2015 Winter Thoughts from the Language Literacy Lab

Welcome to the 2015 winter edition of Thoughts from the Language Literacy Lab, a newsletter with communication tips for families of students at Barnstable Intermediate School. I’m Barbara King, one of two Speech/Language Pathologists at BIS. Students who attend the Language Literacy Lab are exposed to tasks that support overall language development, targeting their language skills in a variety of oral, reading, and writing contexts. The goal is improving the effectiveness of students’ communication and academic and social success.

The topic of this semester’s newsletter is oral expressive language with a focus on recasting and how it can be used effectively to improve oral expressive language. While oral receptive language includes listening and understanding language, oral expressive language includesthe ability to communicate with others using orallanguage. If receptive language is considered the “input,” then expressive language would be the “output.” Both of these abilities begin to develop at birth. Expressive language is a separate skill from speech production (articulation), which is concerned with the production of individual speech sounds using the lips, teeth and tongue. Well developed expressive language abilities permit students to formulate and express their thoughts clearly and concisely, with sufficient detail and elaboration. Intermediate school students with well-developed expressive language abilities are able to express their wants, needs and thoughts using appropriate words, word combinations, phrases, grammar and sentence structure (syntax).

Parents and guardians play an important role in facilitating their children’s expressive language skills. They are modeling language each time they speak with their student and play a key function in developing students’ communication skills. Families can help their children grow their language skills by taking advantage of natural moments that they already share with them. When your child initiates a conversation or talks about a topic of personal interest, put those moments to good use! The student is showing interest in communicating and your response to their “output” shows them that you are interested and listening to what they have to say. More practice across different topics, settings and with different people can only lead to more improvement in your student’s expressive language abilities!

Try the following suggestions with your student at home, in the car, or any time that is convenient.

Suggested Activities for Using Recasting to Improve Oral Expression Skills

1)Recast your student’s oral messages using correct form (i.e., grammar – ran vs. runned, pronoun use, topic specific vocabulary, sentence word order). Recasting is a research proven technique that is extremely effective in improving expressive language. You are simply providing an accurately expressed model of what the child intended to say. You do not need to emphasize key words that were omitted, or incorrect, in the original message and the child is not required to repeat what you said. While repetition produces immediate results, research has shown that children return to their old habits when not monitored by others to correct the form of their messages. Recasting takes longer to show results, but students exposed to the technique continued to independently use the correct form once they started to use it.

Examples:

Grammar

  • Student: “The lightning striked the tree.”
  • Parent: “It did! The lightning struck the tree.”

Correct Pronoun Use

  • Student (telling something his female teacher said that day): “They told us to bring back our signed permission slip tomorrow.”
  • Parent: “Oh, she told you to bring back the signed permission slip tomorrow.”

Topic Specific Vocabulary

  • Student: “I need the thing to fix my basketball.”
  • Parent: “You need the pump to put air in your basketball.”

Sentence Word Order

  • Student: “I would like to have cookies and either than cake.”
  • Parent: “You would like to have either cake or cookies?”

2)For students who tend to provide brief responses, parents and guardians can also use recasting to expand their student’s sentences. When you expand your student’s sentences you are recasting what was said either by correcting the sentence (i.e., fixing an ending, correcting a word, replacing a non-specific word with a specific word), or expanding the meaning by adding new words/meanings to the sentence.

Examples:

Correcting the Sentence

  • Student: “I buyed new ones.”
  • Parent: “You bought new basketball shoes.”

Expanding the meaning

  • Student: “I bought shoes.”
  • Parent: “You bought new basketball shoes at the mall last weekend because you outgrew your old pair.”

References

Clinical Topics – Spoken Language Disorders. American Speech, Language and Hearing Association Practice Portal.

Expressive vs. Receptive Language. May 15, 2012. Olson, Gretchen. North Shore Pediatric Therapy. 1657 West Cortland Street,

Chicago IL 60622. (accessed online 1/31/2015)

Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, December 1994, Vol. 37, 1414-1423. doi:10.1044/jshr.3706.1414.

Camarata, Stephen M.; Nelson, Keith E.; Camarata, Mary N. (1994). Comparison of Conversational Recasting and Imitative

Procedures for Training Grammatical Structures in Children with Specific Language Impairment.(accessed online 1/31/2015)

Receptive and Expressive Language – Stepping Stones to Literacy. University of North Carolina at Greensboro (accessed online 1/31/2015)