Speechtracking is an auditory verbal therapy technique where the clinician presents a sentence through listening alone and the child is asked to repeat it verbatim. It is a higher level activity typically used while working on auditory skill development with students that are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, particularly those with cochlear implants. In addition to helping the clinician know what the student is and is not hearing, it provides nice insight into the students' grasp of English grammar, including word order, function words, and grammatical markers. This type of task relies heavily on auditory memory. Speechtracking can be a good way to develop and improve this memory, but it can also have a negative impact on the students' performance. A student with a weak auditory memory may simply have difficulty recalling long strings of verbal information. It is also important to keep a student's speech articulation error patterns in mind as well. It wouldn't be appropriate to determine that a child doesn't hear, have, or understand plural -s if in fact their omission is due to an articulation error or phonological process, such as final consonant deletion or cluster reduction. Typically when a student makes an error, such as leaving out a function word, changing word order, or omitting a morphological marker, the clinician repeats the sentence and uses acoustic highlighting (auditory emphasis) on the error to help the student notice and fix their mistake. After 2-3 presentations, I, of course, will also add sign language to ensure comprehension.
Now, this type of activity can be rather boring...simply repeating sentences. It also doesn't require the students to truly understand what they are copying. So, I like to use materials such as the ones pictured above. It requires comprehension and gives them a reason for completing this type of task. In this particular winter activity, students would repeat the sentences and then decide if that sentence is a fact or an opinion. I have another activity that has the students repeating winter-themed sentences and then sorting them by verb tense (past, present, future).
No comments:
Post a Comment