Language Teaching Techniques and Programs

2008

Question: What techniques or programs do you use in your speech therapy to teach individuals or group the language?

2009

Answer: There are many different techniques and interesting programs which I use in my therapy practice and modify based upon the child’s developmental level and individual needs. All of them can also be applied by the parents or others who work with the child.

2008

Expansion

A clinician expands child’s telegraphic or incomplete utterance into a more grammatically complete utterance. Example: A child says, “Car go.” and a clinician expands the sentence, “Yes, look at the car going.”

Extension

A clinician comments on child’s utterances and adds new and relevant information. Example: A child says, “Play ball.” The clinician says, “Yes, let’s play with a big, blue, bouncing ball.”

Focused Stimulation

A clinician repeatedly models a target structure to stimulate a child to use that structure. It is usually done during a play activity that the clini­cian designs to focus on a particular language structure, e.g. plural mor­pheme -s. A clinician uses various stimulus materials, talks about them, and repeatedly models the plural constructions.  Example: A clinician says “Look, here are two dogs running. I see two dos. And over there are two boys pushing cars. Now the boys are drinking. The cups have blue and red balls on them. What do you see? ” A child says, “I see two bike on the grass.” The clinician does not correct the child’s incorrect responses but instead models the correct target. She says, “Yes, two bikes are on the grass.”

Incidental Teaching

This method teaches functional communication skills through the use of typ­ical, everyday verbal interactions that arise naturally out of situations. The child selects the activity, situation, or topic, and the clinician works on the language teaching into it. Example: A child may choose to play with farm toys and imitate actions, e.g. eat, run, swim, etc. If the clinician is teaching progressive -ing, can use the farm animals and actions, chosen by a child plays and say: “See, the hours is eating grass, the chicks are running away and the ducks are swimming in the pound. And right over there the pigs are playing with mud and the cat is climbing a tree. Look! A farmer is driving a tractor!”

Joint Routines or Interactions

These repetitive activities are frequently used in early language stimulation with young children. A clinician can use routines such as Peek-a-Boo game to establish interaction with a child or create own practice, e.g. always starting therapy sessions by telling the same short story which contains certain target language structures and encouraging a child to use the repetitive words, phrases, and sentences.

Joint Book Reading

A clinician stimulates language through the use of systematic storybook reading. Joint book reading allows for repetitive use and practice of the same concepts and phrases. It is also helpful for establishing joint atten­tion in which, the clinician and the child are focused on the same thing. The clinician selects appropriate storybooks with interesting plot and pictures and reads the same story several times dur­ing several sessions so that the children memorize it. The clinician uses prosodic features frequently to draw attention to specific language structures. For example, if working on the past-tense form a clinician might emphasize -ed morpheme through increased emphasis on words containing that morpheme. Example: “The boy looked through the window and noticed three helicopters frizzed in the sky.” When the children are quite familiar with the story, the clinician stops at points containing target language structures and prompts the children to sup­ply the appropriate words, phrases, or sentences, e.g., “The pilot (land-ed), (open-ed) the door and (stepp-ed) out of the helicopter.“ A clinician can manipulate the activity by pausing at dif­ferent junctures so children supply different language structures or produce progressively longer utterances. Children can be asked eventually to “read” (recite from memory, but looking at the text and pictures) and pause while other children supply words, phrases, or sentences. Joint book reading helps develop vocabulary acquisition as well as a sense of story grammar in children.

Mand-Model

This method teaches language through the use of typical adult-child interactions in a play-oriented setting. A clin­ician, using attractive stimulus materials, designs a naturalistic interactive situation; then, establishes joint clinician-child attention to a par­ticular material such as a set of paints. Next, the clinician demands a response from a child, e.g. “Tell me what you want.” or “Tell me what this is.” If the child gives no response or a very limit­ed response, the clinician models the complete, correct response. If the child does not imitate the entire modeled sentence, the clinician prompts, e.g. “Tell me the whole sentence.” The child is praised for imitating or for responding correctly without modeling and is given the item he or she wanted.

Milieu Teaching

Milieu teaching is a collection of child language intervention procedures that are used to teach language in functional, natural, and conversational communicative contexts. It can be described as a naturalistic child language teaching method, which uses such techniques as incidental teaching, mand-model, and others.

Milieu teaching can occur in a variety of settings, such as the therapy room, the child’s classroom, and the child’s home.

Narrative Skills Training

This technique’s targets the more advanced language skill of producing narratives. Narratives are speakers’ descriptions of events, episodes, stories and experiences. Narratives should be produced in a cohesive, logically consistent, temporally sequenced manner. In order to train narrative skills, clinicians can:

• Let the children act out the stories, e.g. stage a drama.
• Use scripts based on such events as grocery shopping, birthday parties, eating in a restaurant.
• Get children involved in routinized, daily activities, e.g. discussing the calendar and the weather.
• Repeatedly tell or read the same stories so that children memorize the characters, events, words, and temporal sequences.
• Pause before important phrases or descriptions when retelling stories, so that children can supply them.
• Ask children to tell stories or narrate events with and then without the help of pictures, scripts, or both.
• Ask children to narrate new events or experiences (not rehearsed or scripted).

Parallel Talk

A clinician plays with a child and describes and comments upon what the child is doing and the objects the child is interested in. Example: A clin­ician says, “You are putting a farmer in the truck” or “Which cow you have is brown and white?”

Reauditorization

A clinician repeats what a child says during the language stimulation activi­ties. Reauditorization may be combined with other techniques, like model­ing. Example: A child says, “Am swinging”; the clinician repeats, “Am swinging.” More evidence is needed to demonstrate the efficacy of reauditorization.

Recasting

This expansion of a child’s utterance into a different type of sentence is excellent for children who are working on more complex grammatical forms. The child’s own sentence is repeated in modified form, but the clinician changes the modality or voice of the sentence rather than simply adding grammatical or semantic markers. Example: A child says “The baby is hungry.” A clinician recasts: “Is she hungry?” changing it to a question form. A child: “The dog chases the cat.”  A clinician: “The cat is chased by the dog.” changing it to a passive voice.

Self Talk

A clinician describes own activity as playing with a child. Using language structures that are appropriate for that child, the clin­ician might say something like, “Look, I’m putting the dress on the doll. See, I’m putting the dress on her.”

Story Grammar

Since children with language disorders frequently have difficulty with the structure of narratives a clinician can teach and model the following elements of story grammars:

• Setting statements - the introduction to the story, the physical setting, the characters, the temporal context.
• Initiating events - episodes that begin the story.
• Internal response - the characters’ thoughts, emotions, reactions.
• Theme of the story - the main idea.
• Goals of the characters - what the characters are trying to accomplish.
• Attempts - actions the characters take to achieve their objectives.
• Direct consequences - results of actions.
• Conclusion - how everything turns out, lessons or morals learned from the story.

Whole-Language Approach

This philosophical approach to the language states that learning written language should be like learning oral language. Proponents of the whole-language approach believe that children learn literacy in the same way they learn spo­ken language, through being immersed in a literate environment, communi­cating through print, and getting supportive feedback. The whole-language approach focuses on acquiring meaning, not on teaching specific subskills or language components. Whole-language theorists and prac­titioners believe that interconnections between language components are more important than the components individually. The clinician introduces new ideas and concepts but maintains the same theme for continuity. The clinician is a facilitator, not an instructor. The whole language approach needs efficacy research and experimental evaluation of the teaching strategies promoted.