four violins, three children, three parents and one teacher are gathered in a room. As the teacher plays a series of rhythmic notes on her violin, the children imitate and the parents encourage. Soon we see the children initiate and the teacher adapts. This transactional model of learning seems to transcend traditional verbal instruction. Good thing, too, because these three children have a disorder called specific language impairment (SLI). SLI is characterized by a difficulty in processing and producing language that affects approximately 7 percent of children in kindergarten and often goes undetected. It’s important to note that these children have normal IQ and cognitive functioning and do not have autism, hearing loss, developmental delay or any other diagnosis that would otherwise explain poor language skills. These language deficits include vocabulary, word endings (i.e. past tense “-ed”), pronouns (he/she versus her/him), complex sentence structure and narrative/story-telling abilities. SLI can have a large impact on academic performance and quality of life because these linguistic vulnerabilities affect the children’s access to verbal classroom instruction, their development of reading comprehension skills and written word decoding, and their social interactions with their peers.