A lot of speech-language pathologists address the skill of categorization in language therapy.
The problem is that many of them make a key mistake that limits their students’ ability to generalize. In this video I share how to fix that problem.
Why target categories in language therapy?
Many speech-language pathologists know that their students struggle with categorization and word-retrieval. They may also know that their students struggle to define and describe words, and that they don’t have mental organization required for them to easily learn new vocabulary.
Understanding categorization can be really important in developing these abilities, but a lot activities and materials on the market encourage ineffective practices. While they’re not inherently bad products, the way they’re often used is not likely to yield good generalization.
It can be tempting to drill and work on categories as a discrete skill. For example, rote naming a bunch of animals or foods. Or giving your students a bunch of words and asking them to name their category; or even sorting activities. These are the things people do with many of the “categorization bundles” worksheets of flashcards.
And these activities are FINE when done as part of another, more functional activity. But the mistake many people make is that they simply stop there and DON’T do any other activity or give their students any other context where they can apply this skill. A lot of published worksheets and materials will guide you through in that fashion without any extension activity to follow it so the whole lesson can be very decontextualized.
In other words, the skills are taught “out of context”, so when the student encounters another situation later on when they they actually have to apply that skill, they don’t draw that connection and actually use it effective; mostly because we haven’t shown them how.
This is why if you’re working on categorization and not seeing functional gains in vocabulary development, it might be because you’re making this mistake. But the good news is that it’s easy to turn things around. There’s a way you can teach vocabulary and categorization in a way that actually does help your students to make connections that will bridge that gap between those drill activities and functional language activities that your students have to doin school; such as reading comprehension, telling stories, or writing paragraphs.
How to teach categorization effectively
What what you want to do instead of teaching categories in isolation is to teach your students to name an entire string of semantic features at once. A word’s category is just ONE semantic feature. There are also other features, like function, physical attributes, etc. When we teach them all together, instead of doing so in isolation, it’s challenging enough that it gives students some context, but it’s not so difficult that your students can’t do it.
It requires SOME application of skills but not too much. So for any particular word you might be discussion, instead of just naming that words category, you’d want to talk about a whole bunch of different attributes at once. This is called semantic feature analysis. For example, if we were talking about the word “dog”, instead of just asking the category, I am going to describe a whole bunch of different things about a dog. And during that process, instead of asking them question after question to pull the information out of them after I’ve asked them to “tell me what this word means” or “tell me about a dog”, I am going to teach them to self-question so they can retrieve that information independently.
Those questions would specifically cue them to think of different features. Like “What group does it belong to?” or “What does it look like?” I do a breakdown of how to teach students to self-question during semantic feature analysis for adjectives in this article here.
Students with language disorders really struggle with retrieval, so if we don’t give them the opportunity to apply these skills all at once, generalization becomes hard. You want them to draw the connection that knowing a word’s category helps you explain what that word means and remember different things about that word. When you’re just drilling, they don’t get the opportunity make that connection.
It’s totally fine to practice naming individual features, like categories, before you do semantic feature analysis. But we want to treat is as a quick priming activity that just lasts a minute or two before the “real” therapy starts. The priming is good if you have a particular feature that’s difficult for them to recall, which for many kids is the category. The main thing to remember is that you DON’T want to stop after drilling categories. You want to pair it with a more functional exercise like semantic feature analysis.
This is a great strategy to use with your students to boost word retrieval and vocabulary skills in language therapy, and the best part is that you can tailor it for students in Kindergarten all the way through high school. I have students in my Language Therapy Advance Foundations course using it with students across that entire age range.
This is just ONE of the strategies I teach as part of my 5-component language therapy framework designed to remediate language processing and boost comprehension and academic performance. You can learn the entire overview of how the framework work in this online presentation for SLPs.
When I first started practicing as an SLP, I had no idea where to start when it came to language therapy. I would often get stuck doing drill-type activities and couldn’t figure out what skills to target and in what order, or how to get my students to generalize.
As I talked to other SLPs, I realized I wasn’t alone, which is why I went back and got my doctorate and created my 5-component language therapy framework. That’s why on this online presentation, I’ll share:
- The five essential ingredients every effective language therapy protocol must have (that aren’t being taught in most classrooms)
- The single most impactful skill that gets to the root cause of language processing issues (working on this ONE area makes it possible to target fewer skills, but get better results!)
- How to eliminate “time-wasters” from your sessions, so you can prioritize skills that make a true impact on student performance
- Why most students don’t make progress with goals focused on “following directions”, “wh” questions, and “comprehension strategies”(plus what to do instead)
You can grab your free spot in the training here.
