A lot of people ask me what’s inside Language Therapy Advance Foundations, my signature course that shows SLPs a systematic, evidence-based approach to boosting language processing and academic language skills.
That’s why in this post, I wanted to share the overview of how the techniques in the program work.
The video below comes directly from the first module of Language Therapy Advance Foundations; and it gives a high-level overview of the “Essential 5” framework.
This is the exact process I’ve used to help hundreds of my own students get to their least restrictive environments…
And it’s also the same process I’m teaching other SLPs to help them break through therapy plateaus and show up to sessions confident.
Many SLPs only have 30-40 minutes a week to make a difference with their students.
Since they can’t teach everything, high-impact SLPs know how to focus on the essentials that will have the biggest impact on their students’ reading, writing and comprehension skills.
So, where do we begin?
The answer may surprise you…
VOCABULARY is the key area that creates the biggest impact for our students.
Vocabulary skills in early elementary are one of the biggest predictors of academic and reading performance in high school (Scarborough, 2001).
This is because our students need to understand 90-95% of the words in a text in order to comprehend it (Nagy & Scott, 2000).
Students with language delays typically experience high cognitive load as they try to make sense of the words and sentences in front of them, so much so that there’s “nothing left” for higher-level comprehension. (Scott, 2009)
This is why it feels like you spend so much time on inferencing, retelling, and stating the main idea, without making much real headway!
Without adequate word and sentence comprehension, students are unlikely to respond to higher-level comprehension instruction (Scott, 2009; Nippold, 2017).
This means that if we don’t address these underlying vocabulary issues first, their comprehension challenges will persist (Nippold, 2017).
In this video, I share how you can use the Language Therapy Advance Foundations process to close that gap for your students:
Language Therapy Advance Foundations is based on a robust body of work about what really works when it comes to treating kids with language disorders.
I’ve designed the course curriculum on a framework called The Essential 5.
There are actually 5 key language areas that affect vocabulary growth, and we need to target each one directly to turn students with language disorders into effective readers, writers and spellers (Kucan, 2012).
They are:
To learn more about the “Essential 5” language therapy system that helps students boost academic language, processing, and comprehension, check out my free online masterclass for SLPs.
It’s called: “How to 10x language therapy outcomes without hours of prep and planning.”
Here’s what you’ll learn:
1. My evidence-based 5-component framework for boosting comprehension and expression.
2. The top language therapy mistakes and WHY they confuse students and lead to SLP burnout.
3. The ONE area to target that will maximize therapy time (even with a packed schedule).
You can register for the masterclass here.
