Hakim is a 12 year old African American boy repeating the 6th grade.Previously he repeated the third grade.Hakim has not been identified as needing special services but his language problems are evident.He performs poorly on reading comprehension tasks.His receptive and expressive grammatical skills are poor and his vocabulary is limited.His parents are at a loss.Hakim's test scores are not low enough to qualify him for special services and tutoring has not helped.A private speech-language pathologist has been hired to help.Her assessment revealed that Hakim's cultural and language differences interfere significantly with his academic performance.She also found that Hakim exhibits SLI in the areas of vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge and use,sentence processing and narrative production.Moreover,because of repeated failures,Hakim's school performance is hampered by