Ming from Agents of Speech breaks down how to assess and improve a child's speech, explaining the difference between speech (sound production) and language (vocabulary and grammar). Work with a speech therapist to identify missing sounds, then practice at the right level: single words first, then sentences, then conversation.
Okay, so how do you improve your child's speech? Maybe your child's speech and language level is subpar to their peers, right? And you want to improve, no matter their clarity, for people to understand and so on. So the first thing you need to do is to understand what's missing inside of the whole rubrics of how your child is. And you can do this in a few ways. And the easiest way is to get assessment from a speech therapist. I personally don't do assessments over the Internet. The best way is to find someone in person to do it, and you will see what levels that your child is currently having. And so after you know this, then you have to ask the question, oh, my child doesn't communicate well. Is it a speech problem or a language problem? So a speech problem is the sounds, the pronunciations that a person has. So for instance, if I spoke and I missed out all the S's, right. It would be harder to understand. So specific sounds, specific syllabic structures that children are having trouble with. I'm not going to deep dive into what a syllabic structure is, but you need to know, is it a speech problem, the ability to produce speech sounds, or is it a language problem of that I don't know the words, the grammar, or up to a sentence length, I cannot proceed anymore. And a very good example of this is, for instance, if I know the Indonesian alphabets or the Japanese alphabets, I can say any word. I can read any word right now, I can read any sentence I want to. But does it mean I know the language, the message behind it? No. And I can do it in good pronunciation. There aren't sounds that I cannot say. So that would be a pure language problem, that I cannot communicate properly in the foreign language. Whereas a speech problem is, for instance, there are some sounds. Like with some friends from Mongolia the other day, they try to teach me some words, I could even make sound. There's a lot of throat sound. Like I don't even know how to do it. To create a sentence with those sounds was impossible. So it's both a speech and a language problem in that case, okay, if it is a speech case, then you have to think about what sounds are missing currently, Right? What sounds are missing? If a child cannot pronounce or produce. That's the word. That's a real word. The sound. L. Right? L. Okay, that's missing. Where is it missing? Is it missing at the front of a word, in the middle word or at the back of the word? Right. If they can do it In a single word, can they do it in a sentence? If they can do it in a sentence, can they do it in the conversation? So you need to know what the level of breakdown is in terms of that particular sound and what sounds are there. Maybe the L they break down at a conversational level. Maybe the S, they can't even do it in the word level. Right? You need to know, and you need to know why so that we can treat it. The speech sounds is all about thinking about why can't they do it right? Why can't they do the L? Is it because their tongue doesn't know how to go up? They haven't learned that motion yet. That's why they can't do it right. For instance, the trill R people say that as a genetical thing. It's not right. It's learnable. I couldn't do it and I learned how to do it. It's all about why is it the position of the tongue. They didn't give enough slack for the tongue to vibrate as the air comes out. Then it's something that you have to teach the child about how to improve that. Okay, so speech sounds is something that we want to improve on if it really affects the communication ability. So if someone says something to me, I have a problem understanding because they're missing out all the S's, then we need to make that a goal. Okay, so the most, majority of the time it's more about language. Right? To improve your child's speech, if they're saying like one word after another and not in a full sentence or even a phrase, then you need to understand that's the breakdown level. They're stuck at making phrases, they break down the phrases. So then you teach there and you don't need to ask why. You don't need to ask why. Like speech, you don't need to say, oh, why don't they understand that? It's very easy because they don't know the structure, the sentence structure. And it might not have enough vocabs. Just if you do these two, it's probably done right. And that's how you improve the speech and language of a child. Understand where they're at. And then, okay, this level, then I will teach at this level and it should be fine. Right? And obviously there are a lot more nuances about how to teach a child. Most of like 90% of the battle is to getting the child willingly sit there and listen to you and learn and try. That's actually hard because behavior wise and so you know, if you want to improve your child's speech and language, you should learn about where the things are missing for speech. Think about why, and then teach the deficit for language. We just need to know when they break down in terms of communication and then we stick there and we make goals for it. And to sum it all up, you need to have a routine that makes children want to work with you and then it's just a straight road. Right. Every time you go to a new breakdown level, you create a new language goal and you go to another one. Like now he can do subject, verb, object, sentences. You can do it now. Can we do it in a well formed grammatical sentence? He can. Okay, cool. So can we do three in a row or can we put. And we teach him like compound sentences or whatever. It's very straightforward once you know what breakdown levels there are and what's missing. But the most important part is getting. Getting your child wanting to do therapy with you and do training with you. So for that, you can learn more@ww agentsofspeech.com course and you can look at all the free courses we have about how to set up the therapy at home, how to get your child ready, and what the different levels there are. Okay, that's it for today's video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.
