Benefits of 'Assisting Students with Language Delays in the Classroom'

This language programme is designed for teachers to use within the classroom, either with the whole class or with small groups, which can be integrated into the class programme. It caters to the needs of students with a wide range of language abilities, from those with very limited language skills, to the students who find initiating or participating in conversation a challenge. It was created as a result of years spent working with students in the classroom and working closely with their teachers.

The use of Language Charts make it easy to see exactly what skills are required for the development of functional language and the step by step structure of the programme guides teachers to the skill areas appropriate to the language needs of their particular students.

The programme focuses on the three areas of language development, i.e:

·    ‘The Preverbal Skills of Language’, which provide the foundation for the development of language and are essential in order for a student to acquire functional language. These include skills such as; Attending and anticipating; Learning to look and listen; Copying actions and sounds; Waiting and taking turns.

·    ‘The Building Bricks of Language’ are the words and concepts necessary for the development of a student’s practical vocabulary, allowing them to follow instructions, respond to questions and develop their communication skills.

For example; nouns, verbs, prepositions, negatives, sequencing skills.

·    ‘The Skills of Conversation’ are required in order to provide the student with the ability to initiate and maintain an interactive conversation. These are skills such as, Waiting, listening to others and recalling information given; Speaking clearly; Asking and answering conversational questions.

Photo by Ladyheart at Morguefile.com

           

The programme provides teachers with information as to;

·    What skills are important in order to assist a student’s language development.

·    Why these skills are important, providing clear explanations of the significance of each skill and key points to remember when teaching that skill.

·    How to teach these skills, providing 180 practical activities and fun exercises to assist the development of each skill. These exercises and activities can easily be incorporated into the regular class routine and programme.

The activities in all three areas are purposely ‘Low Tech’ so the majority of resources should be readily available within most classrooms or schools. 

- Francesca Bierens

Speechmark author of Assisting Students with Language Delays in the Classroom

Towards a Culture of Communication and Involvement

The commitment of communication partners to communicate with, and involve, people with learning disabilities requires the active promotion of a culture that is positive and empowering. It is also important for communication partners to consider how they view disability because this greatly influences the way in which they support people. The social and medical models of disability demonstrate how disability can be perceived and how society views disabled people. Attitudes and perceptions towards people with learning disabilities can greatly affect the communication opportunities and quality of support provided.

Some of the barriers to communication that might exist in services supporting people with a learning disability include the following:

• Lack of understanding; eg assumptions are made that people cannot communicate.
• Lack of confidence or experience (which may result in a person not engaging with someone who uses alternative methods of communication).
• Lack of guidance and support available to practitioners.
• Lack of training in communication approaches and tools.
• Lack of skills among practitioners and managers.
• Lack of creativity in approaches.
• Poor, or no, support plans which show how a person communicates and how they like people to communicate with them.
• Information not being shared between practitioners, teams and services.
• Lack of communication tools preventing a person from communicating in the way they are used to.
• Limited resources to support communication.
• Assumptions made about what a person cannot participate in, is able or unable to do, about what they like or dislike, and their preferences or opinions.

The above information is an extract from the book ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’.

You can purchase 'Communicate with Me A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’ book with companion online resource and quality assurance frameworks from Speechmark www.speechmark.net , Amazon and all good book retailers.

You can also join the:

•Communicate with Me Communication Partner Development Scheme

•Communicate with Me Internal Quality Assurance Scheme  

 visit www.communicatewithme.com

Main text cited from: 

© Martin Goodwin, Jennie Miller, Cath Edwards (2015) abridged section from ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability. Speechmark Publishing

A Guide to School Start 2e

The first year of school can be challenging for plenty of children. There are some who need that extra help.

One resource to help in this case is School Start 2e. This practical guide can be used with children who need additional help in developing communication skills during the crucial first year of school.

Successfully trialled over a three-year period, School Start 2e is an invaluable resource for teachers and teaching assistants that encourages good collaborative practice between schools, speech & language therapists, the school's inclusion coordinator and parents.

This early intervention group programme is aimed at enhancing children's language and sound awareness skills during Reception Year in mainstream primary schools

It comes with simple checklists to identify suitable children, contains weekly sessions with 3 activities and handouts, and provides forms for recording outcomes.

One of the materials included in this resource is group sessions for the Language and Sound Awareness programmes. The following video is an example of an assessment for the language group: 

A walk-through the kit used for an assessment:

 Resources for the Sound Awareness Checklist:

Resources for the Language Checklist:

Details of the checklist:

Example of prepared resources for delivery of the groups:

The results over a 3 year pilot provides evidence that the programmes have been successful in the schools that have used it. 

Testimonial for School Start:

Speechmark authors Catherine De La Bedoyere and Catharine Lowry have been Speech & Language therapists for 15 years. Catherine De La Bedoyere also taught postgraduate teachers at Kingston University and currently works at Sussex Community NHS Trust. Catharine Lowry's experience has been within language units, community clinics and special schools for children with MLD and is presently in the mainstream service for Your Healthcare NHS provider in Kingston Upon Thames

Know more or order School Start 2e.

Importance of mental wellbeing among SEN children

Evidence shows that children and young people with SEN can be up to six times more likely than their peers to experience mental health problems.* So, just why is this? Well, firstly, all of the usual issues that can affect any child, will also affect those with SEN. Secondly, children and young people with SEN can often experience lower self-esteem than their peers, be more vulnerable to bullying, have difficulties understanding social situations and making friends, and can feel isolated from their peers, both academically and socially. 

Some may also find that they have less independence than their classmates, or can find it harder to recognise and talk about their emotions. All of these things can in turn increase the risk of mental health issues.

Mental health difficulties in young people with SEN can also often be missed or overlooked.  Sometimes it can be easy to put issues down simply to a child’s SEN (‘Oh, anxiety is just part of his dyslexia’, ‘She’s bound to feel lonely and left out because of her autism’). School staff may also feel that they lack the expertise to help a child with SEN (‘But he has ADHD so will need specialist support. I don’t know how to help him.’), or indeed that they lack the background in mental health to be able to make a difference.

So, what can we do as educators to promote mental health in children and young people with SEN?

1. Promote mental wellbeing strategies – just because a child has SEN does not mean they won’t benefit from the same strategies as others: teaching them to recognise their strengths, to cultivate positive emotions and to understand their emotions. Many will also benefit from improving their problem-solving abilities and self-esteem.
2. Ensure that you know referral procedures in your setting for specialist support for students experiencing more significant difficulties.
3. Try not to make the situation worse. Sometimes it can be easy to have a deficit-based approach to students with SEN, focusing on what they can’t do, or on closing the gap between them and their peers. It is important that we don’t eliminate the ‘fun’ and vocational aspects of the curriculum which these pupils in particular will benefit from, and that we focus on accelerating strengths and increasing enjoyment of school as these things will have a positive knock-on effect on a child’s wellbeing.

From the book: The Sky's the Limit

 - Victoria Honeybourne

Speechmark author The Sky's The Limit

*NASS (2015) Making Sense of Mental Health, online, www.nasschools.org.uk/nass/making-sense- mental-health/

Useful communication guidance for pupils with special needs

Communicate with Me was written in response to a need to improve how the services for people with learning disabilities communicate with, and involve, the people they support.  It was written as a resource to support work practice and a quality assurance tool to support services to integrate these practices into service culture.  Communication is integral to delivering a quality service for people with a learning disability and effective communication enhances the quality of that support.

Communicate with Me is a resource that provides guidance to anyone who supports someone with a learning disability, whether they are a paid practitioner (employed by a service or directly by an individual), a family member, an advocate or another member of that person’s community. 

Communicate with Me is a learning resource designed to further the abilities of all communication partners to both communicate more effectively with people with a learning disability and to support people in a way which enables them to become more involved in their own lives. 

Communicate with Me is designed to support the whole service to consider and develop both how it communicates with, and involves, people with a learning disability in a way which enables change to become embedded in the culture and shared values of that service.

The above is an extract from the book ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’.

You can purchase 'Communicate with Me A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability’ book with companion online resource and quality assurance frameworks from Speechmark www.speechmark.net , Amazon and all good book retailers.

You can also join the:

•Communicate with Me Communication Partner Development Scheme

•Communicate with Me Internal Quality Assurance Scheme  

 visit www.communicatewithme.com

Main text cited from: 

© Martin Goodwin, Jennie Miller, Cath Edwards (2015) abridged section from ‘Communicate with Me – A Resource to Enable Effective Communication and Involvement of People with a Learning Disability. Speechmark Publishing

Planning your intervention with Alex Kelly

Here are a few of my top tips for making your intervention work..

I like to put any intervention into the following four-step plan before I start my group or one-to-one sessions. This will help you to work out how best to work with someone on their social skills difficulties.

Step 1: The behaviour … what is it?

Make sure that you choose the right behaviour or skill to work on first. So, having assessed the person, you need to consider the hierarchy and the complexity of the skill you want to work on with them. Ask yourself: are you setting up the person to succeed? Is the behaviour too complex?

Now consider whether the behaviour has a function or a reason. Maybe the person is behaving in this way because of an underlying problem that has not been addressed, eg a sensory need. Or they may be getting something out of the behaviour: for example, people leave them alone and they like this.

Finally, try to really describe what the person is doing – the more detailed you can describe the behaviour, the more likely you are to be able to help the person understand what they are doing wrong. You may need to add how it might make other people feel or what they may think to give them insight, although I would do this jointly with the person.

Step 2: The rules … what are they?

We need to help people to understand what they should be doing instead – what are the rules?

What should be happening? So many adults I have worked with have asked me why they were never taught the rules as a child. Of course, before we can do that, we do need to know them ourselves, so that is where I hope the Talkabout resources will help you out!

Step 3: The motivation … what is it?

Every person you work with will need to be motivated at some level to come to your group, change their behaviour, and become more socially skilled. Often the key to success is to work out what the motivation is going to be for the person to want to change.

We cannot assume that all people are motivated by ‘being friendly’ or ‘friendly behaviour’ or ‘people will like me’ or ‘mum will be pleased’. It may be better to reward them with something: for example, an activity, a smiley-face chart or just saying ‘This is the polite thing to do’ or ‘This is the grown-up thing to do’. If we don’t consider the motivation, the intervention may fail.

Step 4: The strategy … which one is best?

There are many different ways of helping people to improve their social skills and usually the best intervention is the one that includes a number of them. There are eight main ways in which we can help someone.

1 The environment – in the school or at home. It is essential that the environment backs up what is being taught as much as possible. Think about getting all of the teaching staff on board with what you are working on. Making sure that everyone is encouraging and discouraging in the same way can go a long way to helping someone transfer those skills out of a group and into their everyday life. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t work with someone if I can’t get the environment to back us up, but it may explain a slower progress. You may see people beginning to get the behaviour in certain situations but not all of them. This is OK. It shows you that the person has the ability to get it right when the environment is conducive.

2 Talk it through with them or use comic strip conversations. With many skills and behaviours, it is very helpful to talk it through with the person or to draw it using stick figures and speech bubbles. You will gain an insight into how they may describe what is happening and why it happens, which will help with your intervention.

3 Social storyTM. Carol Gray developed this approach in the early 1990s and I often use stories to help teach social skills. A social story gives someone insight into  their difficulties and helps them to know what they can do instead. It also contains perspective sentences about what other people may be feeling or thinking which can be very useful for people with ASD.

4 A visual cue or schedule. It is important to remember that many people are helped by working visually, so the worksheets and activities in this book will help, but people may also be helped by a prompt card or a poster displayed in the classroom. At our Day Service, ‘Speaking Space’, in the UK, we use a lot of ‘now and next’ symbolised strips which can work well to cue people in to what is expected of them in certain situations.

5 A reward system. Rewards can help if the motivation is very tangible: for example, stickers to get a financial reward or do an activity, or a certificate of achievement. Other rewards can include a special time with someone to talk about something specific – for example, 20 minutes at the end of the day to talk to their mum about dinosaurs. Any reward needs to work for the person, so you need to refer to their motivation.

6 Use of other media. Using DVDs and clips of cartoons or television programmes, or even video clips of you modelling behaviour, can really help to teach social skills. Many people find visual methods of learning much easier and showing a video will usually motivate most people. I often use this method in groups as well as in one-to-one sessions. The Talkabout DVD includes video clips of actors modelling inappropriate and appropriate behaviours for all of the key skills covered in Talkabout (Kelly, 2006).

7 Role play and modelling. In this book I often suggest using role play and modelling to help teach skills. Modelling is when the facilitators model a behaviour, both inappropriate and appropriate, and role play is when the group members practise the behaviour themselves.

Here are a few important points to remember when modelling:

• Keep it short and simple.

• Model one behaviour at a time.

• Start with bad behaviour and end with good.

• Never use the group members to help you model behaviours.

• Keep the situation as ‘real’ as possible – it is better to model a normal conversation between two group facilitators than to pretend that one is a child, shopkeeper or teacher.

• Ask the group what they thought was bad about the behaviour. What should have happened?

Here are a few important points to remember when role playing:

• The group members are asked to act a scenario or to practise a skill.

• It is a stressful experience for some people.

• Try a ‘getting into role’ exercise such as the magic carpet or twisting into a role like ‘Superman’.

• Remember to de-role, especially if the group members have played the part of someone else.

• Consider using puppets.

8 Social skills group. This is my favourite way to teach social skills and the Talkabout programme should give you all the resources you need to run a successful social skills group.

The advantages of group work over one-to-one work are as follows.

• It is a more natural and comfortable environment in which to learn.

• We learn from each other.

• It is easier to problem solve, play games and to set up role plays.

• It gives the opportunity to try out new skills in a safe environment.

• There is an opportunity to transfer skills to other staff, improving the chance of carry-over into the environment.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

Get 20% off when you pre-order today! Hurry though this offer ends on the 30th April, enter code TA20

The Theory Behind TALKABOUT

TALKABOUT was first developed in the early 1990s when I was working as a speech and language therapist in London, UK. I was particularly interested in social skills but was frustrated by two aspects of my work as a therapist. First, there was nothing in the literature to guide me on where to start intervention following assessment; and second, my experience showed me that I was not always successful in what I was trying to teach and I could not always predict which children were going to improve and which were not. I set about to solve these two problems over a period of four years.

I started my investigations at a college of further education where I was working with 60 students who had a mild to moderate intellectual disability. We assessed all of the young people I was working with using an adapted social skills assessment from the Personal Communication Plan by Alex Hitchings and Robert Spence – now published in Kelly (2000). The students were involved in this assessment which gave us some insight into their own awareness of their difficulties. From these initial results, we grouped students into their main area of need: body language, conversational skills and assertiveness. We evaluated success through retesting on the original assessment and also compared students with poor and good awareness of their needs.

The results were fascinating. They showed that the students who had been working on their conversational skills progressed more if they had good existing non-verbal skills (ie body language), and students who had been working on their assertiveness progressed significantly more if they had good existing non-verbal and verbal skills.

In addition, we found that students who had poor self and other awareness struggled with all aspects of the work. From this, we established a hierarchy which forms the basis of the Talkabout resources.

Over the next four years, we piloted this programme using different client groups and a group of willing therapists from throughout the UK. We all found consistently that the success of intervention increased if non-verbal behaviours were taught before verbal behaviours, and if assertiveness was taught last (Kelly, 1996).

This original hierarchy then formed the basis of the first Talkabout book (Kelly, 1996) but it has been adapted over the years to include self-esteem and friendship skills. The hierarchy now looks as follows.

Using this hierarchical approach, teachers and therapists can start work with the person at a level that is appropriate to that person’s needs. They can then progress up the levels to enable the person to reach their full potential, ensuring that basic skills are taught before the more complex ones. So a student who needs work on all areas of his social skills would start work first on his body language skills and then would progress to working on his paralinguistic skills, then his conversational skills and, finally, his assertiveness skills.

If this student also had poor self-awareness and low self-esteem, he would need to work on this before working on his social skills. And if a student also had difficulties with his friendship skills, he would only work on developing these skills if he had good self-awareness and good nonverbal and verbal skills.

Of course, success is not just about what you teach first; it is also down to how you teach it.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

Get 20% off when you pre-order today! Hurry though this offer ends on the 30th April, enter code TA20.

Preparation is all important

The Pre-verbal Skills of Language

Whether we are baking a cake or building a house, we all know that good preparation is critical to the desired outcome of the project. For a cake to be delicious, the ingredients need to be measured correctly and strong, solid foundations are essential to ensure the stability of a house.

 

The same applies to language development. For a child to develop language that is functional and communicative, they firstly need to acquire the pre-verbal skills, the skills that provide the foundations on which language is built. 

It is easy to assume that if a child is able to speak, they have already acquired the pre-verbal skills but this is not necessarily the case. A child can often use words but not use these words to communicate effectively with others. Being aware of the pre-verbal skills and assisting their development is very important for the development of a child’s language. This can be done by;

• Encouraging the child to look at you or in your direction, even briefly, when they speak to you or want to show you something.
• Gradually developing the child’s ability to focus and concentrate on a range of activities; those he enjoys as well as activities chosen by other people, such as a parent or teacher.
• Drawing the child’s attention to objects around them and showing them how to look at things both inside and outside, rather then just looking at objects directly in front of them.
• Teaching the child to listen to the sounds in their environment such as planes, printers, dogs barking.
• Encouraging the child to copy actions and sounds made which is done most effectively through play and action songs.
• Assisting the child to wait and take turns, which is a skill that can be taught at the playground or at home, waiting for a favourite activity or at school or pre-school during group activities with other children.
• Developing the child’s awareness and control of their face and mouth muscles by playing games in front of the mirror, encouraging them to copy different facial expressions and tongue and lip movements.

Have fun with these activities and remember it is always better to spend a short amount of time doing these activities regularly rather than hours every now and again.

********************

Francesca Bierens Speechmark author of Assisting Students with Language Delays in the Classroom

Tell a Story, to Get a Story…

Having just completed a fun, productive and interactive presentation on storytelling at a RCSLT Clinical Excellence Network workshop for children with language impairments, I asked the audience to reflect on all the information they had received at the workshop, and identify 3 changes or actions that they would put in place at work the next day.

One speech and language therapist said that she would tell her client a story. I was intrigued by that and asked her to say a little more about that. She continued, that she was often asking the children with whom she works to tell her stories, and whilst she would read stories from a book, she never simply told them a story during her storytelling sessions.

What an interesting observation and a great change to commit to making - and one that can so easily be put into practice. At the workshop, I had shared strategies to facilitate the elicitation of storytelling in children and young people with language and communication difficulties, and one strategy that I have found really effective is simply to take my turn first and share a story with the group, whether it be a personal story about something I have done over the weekend, or a wonderfully wacky and obviously fictional story about a princess, dragon or fire-eater! This gives the students the time to get comfortable, to settle down in the session and enjoy the delights of storytelling, whilst at the same time, also, getting to know a little more about me, their therapist.

It provides the children with practice in a range of essential skills related to storytelling, including listening, using appropriate body language and facial expression to show interest, or, when needed, even confusion, as well as asking focused and appropriate questions. It also, of course, gives me the valuable opportunity to model storytelling and provide them with a helpful template on which to base their stories, if required. Of course my story will have a definite beginning, middle and end, on which the children can map their stories.

Have a go and see for yourself, if you have a group of children reticent at telling stories, try and start by telling stories yourself. Involve the children in different ways, perhaps they can clap loudly or roar every time they hear you mention the monster; or they can count the number of characters in your story. Make your story exciting, fun and interesting, use props like swords and other attention-grabbing objects, and dress up like the characters in your story. Be the wizard, the witch or the dragon. And by the time you are at the end of the story, you may very well found that you are no longer the sole storyteller, but one part of a very satisfied collaborative enterprise.

Go on, try it, tell a story, or even two, to get a story… 

Victoria Joffe, Professor, Enhancement of Child and Adolescent Language and Learning

School of Health Sciences, City University London

Speechmark author of: Vocabulary Enrichment Programme, Narrative Intervention Programme, Favourite Idioms and More Favourite Idioms

Look how well they are getting along; but it’s just a box of Lego®!

We all have a building story; the grand design of creating our own miniature house or the momentary glow of success on discovering the extra set of wheels which completes our innovative vehicle design. Sometimes though, the magic of that box of bricks can have the potential for so much more.

Lego® therapy has been around for a while now. Daniel LeGoff and later Dr Gina Gómez de la Cuesta and Simon Baron-Cohen from the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge,  have shown that within a more structured environment, the use of building blocks and sets can be utilised to improve the social and communication skills of young people with Autism. Recently more and more educational, health and social care settings are realising the benefits of this great programme. Just this week, there’s been news of a special school in Blackpool setting up an after school club.

Using it in a number of settings over the years has been interesting and inspiring. Whether as a one-to-one session to teach and build confidence in social communication, or as a whole class tool to encourage speaking and listening in a literacy lesson, this structured use of model building has had the ability to unlock potential in many young people who prefer a more logical approach to collaborative play.

For the ‘logical thinker’, many aspects of social interaction and communication are strange. ‘To hug or not to hug……..’ This is actually the question. Take a moment to consider what the ‘rules’ are around hugging. Do we hug everyone we know? Do we hug all our friends? Do we sometimes hug in certain places but not others? This single area of socially acceptable behaviour presents one with the prospect of crossing a social minefield. It is just one area of social etiquette which, as a ‘social thinker’ we (usually) successfully navigate, managing to avoid any major explosions. The logical ones amongst us, however, find themselves blundering wildly through; desperately attempting to avoid mistimed contact, awkward polite back pats and the painful minutes entangled in the unanticipated, uninvited clutches of a well-meaning associate.

The activities within the book ‘Building Blocks for Communication’ have been developed with the logical thinker in mind, although all thinking types will no doubt benefit. They have been developed and tried and tested through close work in a number of settings with some incredible people. Used in mainstream classes, Nurture Groups, by Family Support Practitioners and parents at home, and also, with careful planning, in social communication intervention groups, these activities have been designed to be adaptable for many ages and abilities.

The training courses running alongside the publication often produce many more ideas for new and innovative activities. So, get your logical thinking caps on, get out that box of bricks and start presenting abstract concepts in a more structured way! 

Amy Eleftheriades, Alpha Inclusion.
Speechmark author of ‘Building Blocks for Communication’