December 2, 2018
by Carole Zangari -
Happy December, AAC friends! If you are as busy as we think you are, you probably missed some of last week’s posts. Here’s a recap. Monday – PrAACtical Resources: Teachers’ Toolkit For Students With Little Or No Speech Tuesday – AAC Link Up Wednesday – Video of the Week: Transitioning Students Using AAC: Strategies to Promote Full Inclusion Thursday – PrAACtically December: AAC Resources for A Year of Core Vocabulary Still have time for a little more AAC? Here are some of our suggestions. 10 Apps to Gift an AAC SLP Helping Beginning Communicators Expand Their Sentence Length 5 Ways to Make Semantic Maps More Effective in AAC Therapy PrAACtically Reading with Karen Natoci: The Family Book How I Do It: A Year of Core Words in Action Have a great week, everyone!
Filed under: Featured Posts, PrAACtical Thinking
Tagged With: language therapy, sentence length, summary post
March 16, 2016
by Carole Zangari -
AAC learners often require a good deal of practice to become fluent enough with their language skills that they use them spontaneously across activities and environments. In this week’s featured video, we take a peek at Katya, who is learning to speak in longer sentences and to change singular nouns into plurals, and her SLP. The guided practice allows Katya to firm up her skills in these areas and develop the fluency she needs to be able to retrieve language during ordinary life experiences. Many thanks to Lindsey Cargill and Katya for posting this video.
Filed under: Video of the Week
Tagged With: language intervention, morphology, sentence length
June 30, 2014
by Carole Zangari -
Throughout the month, we’ve been talking about building sentence length and complexity. We’ll end the month with a concept that applies to both beginning communicators and those with more complex language skills. Human beings are pattern-seekers. We notice similarities and distinctions, and compare things that are new to us to things we already know about. As we go through our lives, we draw on our pattern-seeking skills to learn about and understand the world. How can we use this intrinsic trait to help us in teaching language to AAC learners? Consider patterns when choosing your targets: Increasing sentence length is a broad goal that gives us lots of flexibility in how we design our intervention. We can lengthen sentences by adding descriptors, temporal terms, conjunctions, embedded clauses, and more. Within each category, there are many options. For a beginning communicator, we might teach descriptors related to appearance (e.g., size, color,... [Read More...]
Filed under: Strategy of the Month
Tagged With: language intervention, sentence length, sentence structures
June 16, 2014
by Carole Zangari -
Expanding the length and complexity of sentences is something that SLPs love to work on well beyond the ‘early communicator’ phase, something we talked about a few weeks back. In today’s post, we’ll consider ways to build more complex utterances for learners who are gaining competence with their AAC systems but who still use language that is immature, imprecise, or overly simplistic. In many ways, this therapy is like language therapy for any other learner with delays in grammar, syntax, and morphology. Indeed, we sometimes forget to activate all that we know about language intervention when working learners who use AAC. We try to use that as a starting point and adjust for the AAC components as needed. Here are some of the things that we think about when planning therapy for AAC learners who are trying to strengthen their ability to speak in more complex sentences. Relate the language... [Read More...]
Filed under: Strategy of the Month
Tagged With: intervention, language intervention, sentence length, strategy