2 The nature of an SLT’s interventions
You will shortly listen to the second part of the interview with Sean Pert, where he talks about the gestures and coloured blocks that he uses to draw children’s attention to the different elements in a simple transitive clause. These form part of an intervention programme called BEST, or Building Early Sentences Therapy, run from the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in collaboration with Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust (Newcastle University, 2016).
Activity 2 How Sean Pert approaches his work as an SLT
As you listen to Sean, consider the following questions.
- What strategies does Sean use in the therapeutic context to encourage meaningful communication?
- Which aspects of language use is Sean particularly keen to foster in the children? Which aspects does he regard as less important?
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.
Discussion
- Sean tries to create realistic and enjoyable communicative situations, where children have a genuine motivation to contribute. He also aims to model plenty of contrasting linguistic examples for them, so that they can isolate the roles played by the different parts of a sentence, in other words identify the boundaries between grammatical groups which Sean refers to as phrase boundaries). In this context, he regards the children as ‘little linguists’ trying to work out the rules. You may well have experience of this kind of ‘pattern drilling’ yourself as a learner or teacher of other languages.
- Sean is primarily interested in fostering children’s ability to engage meaningfully with others through spoken language. He is only interested in the surface form of the child’s utterance to the extent that this is crucial to the meaning, for example if changing a verb tense or the number of participants is important to communicating the message at hand. Conversely, though, he does insist that children include in their utterances all the key meaning-bearing elements of the sentence (in his terms, all the relevant semantic roles). In a face-to-face situation it may be natural for children to communicate multimodally, for example by pointing or gazing at one of the participants in the utterance, but it is Sean’s role to ensure that the children referred to him are capable of expressing grammatical relations linguistically.