Language Disorders - Lecture 6 Notes

Purposes of Intervention

1. Change or Eliminate the underlying problem

2. change the disorder

3. teach compensatory strategies (severe autism - functional communication)

4. change the child’s environment - teaching sign language to the parents at home

How can intervention change language behaviour?

1. Facilitation - rate of language is accelerated

2. Maintenance - preserves a behaviour that would otherwise decrease or disappear

3. Induction - causes the language milestone to be achieved

Developing Intervention Plans

1. Intended objectives (products or goals) - clinician says what she wants to do

2. Processes used to achieve objectives - how will she do it?

3. Contexts in which intervention takes place

Considerations When Setting Goals

• communicative effectiveness

• teachability

• client phonological abilities

• teaching only one new thing at a time.

Definition of Long Term Goal

result of a culmination of several short-term goals

Definition of Short-Term Goal

gains in specific aspects of language - success moves child closer to achieving long-term goals

Types of Interventions

1. Clinician-Directed (CD) - clinician picks out what they are saying

• drill, drill play, and modelling

2. Hybrid - clinician still picks but more modeling and encouraging for something to happen (more natural)

• focused stimulation, vertical structuring, milieu teaching, script therapy

3. child centered (CC) - clinician has least amount of control. The clinician will follow the child around through naturalistic settings and playing

• indirect language stimulation - imitation and expansion, whole language

4 Issues with Intervention to Consider

1. Naturalness

• make language informative

• increase motivation to communicate within task

• use cohesive texts

2. Modify Linguistic Stimuli (how clinician talks to child)

• rate of speech

• repetition

• complexity

3. Reinforcement (increase frequency of task) and Feedback (give client info about accuracy and/or a model for better production)

4. Generalization

How to help a child generalize the information

• use multiple examples of target

• sequential modification - extend therapy from one setting to another

• adjunctive milieu therapy - new intervention in a new place and with new people

• use “real life”materials not just materials designed for speech therapy

• encourage self monitoring

• encourage children to take advantage of models around them

Types of Speech Therapy Delivery

1. Pull-out/clinic based

2. consultant model

3. language based classroom model

4. collaborative