How To Do Language Facilitation At Home (Part 7)

Hey, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com in this video. This is the last part of our do it Yourself at home speech therapy series and we're going to talk about language facilitation. So stay tuned in right now. Alright, so what is language facilitation? If you have been in speech therapy with your child in any way, then you should know what it is because that's one of the first things speech therapists talk about. But if you haven't, everything that we talk about here is inside this book. It's from the Hannon program. I'll put the link for this book down below. It's called It Takes Two to Talk. In this video, I just want to tell you the key points, what you can do right now, what you can change in your pattern and your behavior about how you communicate with your child. And it's called language facilitation. It's because you're actually now facilitating language and instead of dictating how they should learn. Okay, so I know in previous videos in this series we've been talking about requesting table tasks so on. These are quick and easy tactics you can do right now. But language facilitation is a long term strategy and it really helps your child to pick up a language that they don't really know. And it actually works with adults who are learning another language as well. So it's all about the correct amount of language input that you can give a child without like making them confused. So using language facilitation skills, you can adjust the language input so that you can teach them the language rules, grammar and also new vocab and stuff, which is very important when someone, especially a speech delayed kid, to learn language. Okay, so what you need to do at home is that you have to actually stop talking, stop asking questions and all that stuff. In the book it takes to talk, it talks about different kinds of parents. But if you think that talking to a kid is like all bubbly and going yay and all that kind of stuff, I think you might be a little misguided because as a, as a guy, especially if you're a dad watching this, you would think that it would be pretty unnatural for us to go really high pitched. First of all, even if you do have a high kind of high pitched voice, it doesn't mean that you're gonna use it all the time. And when you do that, you're actually cueing your child that you're about to engage him or her and that's not really that natural anyways. So if your child really only listens to you when your pitch is high, then this is also a prompt and a cue. So you have to be careful about that. Not saying that, you know, it's something what we call mother reads, which I will talk about in another video. But at the end of the day, you don't wanna make yourself talk like that to your child every single day, or else it's gonna be very tir and then the interest level will go way low when your child gets older. All right, so what do you need to do? Easy. First of all, I'm laughing because whenever I say it, it makes sense. But when parents do it, they can't, because we did talk about shaping a behavior takes at least 30 days of constant everyday action, no matter what it is. So what we need to do, you have to stop talking and start observing. Okay? In the book, it talks about an acronym called O.W.L. o W L observe, wait and listen. But I'm just gonna talk about observ. And why I need to make a whole video about it is because observing takes a lot of patience and skill, okay? When your child is playing, they're actually having their own fun, okay? And when you go in and barge in, you're actually disturbing them. If you've watched the other video that I talked about, if you're annoying your child or not, I go in and talk about, hey, you shouldn't just go in because it's their private space, okay? And how you want to teach your child is to see how they play and use language in the first place. Our instinct is that when we see someone playing or using something in the wrong way in a not so efficient fashion, we'll just rush in and try to solve the problem for them. If you have elderly at home using, like, gadgets like phones or whatever, or the computer, it's very easy for us to snatch it and just do it for them and finish it. But you have to remember this does not facilitate them because first of all, you're doing it too fast. Second of all, you're actually taking away their item and to do something with it. So the same with children. You have to observe what they're doing right now, see how they're doing it, and then slowly go into it and then demonstrate in the terms that they're comfortable with. So first of all, observe. What are they doing with the bricks? Are they throwing it? Are they stacking it? Are they eating it? That kind of stuff. Even if they're wrong, do not correct them. Just look at what they're doing you. Are there any language and speech involved, any sound play, as we call it, Then what you want to do is to start to imitate those stuff so that they think you're on the same level. You're playing with them instead of trying to teach and correct them in the beginning. A lot of my clients, when they start playing with the kids, the kids run away. The number one reason is that they didn't take the time to observe what's going on. If they really did take the time to observe and learn what the play routine is with a child, then it's pretty easy to infiltrate into their play environment. So you have to think about that. Okay, so language facilitation always starts with observing. That's number one. Number two is to wait as it talks in the book. But before that, I would like to add my own twist to it. I like to imitate what I've observed already. When you imitate something, it's called mirroring in psychology terms. But actually, salespeople, they tend to like mirror your posture, your tone, tone of voice, your energy level, all that kind of stuff you have to imitate in order to be able to sell something. And you need to remember, think about this thing. It's just human psychology. You don't want someone to become like a really hard salesperson, a salesman or sales woman coming at you with everything they got. And that's what a lot of parents are doing. They're hard selling the toys, the activities, the way you're playing to their child, and they don't like it. So what you need to do is to be a better salesperson. Okay? First of all, you have to mirror. You have to observe them, profile what they're doing, and then mirror their actions, how they play, how much sound, how much light, how much, whatever they're accustomed to. So if you shout, some kids will go like that. They would run away. If you play too much and too much action, the kids will actually get overwhelmed in terms of sensory, which is a whole other topic. But. But you have to take the time to do your intel correct. Once your child is okay with you sitting next to them and playing with them, then you can really talk about giving the correct words and sounds according to the action. So once you've observed, you see what their eyes are doing and everything like that, the next thing you have to do is to add language to the situation. And this is where a lot of parents and actually teachers fall short. It's just because that's how our parents talk to us in Another video I did talk about. No questions, don't talk, just talk less, all that kind of stuff. This is all language facilitation. How you want to do it is to look at what your child is looking at right now, right here, right now, at this instant, and you will commentate about it. And when you commentate about what your child is doing, keep it easy, keep it short. If your child is at, like, one word per sentence, then keep that one word, okay? Because most probably they can only understand a word at a time. And if your child doesn't even have words yet, maybe you should start with some sound, play some sounds, some silly sounds, such as, you know, if you have a car, a police car, you go, beep, boo, beep, boo. That kind of stuff. Or even, like, some sounds that only you can do, which I did talk about being more resourceful. So for instance, something, a car goes down the slide, you might do a lip trill, like, or, like tongue trill, something like that, so that it catches their attention and they want to play, okay? So you have to look at what your child is playing and doing and looking at right now, and then give appropriate sounds and words. And this is what we really talk about, language facilitation. Because you're adding sound to meaning, sound to meaning, sound to meaning. If they're not looking, they're not listening, they're not putting connections together. All right, so this video ties in all the things that I've been talking about in the previous series. This is what you do when you're not doing those, like requesting those table tasks that I was talking about before. And it really starts with changing your communication patterns, your behavior with your child. And it's just like learning to ride a bicycle in the beginning. You're going to trip and fall. As a parent, you don't know what to do. And, you know, you get a lot of negative feedback from your child because they keep on ignoring you and whatever. But trust me, it takes time. And just as any skill in the world, it's about practicing. And as much as you want to change your child's communication, the first person you need to change is actually yourself. So. Once you have observed and understood how your child plays, it'll be very, very beneficial to you because now you know how to actually communicate in a way that your child understands. Okay? So with that said, thank you very much for tuning into this video. This is the end of our home therapy series. If you have more questions or anything, you can put them in the comment section below. And if you liked it. Please like this video because it helps the YouTube algorithm to show it to more parents like yourself and to learn about how to do stuff at home that, you know, therapists or anyone don't really have the time to explain during, you know, session times. And that's why I'm making these videos because most of the time when I'm doing sessions, I don't have enough time to talk to parents. Maybe like 45 minutes of real therapy and then 15 minutes of just teaching them what to do. But that's not enough. So you really have to understand the mindset behind all these kind of techniques and strategies that, and that will actually accelerate your child's language performance. Because now you're a different person. You're actually a facilitator at home rather than someone who's testing, testing, testing, asking questions. Right? So if you haven't, Please go to ww.agentsofspeech.com checklist to download the whole therapy checklist that I have made. It's just all the tools and toys that I recommend all my clients to get if they're trying home therapy themselves at home. Alright, so with that said, thank you very much and I'll see you in the next video real soon. Bye.