Teaching Children to Speak in Sentences | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Hey everyone. Sorry, forgot my mic. Hey everyone, tell me if you can hear me. Today in this video, we're going to talk about how to teach children to use sentences, okay? And by using sentences, I mean a lot of parents are asking me that children are stuck with like one words or like two, Just one word at a time, right? And what we call a one word level. And most of the time when children are stuck at one word level, they do not use phrases, they don't use sentences. And sometimes parents are reporting that, you know, whenever parents tell them to talk more, they won't do it. So today we're going to dive in right away and tell you what to do, okay? And the stuff I'm telling you here is basically what I do inside the clinic room and basically what I tell parents what to do at home as well, okay? And sorry, these lives aren't supposed to be like step by step guide, but it tells you like around the gist of what you should be doing at home. Okay? So let's talk about the number one point that about this live is to model the right language, okay? And what do we mean by modeling the right language? So let me start off with a story. So I have a client of mine, actually it's not only her, there's a bunch of kids who love copying their moms talking on phone. So whenever they get like a phone toy, they would go, hello, like that. And in, in Hong Kong, they would take up a phone and the kid would go, why? And he would go like that. So what they're doing there, and it might be cute, very funny and stuff, right? But what, what they're doing there is they're copying their moms and copying their dads and copying like people on the phone, right? So that means they are taking your model of, of language, but they cannot do a whole like what we call like a discourse, right? A conversation. Well, a lot of parents are asking, oh, how can I make them conversational? Well, they are trying already. If your child is already copying that or if they're copying something from the tv, they can recite something and then they're like. And then the parents would be like, hey, how come they can recite YouTube channels and videos but not talk to us, okay? And this is the reason why, I'll tell you why. Because you're modeling something that's too hard for him, okay? Whereas the videos, the YouTube, it's easy. And they repeated it many, many times. Like for instance, if they know how to sing the Barney song, if you're From, I don't know, like, me in a childhood, you know, how to sing the Barney song is because we've heard it many, many times, and it's the same thing over and over again, and it's predictable. It's easy to remember. Whereas some stuff such as you talking or, you know, you on the phone, you talking to the kid, that's a little more difficult. All right? And why I say that you need to model the right language is that. Are you right now talking to your child and like, a paragraph, right? Or like, in long sentences. These aren't that great. Okay? Why would I say that? It's because it's difficult for your child to catch on, all right? And a lot of parents here are. They have religious beliefs, right? So they would ask children to, like, recite prayers, recite parts of the Bible, parts of the Quran. I don't know which religion you are. That doesn't matter, Right? That stuff is also hard. But at least they can follow a little bit. Okay? Just a little bit doesn't mean they can recite. So if they're at one word level, you're watching this and you want your child to, like, speak in sentences. You are supposed to. You're supposed to model the right language. And how. And what do you model? Right? You need to model at the level of your la. Of your child's language. Okay? And I do. And if you. If you've heard of this before, because I've talked about this in the micro course, right? If you haven't joined, you should. It's Agents of Sweet. You can go click the link below or above. Doesn't matter where it is. And we do talk about. You need to meet your child at where the language level should be. Okay? And most of the time, for one word level children, it's one to two words, okay? And you might. You might say, ming, this whole live video is about making sentences. Why are you telling me to talk in one to two word phrases? All right, which brings me to the second point, right? You need to do phrases before sentences is very, very, very, very important. You cannot jump to a sentence right away. And there are a lot of research, a lot of therapists out there who say, hey, you gotta. There's a whole debate about it, right? Because developmentally speaking, children start off with phrases. We. They do what we call telegraphic speech and what that means, basically. It's just that it's. It's sentences that do not have grammatical structure. Okay? For instance, like, if I were to say. Like, if you were to Describe what I'm doing now is main talk, right? Then that would be not correct, grammatically speaking. Okay, But. But the content of it is correct because I am. I am talking. So you. If you're trying to teach a child one to two word phrases, some therapists, some experts, some whatever, some doctors, whatever they would say, hey, you need to model, like, you need to model the. The grammatically correct speech or grammatically correct sentence, such as Ming is talking, right? But then you need. You will introduce the is, which is like a verb. For. There's an like you're introducing is, right? You're introducing, like, talking. The ing. The ing, right? Which is these two things you have to. It's not that you have to explicitly teach, but at the same time. At the same time, you're making it harder for a child to distinguish which. Which language. Oh, sorry. Which word means what? Right? So the reason why your child is stuck at one word is because they don't know how to put two words together, or three or four, for that matter. Okay. The grammar for itself doesn't really matter at this time. Okay. And why we like to, for instance, for me, why I like to do, like, two words without any grammar is because I want the kid to be successful. I want them to win. I don't want them to, like, listen to Ming is talking and then feel. Feel it being so very difficult. I want it to be super easy for them to identify. Okay. Where the verb is and where the, like, the subject is, if you may. All right. So going on. All right, let's say that. Yes. Yeah, of course, when you talk, it's the best practice to stay grammatically correct and try to tell. Tell your child to talk in a grammatically correct fashion. But at the same time, you're dealing with two things, right? You're. You're teaching two things. Number one, you're teaching the grammar. Number two, you're teaching the sentence length, which is difficult. You should never do two things at the same time, especially to children who are delayed, disordered, like on the spectrum, whatever you like to call it. As long as someone who's learning language, their first language, and they're having difficulty with that, don't try to mix two things together because it's super hard. And this is where I feel like parents are too hasty because they want to do, like, three things or four things in, like, together. That's why they're failing at everything. And they feel really defeated because they see other children, they can do everything already. Then, you know, it becomes, you know, because you're setting up them up to fail yet again. I always like to talk about try to make your child win. Right. That's why you start, start with like two words. And we do phrases and let's talk about what kind of phrases we can do, which kind of pushes towards point number three. Okay. If you can't see the points, it's in the comments section or inside the description. You can just take a look. I'll just show it here. Right, yeah. So the number three is like to increase vocabulary size. Okay. And by the way, if you have any questions, you can just throw them down in the comment section. All right, so. And why do we need to increase the vocabulary size? Research says, and a lot of research differs from like country to country, culture to culture, whatever to whatever. Right? So people say that, oh, you need children, needs 50 words or above to make. To start combining words. Some people say 150, some resources more than that. I'm not going to quote anything, not going to embarrass myself. But at the same time, the category of the, of the vocab also makes, you know, makes a huge difference. Let's say that you only know nouns, right? Which is a lot of delayed children because they love watching YouTube. They learn massive amounts of nouns, right? They learn about vegetables, they learn about like occupations, you know, animals, you know, have sky animals, sea animals, like forest animals, whatever. And they are better than us. And that they know the difference between a turtoise and a turtle, which I didn't know, by the way, and an alligator and a crocodile, which I also don't know the difference. Difference. But that's besides the point. The, the point is that they have a massive amount of vocab, which exceeds 150 to like maybe 300. By the same time, they cannot talk. And a lot of parents in the group or on the YouTube channel are saying, hey, you know, my child can count from 1 to 20. They can do ABCDEFG. They can say the colored, you know, numbers, you know, names of whatever, their favorite show, whatever. Yeah, but it's all in the same category, which is nouns, which is labeling of like, things, objects, adjectives, whatever. But you need to think about what is the most common. What are the most common structures of two words? Well, one of them is an adjective plus a noun, which, I mean, a lot of children can do like a white horse, like a black table, you know, a big sofa. Okay, I'm just pulling this out of nowhere, obviously, but you get my point. That's one of them all the other ones, they need somewhat of. They need some different categories like verbs, which is very lacking, by the way, for children who are speech and language delayed or disorder, they do not have enough verbs. And the reason behind it is because it's a little more. It's just a little more abstract. And whenever you go a little more abstract, it's difficult to learn. Okay? And that's why, even for us, right, we only learn about harder words when we get older because they get more and more abstract. And for children, verbs are pretty abstract already because an action by itself, to put a word to it is difficult. So to increase vocab, you need to increase vocabulary. Verbs first. All right? Because, you know, verbs take a pretty center. Like it's a pretty centerpiece in a sentence. Okay, let me give you example. If you want to go for a very easy sentence like svo, subject, verb, object, you would be saying something like, ming eats apple, right? Or mommy eat apple, or mommy drink water, or daddy, you know, watch tv. Okay? So where does the verb go in the middle, Smackdown and middle. And a lot of languages have that in common. Okay? Chinese, one of them. Chinese, one of them is already one that has a verb in the middle. Most of the time I say English. Yeah, I don't know about Spanish, I don't know about whatever. I think Indonesian is the same, I guess. Yes, it's in the middle. Okay, so you get the point. You need to have that verb in order for. To describe something. All right, so Aileen has asked the question, okay, so how do you do verbs? Great, great question. Okay, so how you do it basically is you can do many, many ways. There's many, many ways to teach verbs. All right, the first one is to use toys, okay? Use those toys that, you know, if you haven't, you should check out the checklist that I've been talking about. Okay? So some toys you can use are like car slides, you know, a cook set, doctor's kit, all those, like, all those toys. Once you build up the routine, you can stop your child and teach them the verb before you let them do the action. Okay? For instance, if they like a tea set, right? They know that first of all, you know, you have to put the. Pour the water inside the kettle and then pour it into the cup, okay? So what you can do is to basically teach the verb pour, right? And you just stop them right, before they pour inside the kettle or the pot or whatever you call it, that container, okay? And then after that, you stop them again and you ask them to say pour and then after that, you stop them and say drink. And then as they can say it already, you add gestures towards the verbs. Okay? Pour, pour, pour, pour, drink, like that. So what you do is that you link the words to the gesture and the action, and later on you only do the action and the gesture and hoping that they would say the word. And once they say the word, what you do is to. Is to act dumb and then say poor what? Poor. Poor what? Right? You're acting dumb. You don't know what comes after the verb. So they need to become more specific, right? So you can say pour cup or pour kettle or kettle. Right? Now, the grammar doesn't really make a difference, to be honest. But what I mean is it needs to make sense. If everything inside the kettle is water or tea, then you cannot change, like, the noun that often you can only say pour water for, like, pouring water inside the kettle and then pouring water inside the cup. So you can't have too much of a contrast. So sometimes what I do is like, I go as much as to, you know, throw grammar and logic outside the window and try to teach, you know, the whole sentence of use kettle to pour. Like pour with the kettle, right? Or, you know, pour into the kettle or pour into the cup. But I omit the into so that later I can teach that. Okay, so that's number one method. Okay, so number two method. Number two method of teaching verbs is not. Do not use flashcards for verbs. Because a flashcard is like a static image, all right? You can use it after the child understands what a verb is, but don't use it in a photo. You can teach them with actions, basically, what you can do. Yeah, there you go. Someone has asked it. So you cannot really use flashcard with verbs yet as the main method after Susie. Okay, after you teach the child with, like what I said just now with toys, and I'm going to talk about two more methods or one more, I'm not sure. And then you can use pictures. Okay, got it. And we. We go through about how to use, like, pictures and flashcards and whatever in the micro course. So go check it out. It's agents of Speech.com micro. All right, so if you don't use flashcards, what can you do? So you can act it out. You can say what's happening? And then you. And you act it out. Like, for instance, I tell them, like, you gotta have a good relationship with your kid, right? And once you have a good relationship with your kid, you can do anything. So, and what I mean by that is another topic. All right, but this is what you can do. You can say, what's happening, drinking like that? And you try again, what's happening, drinking like that? So how you can make it fun is that you can make the verbs a more lively. So, for instance, if you're drinking, you can slurp it really hard, you know, and then you go like that. So I don't know, some kids like me doing that. And that's why they learned the verb like for drink. And same for eat, same for sleep. Sleep. You can do it like a. Like a snoring sound, like. Like that. And other than you doing it, you can also use doll, which is kind of creepy. I don't like it. I use. Sometimes I use figurines a lot. And one of them, the figurines that I like to use the most is called playmobils. Right? Those are expensive. If you cannot, then, you know, use some animal toys also can do, you know. So a few verbs I like to teach in the beginning are things such as walk, you know, with. Like this, with the feet. Or like, if it's static, you can just move it or something. You can do jump, you can do run, you can do sleep, eat, drink, sleep, you know, and that's probably it. Let's do that. And then when they understand what a verb is, then you can teach them as a category with flashcards. And later on you can use that. Use those flashcards to teach some more sentences. All right, so this is all, all this, all teaching, all of this needs to. It hinges on that you're able to sit your child down and. Okay. Which is a rare skill to have. So, you know, as a parent, I mean, not as a therapist, but as a parent, it's a rare skill for a parent to have to sit a child down and teach them something. Okay. I can only tell you the methods, but the prerequisite is that you have to be able to teach them something or else, you know, they just run away. No matter what you do, no matter what tricks and tips I tell you, if you can't get your child to listen to you or you have a good. You have a bad. Not bad. Like you haven't had that relationship yet. It's difficult. All right, so hopefully you know how to increase the vocab size for verbs. I'm sure you know how to do nouns and adjectives and whatnot because you just use YouTube or something like that. Okay. The third way of doing verbs is something I use very little, very seldom do I use this, and this was back when I was teaching a lot of children on the spectrum. We would use videos of us doing the verbs, which is handy nowadays because we have Google Drive and whatnot. It's easy to access through a phone and, like, iPad, right? So the action should be very clear. Just one person doing something. Okay, so imagine like, the video right now, what you're watching, right? And then I'm. I'm doing, like, I'm doing this. I got. And I'm talking over the phone, right. Obviously that there needs to be no sound on the video, right? Or else that's going to be a distraction. All right? So just remember that you can use videos as well, but you have to pre make it. Which makes it difficult. You need two people, one person filming, one person doing the action, and no sound involved. Okay? So let's keep on going. All right? If you have any questions about, like, what I was talking about, please do tell me. All right, that wraps up for increasing the vocab size. Okay, so I'm gonna keep on going. So the fourth thing I'm gonna talk about now is to sentence structures and generalization. And this might be something that's a little difficult for you guys to understand. So there are a lot of different sentence structures. And I mean, we have a very international audience here. Some people are speaking, like, Malay, Bahasa, Malayu, Bahasa, Indonesian, you know, Chinese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Spanish. Some people who speak Polish are also inside the group and in the channel. What I want to say is it doesn't matter. It needs to come from your intuition. As a native speaker. Okay, what can you mix things up with? Okay, what comes first? What comes next? It needs to be from you as a native speaker. So if I were to, like, you need to think for yourself. Okay, what can you say at that as an input for a child? The structure needs to come from you. And for the parents who are watching this, it's usually one to two words. Okay? So you think about what two word structures can you do? Can you talk about in different ways? Okay, so for instance, like this one, this cup, if I were to like, to describe it to a kid, I would say a blue cup, right? What else can you say? Not much else. You wouldn't say ceramic cup. That'd be too hard. You might say it's a small cup, but there's no comparison. Okay? So you have to have, like, some. It takes skill. It takes, like, practice to build up that. That sense. Okay? Some people say that it's a common sense. It's not Common sense, okay? Common sense is trained sense, all right? It's because you had some form of education. That's why you have common sense. Common sense doesn't come for free, okay? You gotta learn stuff, and then it becomes second nature to you. Okay? So what else can you do? Like, for instance, this one. A bottle, right? You can say bottle. You can say water bottle. All right? Some children learn this as a water bottle. That's one word for them. It's not two, because they can't say metal bottle, which is fair enough. I think it's. Metal is easy. Silver, right? Silver bottle, Long bottle, maybe. But at the same time, you need something to compare with, right? So you see, there are many, many ways to say it, okay? So some common structures you can use or you can teach is that after you increase the vocab size, be aware of what words they know and at least have one word inside of the structure that they can relate to. Okay? Let's say I'm teaching you something. Like in Chinese, if you didn't know the word blue or cup in Chinese, and I would just say this one, right? For instance, I use my mother tongue. Like in Cantonese, I say, right? Would you know, without knowing, like, grammatical, like the grammar, the grammar rules in Cantonese, or like the words in Cantonese, which is blue, which is cup, right? You wouldn't. So hopefully, if you're saying this thing, you should be. Your child should at least know one of the words, okay? Or else it wouldn't make sense for him to deduce what it means, okay? It's difficult. It's not logical for a person to hear two things that they have no idea about, and they have to just guess, right? It's impossible. So remember that, you know, you need to have at least one. Okay? So I went, like, kind of another direction, but sentence structures, number one, subject verb, okay? Like what I was saying. Mommy eat, mommy drink, daddy sleep, daddy jump, Daddy, you know, stand up, daddy sit, right? These are subject verbs. You can have verb objects, right? Drink water, you know, eat apple, push chair. What else? Open door, you know, turn on shower or something. On shower or whatever. Whatever suits your needs, okay? So there's subject, verb, verb, object. There's also what we're talking about, like an adjective plus a subject, right? There's also, like ownership. What was it called again? And opposes it. There you go. That's the proper word for it, okay? So you can say mommy's purse, mommy's bag, daddy's bag, and your bag. Um, that usually. If I would usually use the Child's name. And a lot of parents would say, hey, how about like you or your. Or like me, I? These pronouns, typically speaking from where I'm from, Hong Kong, by the way, this is acquired by around like three and a half to four or sometimes even later, so it doesn't really matter. Okay, the. Remember, only do one thing at a time. If you're shooting for a sentence length, then only do the sentence length. Okay? If you're, if you. If you're teaching, like a whole new vocabulary such as this one. If they'd never seen the mouse before, it'd be crazy for you to say black mouse because you're teaching this word, right? If I were to teach you a new word, I wouldn't put like an adjective before it. I would only tell you and label that thing to you, right? That would make no sense. Vishal has never seen a mouse before, and you say a little black mouse. That's crazy. Okay, Unless they know little and black. Okay, Unless they know that. But still, you are still teaching a new vocab, so keep it that way. Only use one word. So therefore. All right, what was it I was talking about? Oh, yeah, sentence structure, subject, verb, verb, object, adjective, plus a noun. That's what we call it. You can do object and object. Like, for instance, you can say, this is where, like, you can teach. And okay, you say cup and bottle, right? Or you know, you can do. That's an adjective and a noun. You can also do like numbers, since your child knows it. So for instance, you can say, I have a lack of stuff here. So you can say like two face masks, right? You can do that. Okay, and what else can you do? You can do possessive, which is kind of like an adjective plus plus a noun, right? Because you are describing that thing in terms of your ownership. So you can say Ming's glasses, Ming's shirt, like that, right? So I would go for those sentence structures first. But it really depends on you as a native speaker, what makes sense to you, okay? And you have the most. You have the last say about what to do. Okay, so what is generalization? Maybe I've. I've said this many times on this channel, Facebook group, Facebook page, whatever. We're doing it three ways, by the way. So you see it in different places. Isn't that crazy? So generalization, what is that? Generalization means can. Like for instance, if I can, like, skateboard inside my house, does it mean that I can skate inside the park, Right? And if I can, that means I transferred my skills outside of my House into the skate park. Okay? That's called generalization. That's one part of generalization. There's different types of generalizations, right? For instance, if I am able to say a whole sentence in a foreign language, does that mean, like, for instance, I can say. I can't really say much in Indonesian, but anyways, for instance, like, if I can say two words together in, like, Japanese per se, right. Does it mean that I can say all? Like, all? Like, I can express myself only, like, with all two word sentences? The answer is no, because it's impossible for me to know all the words for it. Right? And this might not be a good example, but I will get to it, okay? So don't worry. I will answer your questions real soon. Right? So generalization, the thing, language therapy is that it's impossible for us to go through all the combinations of a language. This is where I'm getting to, okay? It's impossible to get through all the combinations. All right? For instance, if your child can say, I want something, parents tend to tell me, oh, they can say three word sentences like, I want chocolate. But can they say, you want chocolate? Can they say, like, you want milk? Or can they switch it and say, you drink milk? Can they, like, switch and whatever and on all those, you know, switch places for different words and it would still make sense? The answer is probably not. That means they cannot do something like that. Right? They cannot generalize. Okay? It's impossible for us to go through all the possible, you know, like the. What was that word I was using in my mind? I'm trying to say permutation, but it's too hard. So combinations. Yeah, there you go. You cannot go through all the combinations of the words. Okay? What we're trying to do is that we give them a sample. We give them examples of like, oh, you can do this, you can do that, you can say that. You can say this in this situation. And we will just hope. We're just hoping that they will get the rule because it's impossible to tell them all the rules. I. You know, like, if you've learned English as a foreign language, as a second language. No, like, people try to tell you the rules, but if English is your first language, then. Or, you know, at least you've learned it since a kid, you don't learn the rules at all. For me, in Masters is the first time that I learned about subject, verb agreement, or is that correct? Please correct me if I'm wrong. So I didn't know that there's a name for it. I just knew that this sounds correct. This doesn't sound correct because I know the rule inside my heart, but I don't know the name for it. Right. And same as language therapy, we cannot tell them all the rules. We cannot tell a kid who doesn't understand you more than a word or two at a time to tell them all the rules. So we're just hoping, we're just praying that they will get the rule correct. Okay. They might like get it wrong here and there, but sooner or later, by trial and error, because they're human and they know how to learn and they're smart, they're going to get it. Okay, so this is what I mean by generalization. You must give enough variations in words and whatever so that they can do. They can generalize on their own. All right? So that they can generalize on their own. Okay, More on that later. Let's answer some questions first. Okay? So Jin Lui Tan, sorry if I'm doing your name incorrectly. Is it advisable to teach only a single language to a two year old speech delay child? I used to talk bilingual to my son, Mandarin and Chinese, until he was diagnosed with speech delay. And most of people advised me to only teach him one language to avoid confusion. What's your opinion? Okay, cool. Thanks for watching. Well, the thing is, I've answered this very clearly in the micro course and to keep it short and simple as an answer, I would say depends on how you talk to your son and bilingual. If you're switching up like crazy, then he will be confused. Let's say I'm like and Indonesia. Why I'm laughing is because Indonesia is a country where they do a lot of this like code switching within a sentence. Okay, you know what, Jinle, if you are saying the words I send the sentences and switching up like the languages within one sentences. Yes. You might be actually confusing your kid. You would confuse adult. You know, if they weren't very good at both languages, it doesn't matter. So I would say that don't switch language within the sentence, but you can switch within, like within the context. You can say one sentence in one language and the next sentence in another. Okay. There are a lot of theories. There are a lot of theories. I don't want to get into it. And a lot of people who advise you to teach in one language. Yeah, of course teaching one language is easier. But what is more important? The naturalness of the environment. If the whole environment speaks like in English and Chinese and Indonesian and Malaysian, then what is the point? Right? Or like if you're in the usa, they speak both English and Spanish. And Spanish is a growing language in the usa. People project that it will become a dominant language later on. So if you're like taking away the chance of your child learning it as an early learner of two languages, it will make it hard. It's a trade off, right? And will he speak faster? No. Like, if you think about it, language delayed or disordered children have a root problem of learning language as a whole. It doesn't matter if it's one or two language, they just cannot understand the rules correctly. So if you use the rules when you speak, don't mix up the grammar, all right? Have a base grammar that is correct to the mother tongue or correct to whatever language you're speaking. All right? Don't switch up within the sentence. That's what I would say. Obviously this is a huge topic. Bilingualism, trilingualism. It's going to be even more important that we address it. But dude, everything is inside the micro course. All right? By everything, I mean my explanation, my knowledge to of which bilingual goes. Okay, to be honest, nowadays, no one, nobody really knows. And. And to give you a little more like insight, right? And language, like speaking two language, bilingual, trilingual isn't the cause for language delay. If a child isn't delayed, they will be delayed even with one language, right? Whether it's going to become a hindrance, you have to try. Okay? So Danya says, what's a realistic timeline to try to introduce past tense language or how do you know when to. My son is three knows phrases and simple sentences. He doesn't understand what to do in class. What did you eat? Right, you're mixing up a few things. First of all, Danya, when you ask a question, you're doing a few things already. So he does. You're asking him if he understands a past tense. Right? But you're actually doing a few things. Number one, you're asking a question. That's number one. Number two, you are asking something that is not here now. Okay? Which is like from far away. Okay? From long long time ago. Not long. A long long time ago according to your kid. Okay? So for him, if you ask what did you do in class, that's like ages for him. So he doesn't like children who are delayed or disordered, whatever. They have difficulty about their. And then. Right, So I wouldn't, I wouldn't introduce or try to make him. Okay. Answer questions that involve a past tense. All right? I wouldn't do that. I Would describe in a past tense and hope that he understands the difference. Okay. Obviously, there are ways that you can teach inside a clinic room, but I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't. I would save you the headache to do it. What I would do instead is that you need to do a lot more language facilitation, Right. Which we do talk about a lot on the channel, on inside the course, and a lot of stuff that I do talk about. Okay? And if you ask, what did you eat? That's even harder. Okay? So don't use questions. I'm sure your little one already has problems with answering questions on its own. Okay? So if you introduce another thing, it's going to be even more difficult. So you can introduce past tense. It's fine. There's no realistic timeline. It depends on your child's development. Okay? So if I were you, if I were to teach past tense, I would teach it by just telling him what had happened. For instance, if you see dad just leave, you can say, dad left. You know, dad has gone to work. I don't know how many words are said. You say a few. Few phrases, simple sentences. I don't know to what extent, so I cannot give exact examples. But instead of, you know, asking him, you can just describe with past tense that something has happened. Okay. Another. Another. Another example would be you can just tell them to open a door. That. Open the door. Yeah, Open. See, you opened the door. It's opened now, right? You just hope. As I said, you're just hoping. Okay, so Alina says, is there too late for generalization? Mine would always have errors, but getting better. Yeah, there's no too late for generalization. I mean, today we are talking about language generalization, right? I hope we're on the same page, Lena. So if we are talking about language generalization, I think there really is. Like, a long, long time ago, a supervisor of mine told me, well, he's not. He's an ABA guy. He's a. He's this professor from ucla, right? And then he's not into language, but he said all. All knowledge at its core is some form of matching. All right? That's why they do a lot of matching in ABA programs, is because they believe the root of nearly all knowledge, or like whatever you do or you say or whatever you know, is to some extent matching. Okay. Association to different stuff. Okay? And I do agree to some extent. And, you know, linguistically speaking, when we're talking about, you know, the meaning of a word and where it goes inside a sentence, we Call it. It's like a network, right? It's like a network. So one word links to another word because, like, of a certain. It's like a family tree. If you say it's like a neural network, it's like a spider web, whatever you like to call it, right? So it's never too late because our understanding is getting better every day, even for adults. Right. If we're learning knowledge, we will be able to grabs grasp more links between like, words and theories and concepts. Right? And by the way, you know, if you're. If you're good at something, if you have indulged yourself in a certain topic for a long time, it becomes easier for you to learn something new within that topic because you have what people say, domain knowledge, right? Or what people say. Like you have expertise in that. Right? So it's going to be so much easier for someone who understands the computer to learn something about the computer. And that is generalization by itself as well. Okay. All right. So Amar says, is it possible. Oh, sorry, we're not supposed to talk about this here. And we're not doing that. Agents of Speech is all about teaching parents about what to do. Okay. And if you want to, you can just go to agents of Speech.com micro, try it out and then try it and see if the tips there is good enough for you. And we can see how we can help you more inside the community. Okay? So Shushu says how to communicate. My son is speechless. Hey, this is too general for me to answer, okay? I do not understand how to answer that. Okay? And whoever says he can answer that is, I don't know, is someone that you shouldn't listen to. Okay? So that's all I wanted to cover. And before I want to leave this live, I want to go through and summarize each of the points, okay. And tell you the exact thing you should do right now to teach sentences. And I know this is a topic that a lot of parents are asking me. That's why I'm trying to make a course about it. And basically it breaks down what steps I would do, what, like tasks I would teach and stuff if it was my own client and what I would think, right? So these are part of it. So number one, you need to model the correct language, right? In your day to day. Are you talking in paragraphs? Are you talking sentences? Are you meeting your child at the language level that they're at? Right? Are you doing that? They are already modeling you to some extent. They are modeling YouTube videos. They are modeling things that they see to hear, right? So why not it be you children? People will only imitate stuff they understand enough to do. So you look at, like, Michael Jackson, he does a moonwalk. Are you going to try it? No, if you. Obviously not. But if you know how to dance a little bit, you might be able, like, feel comfortable to try. All right, that's what I'm saying. Number two, you need to teach phrases before sentences. I know there are a lot of experts out there telling parents that they should be talking in grammatically correct sentences and, like, you know, describe to them in, like, the utmost detail to the kid. All right. Whilst that might be scientifically backed, and I feel like, you know, there has some merit to it and actually has quite a lot of merit to it. But at the same time, we want your child to win, to, like, take the W as soon as possible. That's why we teach, like, grammatically incorrect phrases, what we call telepathic, not telepathic. That. That'd be crazy, right? Just tell them no telegraphic speech, which is devoid. Which means there is zint. Any grammatical, like, words, like is on in whatever, like, off these kind of words. And you wouldn't want that there because you want them to be able to understand. Guess what's the guess how the rule is the noun goes in front of the verb. Like the verb is before the object. You know, the adjective is before the noun or the adjective is like, behind a noun, like in Bahasa Indonesia. So you want them to understand that, right? Instead of learning is on of whatever. Those are just functional words. It doesn't really matter. Okay. Number three, increase the vocabulary size. Cannot emphasize that enough. Get more like, gestures and actions and verbs into their vocab so that you can use it. So many verbs, so many sentence structures around the world have verb as the centerpiece, right? If you study linguistics, usually the whole chunk, like, for instance, Ming is going to the park, right? It is going to the park. It's called a verb phrase because it's headed. The center is the verb. Okay? And some. I hope I'm not, like, slaughtering my. My career here because some linguist is going to come up to me and say, hey, this is wrong, but whatever. Verbs are very important. All right, Number four, sentence structures and generalization. Think about what is natural for you to say in two to three words, okay? And make sure that you cover as much as many combinations as you can so your child has a chance to generalize and catch the rule. Right? So let's finish off with answering some questions, and then we're off. Okay. Because it's been quite a long live today. Okay. So desen. Hope I got that right. Says I have a lot of questions, but don't know where to start. Love your videos. Yeah. Rookies. Oh, oh, great. Good. Well, I'm happy to be of service. We have a Facebook group if you want to join. Just search my name on Facebook, I guess. Anyways, Zoe says Hey, Zoe. Hi. My son is 3 year old, but he cannot speak a sentence when he wish to express something. But he's able to speak the sentence which I ever taught him say like when I asked what's your name? Then he able to answer, my name is whatever. How old are you? I'm three. When he want to drink me, he would ask can I have milk? Milk please. Ah, cute. Two words at the same time. These sentence seems like he printed in on his mind is considered delay. Yes, it is considered a delay. And you should get, what's that called? You should get a. You should get an assessment as soon as you can. All right. It says not typical for a child of 3 year old to not be able to speak a sentence. Right? But at least you know, you know that he can learn. You know that he will listen to you and like if you teach him long enough, he will understand. So follow the tips in the micro course or else we'll be sitting here for four hours. Okay. Go to agents of speech.com micro go take a look, Zoe. All right. And then see if it, if you like it or not, all right? Because what you're describing here means that he, he's just stuck with like can I as a, as a what we call a carrier phrase because it's always can I underscore something, right? Can I whatever. Can I whatever. But they cannot, cannot ever like say a sentence by themselves, right? And that means this child most like I'm. I'm guessing because most of the time I'm not supposed to and I'm shouldn't and I wouldn't give like an diagnosis given what you write. But usually I'm saying usually not saying your son usually speaking is that children who cannot form a sentence and have a lot of these carrier phrase, like I want whatever. Can I have whatever. These children have a lack of vocab. So go and think about how to teach your child vocabulary that he can use on a daily basis. All right, cool stuff. I'm gonna stick around for like around one or two more minutes so you can type your questions. If I don't see any, then I guess I'm gonna end this live. Okay, so then send. You don't use Facebook. Cool. Just, you know, just join our email list. It's agentsofspeech.com go there and then put in your email. And then you can always update you guys on, like, when the lives are, what topic we're talking about. Usually it's kind of random, right? And then whatever. So I'm gonna hang out for one or two more minutes waiting for more questions and if not, we're gonna end this because I do have to pack. And as if you cannot see, I'm still inside a hotel room and it's been crazy doing all this quarantine. And also if you have, like, problems with. You have any, like, ideas about what topics you want me to talk about, you can also put them in the comments. So Lena asks, what about generalization on how to converse with people? Hey, man, this really takes a lot of practice. Okay, I can say this. I can answer this really easily because Lena's child is my student, right? So it's going to take a lot of. For her, right? For her, she's going to take a lot of explaining, a lot of role playing, a lot of real, actual practice. I'm not sure how much she has before, like, this kind of practice, right? Like, I don't know how many times is there where she goes out to a role play or she tries something, comes back, evaluates and thinks about why, okay? That's something she needs to do, like a lot. So I would say because I cannot be there, right? Oh, this is what she means. Okay, so she only talked to certain people. Is there anything to do? Well, first of all, she needs to understand that there is a purpose to talk to these people. The only reason why your child talks to certain people is because now I can say because it's my student, right? So it's because she feels that that person will understand. It's worth it, right? And those people will understand her and not try to take advantage of her or whatever, right? Or it's interesting enough for her to talk, which is, to be honest, quite a normal thing. And a lot of adults, especially around my age, take so long to understand that you don't need a people please or whatever. All right? But if you really want your child to talk to other people, first of all, she needs to understand why she has to put herself out there, all right? And the reason why we socialize and talk to people, okay? And you know, she's not the type to do that. And to some extent, Leena you have to be happy that this is the case. You don't know how many children who are, well, not on the spectrum, but people of special needs, the community, right. They get into real big trouble with like strangers. And this might be actually a good thing. But not saying we're not gonna address it. Right. What I'm saying what we can do is we really need to like tell her a lot more stories, explain to her why. Tell her by example, show her and by if any chance, if we can do some role play and actually find people who are interesting enough for her to talk and that she can make friends out of, like make good friends and good acquaintances from an event or whatever. Which she does, by the way. Right. She does go to places where she does like enjoy talking about whatever topic interests her. That's the thing. Right. Anyways, that's besides the point. What I mean is she doesn't like to talk to certain people is because there's no common topic. That's what I mean. Okay. All righty, let me see. Oh, thank you. Anyway, so Irene says, how many words Should a 22 month baby speak? Yeah. So a 22 month baby is. How old is that? Nearly two. So by one year and six months, depending where you're living at. Yeah, you. You're talking about like 21 and a half to two. It should be one word to two word phrases at least. Right. Some children by two, they're like. But they're talking like adults already. That's just crazy. So around 22 months you should be like a child should be using like two word phrases. Not all the time, but often. Okay. That's how much they should talk about. I don't know how many words per se. All right. But by 22 months they should be using two word phrases sometimes. So Tanya comes back and says, yeah, when my son plays with three other three year old chills, he's very good at physical activity. But when he, when they start talking, he kind of drifts away, I think because he doesn't understand the full conversation. Right? Yes. And you corrected. Yep. Yeah, it's because it's too hard. They've been talking too much too fast. Kids nowadays, they learn language very fast because of YouTube, because of the TV, because of, you know, just parents having really high standards and, you know, kindergartens having, having interviews and stuff that are literally out of this world. So nowadays it's a for alligator. So imagine that. And people can actually catch up. Kids can actually catch up. So kids are difficult. It's hard. It's hard. Okay. For them to be the correct language facilitator. So it must be you, the mom, or the dad who will do a much better job of meeting the child at where the language level at. Okay, Daniel, so you got this. Go, go. You got to do it. Okay. Especially now because there's no therapy. All right. Carmen says how to help my son. The probability to request by using words rather than use behavior to come. Okay, so if I'm guessing correctly, usually the behavior that children use is hand pulling. Like pulling your hand like. Or hand leading, whatever people like to say. Or like, you know, pulling your shirt or pointing or crying. Or like push nudging you and like shoving stuff in your. In your hand. This very typical for delayed disordered children. We talk about the whole thing in agentsofspeech.com micro. A micro course. Shameless plug tell you go get the course, Carmen. Okay, but in a nutshell, just in case that, you know, you don't want to. That's fine. Yeah. Teach her to use other behavior to communicate first, which are more appropriate. For instance, putting a hand up, like open palm, doing some gestures, some simple sign languages. Okay. That are still behavior, still easy enough for him to do. And something that you can like, teach. Okay. So after you have those, like gestures, whatever. And then you can put. Try and upgrade to words and sounds. Okay. But one step at a time. All right. Carmen, go join the microcourse. All right. Someone says, I'm not sure who, but probably inside the group. My daughter can't answer. When we asked her about why did she do this and that. It seems like she doesn't understand the question. She said now six years old. She had speech therapy before pandemic. Now stop Because. Oh, yeah, cool. Yeah. Yeah. If she can't answer, then there's no reason why you should be asking and not giving an answer or any prompt. Right. Remember, if you're inside the course, we always say, don't let her fail. If she can't answer, try something. Try something. Give her prompts if you know the answer for sure. Okay. Teach her describe more than asking questions. Even though she's six years old. Doesn't mean that it's a given that she will be able to answer questions. Especially when you ask her why she did that. Why is it difficult? Difficult, difficult question. Okay, so be sure of what she wants to do. Okay. What I mean is be sure what you. You know the answer and you're able to guide her towards it. Okay. Don't make it too open ended. Okay. Oh, densan says, I guess it's sen, right? Because you're in special educational needs stuff. So how do you deal with someone who is in denial about his speech child special needs, including speech delay. Thanks much. Oh, well, you know, for me, I rarely have to deal with this anymore because I'm in a private setting. People come to me because they have somewhat accepted to that, that they have somewhat accepted that there might be some sort of problem. That's why they come to me. And as a professional, it's easy for me to tell because all I have to do is do an assessment and show them the true ability of a child. There's no dispute, right? Can. How much can a child speak here? Okay, how much can. Can a child understand here? How much can they say? How much can they do? Right? It's. There's no dispute. I just tell them this is what you're supposed to, what a child is supposed to do, right? And this is what they're doing. And I asked them, why did you come to me? And they'll say, because they're slower than other children. And I'll say, yes, she. He is. According to the norms, your child is around one to two years slower, right? And for your case, because you are a teacher, it's very difficult. So I would say that, hey, how about this? Don't let me and you discuss and like, I don't want to. I'm not trying to label, first of all, start from empathy, right? Don't say I'm trying to label your kid, right? I want to help, right? I want to help. I don't know how to do this. You can, you can be as like, for instance, if I don't, if I don't know, I will tell a parent, right? So for instance, if a child has emotional problems that I cannot deal with or has some behavioral problems I don't have enough time to deal with, then I will say, mom, dad, to be honest, I don't know enough, right? I'm not the person to say whether your child is normal, abnormal, typical, whatever the word that you want to use with it, right? But I'm sure this is all about like, this is all about reducing risk, right? If you don't treat something, it will become something larger in the and like down the road. And you and I know that that's why you're here, right? For you, you can say, that's why we're having this conversation, okay? And you can say, how about this? We get a professional to take a look, right? For me, I usually say how about you try and take appointments from. I write your referral letter and you can go to clinical psychologist and take a look, okay? Let her be the judge. I don't know enough, okay? You don't need to argue with them. Just tell them to take one little action, right? There's no point with arguing. For me, it's easy because they come to me, right? They come to me. I've tried to, like, I've never really had to convince because, you know, whatever I say is backed with evidence, especially for speech and language. So they, they cannot because they've come to me already, right? And this is what you do. This is where you use your connections, okay? You refer them to other people and say, this is someone that can help. So hopefully that answers your question and also gives other parents some insight as to how we work. You need to look at the evidence. And that's why people always say evidence based practice, right? We need to use evidence to tell parents. Remember, we, in our profession, whatever we say can be, is put under scrutiny, meaning people would use our words against us. That's why we tend to be very careful with what we say, okay? And people might, we might get sued if we write the wrong thing. We might, you know, and not the country where I'm from, in America, you write the wrong diagnosis, people might not get the full amount of insurance pay or not enough public welfare stuff, right? So for me, at the very least, I'm very careful about that. And hopefully I've done enough of a good job to tell you what I know. Trying to be careful about what I say at the same time. And there was one parent, just before I leave, I just shared a story. One parent emailed me and said, hey, why, why did you say, like in quotation marks? Normal, like that? And she said, I'm. I'm offended. I can't believe you. You don't advocate for, like, other terms and whatever and like, you know, be more inclusive to children on the spectrum, special needs, speech disorders, whatever. But that's not my job. My job is to tell you, to use your own words, to tell you as if I know what you're thinking. Because, you know, I've done this long enough to know what you're thinking and if I might offend you, then, you know, so be it. I want you to do something about it. I want to tell you what to do and you try it and it works. And you tell more people and then you get more, you know, I just want results. And so that you, you know, you know, that you can do it. That's all I want. All right. So with that said, hopefully I won't get slaughtered after I said that. That's the end of tonight's live, and I'll see you next Monday, preferably at my own house. And I'll talk to you next week. Bye.