Transcript

Sean Pert:

When speech and language therapists assess children’s spoken language, there used to be a big emphasis on plugging gaps of the surface structure. There’s increasing interest in the profession around ‘pragmatics’ and the functional use of language. Children will really remember how to use a particular linguistic structure if they learn that in a motivating situation. So, for example, to try and motivate children we might do things like sabotage games; so ask them to talk about the food that’s in front of them, but put the food out of reach so they have to ask for it, or ask them to play a game with a partner or with another child and sabotaging that.

So removing some of the vital things that they need, so that children have to ask each other for those objects and activities. This is a good way of motivating them because it feels more real to children. Just having children repeat spoken sentences is very dull, very boring and not very relevant to their experience. But if they have to ask another child for some bricks to make a model or some object to complete a game, then they find that very motivating and are more likely to interact.

If you aren’t used to hearing a language, and children in that position where they're a little linguist trying to sort out where the word boundaries are, how the meanings map on to the surface structure, they need lots of examples. So we would highlight it in various ways. The first way is to give them lots of examples where you contrast one part of the sentence. So, for example, we may have different agents with the same action and patient.

So it might be ‘The man is kicking the ball’, ‘The girl is kicking the ball’, ‘The boy is kicking the ball’; so that helps the child to abstract the phrase boundaries. We would also give them support by giving them choices. So we might say ‘Is the man kicking the ball or is the girl throwing the ball?’, so that they can hear a good model, rather than being asked what’s happening where nothing is there to support their communication.

Interestingly, children will often think that they have produced a full sentence, but would omit whole parts of the sentence, particularly the patient seems to be quite a universal thing – that if it’s understood because they can see that it’s a man kicking the ball, they might not mention it, because they assume it’s a mutually understood part of the sentence. So we use visual signs and those signs can be more or less formal depending on the needs of the child.

For some children that would mean, simply, a gesture to indicate that a word or a morpheme is expected. For other children it might be pointing to different coloured bricks, so that they know that something is there that’s needed to be said. They then link that to the effect that their spoken utterances have on others. So, for example, if they’re able to request something they gain the object that they desire, and that reinforces their willingness and their motivation to use that structure again.