It’s that time again; you’re in the process of getting your caseload organized, grouping students, and touching base with teachers.
This year is going to be different, you decide. You’re going to tackle those tricky language issues head on, before you get swamped with evaluations.
You’ll figure out exactly what to do for those students who really struggle with reading and writing; even the ones who don’t meet criteria for specific learning disability and only get services from you.
You draft the perfect schedule, with students grouped with other students in the same classes so you can align curricular vocabulary and writing assignments and give yourself long enough sessions so you’ll have time to get to everything.
You’ve even blocked out time in your schedule to review research on treating language disorders so you can find a really good program for them.
Out goes the schedule. In come the comments/requests/concerns.
Billy can’t come to speech at the time! He’ll be missing computer lab! He needs to learn how to take the PARCC test online later this year and that’s more important. Can you just go over the PARCC test guidelines during his speech time?
“You can’t take John and Sarah together because Sarah is in choir and she can’t miss that. Can you just work on her math homework with her during study hall instead?”
Katie can’t come on Mondays because she has to take a spelling test at that time; can’t you just switch it around to a different day? Maybe you can just do her spelling test with her during speech. That counts for her minutes, right?
So what do you do?
Maybe you end up squeezing Billy’s speech time into two shorter sessions. You really wanted longer sessions so you could work on written language. His language impacts his writing so much and you know you should help him, but you don’t know how to address it with such short time slots.
You split up Sarah and John, who were perfectly matched, and now have Sarah with a group of students who aren’t even in the same grade level. You wanted to provide explicit instruction on curricular vocabulary this year because it was such a struggle last year. Now you’re not sure how to address it.
And the spelling test. Short of cloning yourself to be in two buildings at once, you’re not sure how to handle this scheduling debacle. Eventually you politely explain to Katie’s teacher that you have specific IEP goals to address and can’t guarantee that spelling work will target them.
You end up taking Katie out of recess as a last resort because there is no other time that is deemed “acceptable” for her to come. You are now Katie’s least favorite person. You’re going to work on expressive grammar and syntax with her-which she hates, because it’s really hard for her.
These types of situations make our job way harder than it needs to be…and sometimes we just aren’t sure what to do about it.
As a speech language pathologists treating language disorders we encounter countless barriers to doing good quality therapy.
One of the biggest problems is that people do not exactly know what we do.
There’s so much role confusion. We are our own personal secretaries. We are called the “speech teacher.” We are sometimes interventionists. We are consultants. Sometimes we feel like babysitters-does anyone have recess/hall monitor duty? We can act like counselors. One time I had a kid confide to me, “I don’t want to be alive anymore.” This kid was also seeing a credentialed counselor, but he told me!
The most frustrating thing given how highly credentialed we are, we are treated like tutors or teaching assistants.
You can’t blame others for not knowing, especially teachers who are just as swamped as we are. But it doesn’t make it any easier when others don’t understand the value we offer.
When we work with school-aged children with language disorders, one of our main goals is to help them have a successful school experience. This means taking their curriculum in to account. But it doesn’t mean that we should be reviewing the directions in a test manual, completing fill-in the blanks or drilling vocabulary flash cards, or monitoring a student while they take a test.
Let’s take a step back and examine this problem a little further.
Do you know your role? Because the first step in helping others understand what you do is to have a crystal clear understanding of it yourself.
So what exactly do we do as speech language pathologists in the schools treating language disorders? You probably have a conceptual understanding already. Evaluate the student’s capacity and current abilities. Determine the curricular demands. Find the discrepancies between the capacity and demands, write functional and attainable goals, and spend therapy time filling those gaps.
It’s simple, right? In theory, yes. In reality, no.
How do you possibly fill the knowledge gaps when there is so much you need to do and so little time to do it? How do you ensure that students know how to apply the vocabulary that we teach them in therapy? And how to we get clear about what we should be doing so we can help our colleagues understand what goes on behind the mysterious speech room doors?
The bad news is that there isn’t a pre-made program out there that can solve all the language problems of the world. The good news is that you can make therapy more efficient and effective.
It’s possible to do this with groups of students from different classes or grade levels. It’s even possible to give the teachers what they want: their students to be able to complete worksheets, homework, assignments, and tests, and address what the students need: targeted individualized therapy that will build functional language skills. It’s possible do all of this and still leave work at a reasonable time.
So what is the magic bullet for treating language disorders?
To be honest, if you are looking for a “magic bullet” to solve all life’s problems, you will end up disappointed. But the good news is that if you’re looking for something that will effectively hit the root cause of language issues, there is something that works.
As I like to say, it’s not “magic”. It’s “meta.”
By “meta”, I mean “metalinguistic”. If you have strong metalinguistic skills, you have a good chance of doing well in school and life. If not, there’s a chance you will struggle. “Meta” refers to the awareness of or conscious thought about something, while “linguistic” refers to the rules and conventions of language. “Metalinguistic” refers to the awareness of language and its features.
I talk a little bit more about adding this “magic bullet” in this post here.
You can’t teach students everything they will need to know in school. There just isn’t enough time. Instead, teaching students to be metalinguistically aware can increase the chances they will apply skills you teach them so they can learn independently.
Let’s take the vocabulary example. Many of your students have poor vocabulary skills. They need extra practice with their classroom content vocabulary, but you don’t have enough time in therapy to provide direct explanations and extra practice with every single word they’ll need to know.
Show them how to be metalinguistically aware. This will help them teach themselves new word meanings and infer. It’s like teaching a man to fish rather than plopping the fish on his plate.
Let’s look at another common problem: poor reading comprehension skills. Reading comprehension issues often manifest because of weak vocabulary skills. If reading is just too darn hard for students, they’ll be less inclined to read. This means less practice, which means their comprehension isn’t getting any better. It also means less exposure to sophisticated “book language”, which means they will learn fewer words than their peers who read a lot.
The endless cycle will continue, unless you teach them metalinguistic strategies they need to think and pay attention to language in a way that helps them learn.
Just for fun, let’s do one more example: writing. The dreaded expository and persuasive paragraphs with supporting details. This can be like pulling teeth for students with language impairments. We know we should be helping with this, but where to start? After all, we sometimes only get 40 minutes a week to work with the students!
I talk a little bit about how to prioritize when you’re working on writing in this post here.
Teach them to be meta. Good writers are able to focus on the way sentences are formed, the use of vocabulary, and can revise and edit their own work to make it better. There are ways we can show students to use metalinguistic strategies to improve their writing. You may even be able to show them a mneumonic device that can significantly increase the quantity and quality of the written product, even in students with disabilities.
These are just some of the ways that teaching metalinguistic skills can help your students.
Since I’ve been practicing with a metalinguistic focus, a couple things have happened:
1. I manage my busy schedule and my sanity. I don’t stress about those science vocabulary words that were sent down with the kids at the last minute because the test is tomorrow. I may still use them in my session if it fits with the strategies I’m addressing, but I don’t feel obligated to have kids memorize all of them.
Having a clear picture of my role makes it easier for me to say “Yes”, to what’s right, and “No”, to what isn’t. It helps me be efficient in my planning so I don’t feel guilty leaving work at a reasonable hour.
2. My colleagues are starting to “get it”. I get referrals for things other than, “This kid in my class sounds funny”. Now it’s more like, “Can you look at this kid’s writing samples? He really has a hard time putting his thoughts together and I’m concerned about his sentence structure.”
I get less, “Can you finish this social studies worksheet and practice these vocabulary flashcards?” and more “This student is having word-finding difficulties when I call on him. Is there a strategy you are teaching him that I could reinforce in class?” There is hope!
3. The kids are starting to “get it”. This is probably the most important of all. It didn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t mean that your students can sit back and coast along, but there have been many small victories and “Aha!” moments. When you teach rules and strategies over and over again with a clear focus and model them consistently, your students can make great gains.
I had an exciting moment when a student with “run-on sentence syndrome” finally said, “Oh, I need to end my sentence there or use a conjunction because I’m starting a new idea.” Yes!
Moments like this, I know I’m on to something. That’s why I’ve spent over 10 years studying and implementing metalinguistic strategies and skills and learning to be more “meta” myself. My goal is to make therapy more efficient, more effective, and more fun.
I want to help you do the same, and that’s why I’ve got a special invitation for SLPs just like you.
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed and don’t quite know how to start adding a metalinguistic focus to your therapy, you’re not the only one.
Language is incredibly complicated, but it is possible to help our students progress if we have the right systems in place.
To learn a step-by-step process that will lead you through exactly how to build the skills your students need for high-level language processing, download this free guide for SLPs.
This free guide is called The Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure.
Inside you’ll learn exactly how to focus your language therapy. Including:
- The hidden culprit behind unexplained “processing problems” that’s often overlooked.
- The deceptively simple way to write language goals; so you’re not spending hours on paperwork (goal bank included).
- The 4 sentence types often behind comprehension and expression issues and why they’re so difficult.
- An easy-to-implement “low-prep” strategy proven to boost sentence structure, comprehension, and written language (conjunctions flashcards included).
