A short YouTube talk by Ming @ Agents of Speech (uploaded Sep 29, 2023) offering practical strategies to engage speech-delayed children. The speaker emphasizes adjusting language level to the child, using gestures and empathetic scaffolding, and joining the child’s interests to encourage communication.
What topic can you choose that will keep their interest? And also, what language level are you adjusting to? Are you just talking to a single word level child, asking them crazy questions like, why do you think Brian didn't like his lunch? That's impossible for him to understand. If you are in a foreign country, someone talks to you and asks you that kind of question and they want to have a conversation with you, someone with empathy would go down to your language level and start talking and add gestures and whatnot. So therefore, you should be doing that with the kid as well. Do not come from a place where I'm like, I want to have a conversation with you, but I'm going to start talking in a way that I would talk to someone who has mastered language. If you remember back in school, people who spoke a certain language, they hung up together, right? People who had similar interests, they hung out together. People who had similar levels of competency, they hung out together. If you're talking to your child and you want them to hang out with you and they want to have a good time and they want to have a conversation with you, you need to be interested in the stuff that they are interested in, okay?
