The speaker (Ming @ Agents of Speech) argues that play is foundational for teaching children with language delays because play creates a meaningful context for learning social, cognitive, and language skills. Play embeds motivation (analogous to exercising while bike-riding), which helps children sustain interaction and makes language prompting and teaching easier and more effective.
When therapists always say everything starts with play, Play is a good indicator for a lot of things. It teaches social skills, cognitive skills, language skills, a lot of these things. Why? Because it provides a context to learn. So let me give you an example. When you're teaching language and you're treating it as a way to teach language, it's like telling someone to exercise for the sake of exercising. Getting fit, getting better. Obviously, everyone wants to get fit, but children, they may or may not know that their language delayed and they don't understand the reason for advancing. In terms of having a better language means a better social life, meaning a social life means having more friends and you can have more fun, share things, how stories receive more recognition from other people and therefore you can build a community. So let's say if you like riding a bike and the fitness is embedded inside of that, it would make a lot more sense for like people to get fit. It's the same as language. If you have playing, you can engage a child to want to have a sustained interaction with you. It's going to be easier for you to prompt and teach language.
