SFA RESEARCH FALL 2023
gradually increased language and cognitive demands to more challenging levels?
Given the robust association of vocabulary skills with school and standardized test achievement, probably every child on your caseload can benefit from vocabulary enrichment in the course of therapy for other targets.
The relatively weaker profiles of children who stutter when learning new sequences or gestures implies that it may take much more practice to create “expertise” in using fluency skills, just as it appears to take much more exposure to new words to learn them for children who have SLI.
Every child and adult finds that the most challenging multi-tasking in speech - or even sports performance- is thinking about others’ reactions or evaluations, which may be why public speaking is universally feared by most fluent speakers.
Consider how hard it is for your client to balance language formulation, speech execution and monitoring for their own and others’ reactions. A simple way to appreciate it for those who don’t stutter is to ask yourself to repeat (“cancel”) each time you say “um”, “uh”, or any other favorite filler – invite a family member to watch and see how well you are doing with this task. Then stop and ask how long it might take you to change your speech patterns and make that change durable.
Finally, I believe that the most disservice that has been done in considering stuttering to be “just” a
9
speech disorder is in how we tend to view the pace of stuttering therapy.
I was once asked by a superintendent of a school system to provide a stuttering workshop for her SLPs. She explained that clearly they needed such a workshop because, to quote her, “the stuttering kids never get off the caseload.”
This stopped me in my tracks. I asked her whether or not the “language kids” ever got off the caseload. She acknowledged that students’ language problems tend to require ongoing work, as the challenges of the curriculum evolve over the child’s development.
Then I asked her why should stuttering be any different? You already know her answer: because it’s a speech problem. The children who misarticulate get off the caseload rather quickly; by this analogy, so should the children who stutter.
Most newsletter readers will see the failure in reasoning here. But it’s really just one more consequence of seeing stuttering in our old intro text’s table of contents as a speech disorder. Perhaps taking a broader view will help not only to understand stuttering better, but to treat it better as well.
By Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed.D. University of Maryland, College Park
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
