Principes of Language Intervention

Look for skills that are:

1. Normally acquired by child’s age

2. Next skills likely to be acquired

3. Are functional

4. Can easily be generalized

Remediation philosophies

A. Trainer centered: abilities and situational constraints of the SLP

B. Child-centered: needs of the student

C. Hybrid: needs of the student within some of the SLP constraints

Remediation settings

A. Pull-out model

B. Intervention in the classroom

C. Collaborative consultation

D. Full inclusion model

Systems approach to evaluating treatment outcomes

A. Three ways to determine if child needs services

1. Profiling-what client knows

2. Dynamic assessment-ongoing, always changing

3. Monitoring progress

May be ready for treatment if

1. Significant difference between different aspects of language or language cognition

2. Ready to change performance: attitude and willingness take on a more important role as child gets older

Decisión tree-determine

1. What needs to be taught and priority for each step

2. Ways of helping child make sense of linguistic input during intervention

3. Best setting for intervention

4. Specific training techniques

Determine others roles

Need to be very sensitive to the ability/time constraints of those who you would like to be involved

1. Parental role:

A. May require parent education about skills

B. May want to assign homework in which parent may need to assist

Teachers role

A. Classroom curriculum adjustments/modifications

B. Follow-up in the classroom

Classmates’ role

A. Cooperative groups in the classroom

Facilitating language change

1. What presentation methods facilitate the child’s ability to demonstrate new language targets

2. How much stimulus support does the child need to be successful

3. Is the child willing to risk being wrong

4. What motivates the child to improve language performance

Establish a baseline

Formal assessment: use performance on formal assessment as baseline

Informal: do some additional informal, possible SLP created evaluation that deeply tests task

Selecting goal attack strategy

1. Vertical goal attack strategy (most common)

2. Horizontal goal attack strategy

3. Cyclical goal attack strategy

Naturalness components (naturalness to high)

1. Social situation-SLP, teacher, parent

2. Treatment location: therapy room, classroom, home

3. Treatment structure:

A. Drill: organizada activities, daily living activities

B. Drill: drill play, structured play, play

Structured treatment paradigm

1. Stimulus> response> consequence

2. Reinforcement- designed to increase frequency of response

A. Positive reinforcement

B. Negative reinforcement

3. Punishment designed to decrease frequency of response

Experiential language of techniques

1. Imitation: imitate child’s utterance

2. Expansion: elaborate on child’s utterance so reflects adult version

3. Expatriation: provide expansion and new content

4. Modeling: provide example of target structure

5. Scaffolding: help child participate in conversation

Ask questions going from most difficult to least difficult to elicit target response

1. Open ended

2. Multiple choice

A. Vary number of choices to further control for difficulty

B. Avoid listing correct choice last

3. Yes/no

Current intervention approaches

Assertiveness-responsiveness scheme: a pragmatic view in which child is best described as one of the following:

1. Active conservationalist: +assertiveness, +responsiveness

2. Passive coversationalist: -assertiveness, +responsiveness

3. Verbal noncommunicator: +assetiveness, -responsiveness

4. Inactive communicator: -assertiveness, -responsiveness

Types of generalization

1. Generalization- use of trained responses in untrained situations

2. Stimulus generalization- use of trained responses in new settings, with new materials, and new people

3. Response generalization- different responses to the same stimulus (can be untrained responses at same or more difficult levels, such as phrase or sentence level