speech and language in school

[pinkstarlight]

as part as my sons statement he has to have daily sessions at school of speech and language including phonics,he has been crying alot recently because hes hating school and doesnt like his TA.

hes been very unsettled and upset at school,just been looking back through his contact book and its suddenly dawned on me that almost everyone of these sessions ends up in tears. today he had a half hour session in which he did manage to complete the session but cried the whole way through by the end of it he was so upset he point bank refused to enter his next lesson.

i understand these sessions are important but surely a child getting so distressed is not the way to go,it all seems rather bullying and negitive and basically using the same cards everyday.there must be a way of jazzing it up a bit making it more fun and interesting and less stressfull.

im not sure how to handle this as apart from me being on the schools back constantly they are starting to get defensive and have threatened me with a emergancy review to remove my child from the school on the basis they cant cope with him.as long as i dont interfere they are quite happy to plod on.

The problem could be the phonics.
Those who have an Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) are cognitively unable to process phonics. so may be he is being asked to do the impossible and feeling he being blamed for his disability.
Those who have APD are not cognitively able to process the small gaps between the sounds which make up words, but can only process and reproduce the whole sound of a word,and therefore can only match the whole sound of word to it visual shape the word visual representation.

We use both the lexical and the sublexical functions of the brain when reading.
The lexical part of the brain processes words visually or the whole word, and the sublexical system processes the phonic input. Most are able to use both functions when performing the task of reading others have cognitive barriers which mean that they may have to rely on only one of these functions when reading.

Speech And Language Pathologists should be trained in all of these issues is part of their licencing review.

hi,arrange a meeting with the school,ta and speech and language therapist,my son was exactly the same he has this specified and quantified in his statement as he needs this 15 mins every day before he can access the curriculum he hated this when i revied his resources they were dated and very boring,he began to dislikje his ta because she was responsible for delivering this ,it wasnt the fact he hated her but what she had to deliver i had a meeting to review these dated resource pack..and hey presto,its relevant to his specific needs and he now really enjoys this a lot more than what he did.....so give it a go and always do everything in writing make sure if they dont support the change you ask why???etc have it minuted and tht way you can hold people accountable if you find them unsupportive....good luckxx

dolfrog, you've just explained the whole 'phonics v. whole words' teaching methods controversy which I had been completely baffled by. Thanks!

mariamagdalena
The teaching controversy is not about which is the best way to teach children to read.
The controversy is more about not having teachers adequately trained and informed of the best way to teach children to read based on their learning needs which can be evaluated pre-school.

all children need to use both phonics and whole word so that they can develop both the lexical and sublexical parts of their brain as part of their development. To only develop one single part of the brain due to only be allowed to use one program either whole word or phonics is a travasty, and fails to meet our childrens developmental needs

The whole controversy is more a marketing war between the program providers, who have very little or no understanding of natural neurological development, but need to increase sales of their products.

Dolfrog, I am a SLT and I wonder where I could find out more about practical strategies for combating the effects of APD on literacy? Some of the available info is very sketchy.. I went to training with Dilys Treharne in Sheffield but from what I remember the advice related to multisensory approaches/communication friendly classrooms etc to minimise processing difficulties. There was little in the session I attended on literacy.

I have worked with a student who has issues very much like you describe. He had AS. He could read fluently through a whole word route with minimal hesitations etc (whole word scrolling e.g. tut - would say tutorial or tutor then think of context (Egyptian history) and say Tutankhamun, but could not spell with no apparent "attack strategy" e.g. would spell "lamen" for "spin" etc and had extremely poor phonological processing skills. We managed to support him to decode ccvc and cvcc words using a very specific colour coding system indicating place and manner of articulation/voicing and visuals for vowels/vowel digraphs and developing his ability to rehearse and repeat words in order to try to identify individual sounds within the word. We had some success with this but not as much as I would have liked. We particularly struggled with things like syllable identification/phonological awareness at the word level despite visual and kinaesthetic cues which limited progression beyond these levels. Looking back, it sounds a lot like APD..

He didn't have other markers for APD as far as I knew at the time e.g. he was attaining well across the curriculum, could follow instructions well etc and had access to a scribe for his exams so achieved age-appropriate levels.

Just wondering what more we could have done and what would be the best info to read on APD? I would really have loved to have known how to "crack" spelling for him to enable him to access more online activities etc/facilitate his leisure interests.

working9while5

I am acutely aware of the problems many professionals have trying to understand APD, and how best to help those who have APD.

I have had contact with Dilys since 2002, just before we created APDUK, and it was Dilys who diagnosed me as having APD in 2003.
We have a copy of her some of her research presentation notes on the APDUK web site.
The UK APD steering committee now included more Speech and Language Pathologists, and Psychologists.
When the Medical Research Council first started to research APD in 2004, the most immediate issue was to create some new APD diagnostic tests based on sound frequency, to replace the existing language based battery of test from the USA. This has almost been completed, the new test went through the "ehtics procedure 2009 / 2010 and now the last stage of official recognition "Recognised diagnostic tests for a Recognisied disability.

This has left trying to provide ideas of how best to understand support and help not being researched in any great depth, and being dependent on adults who have APD explaining how they have coped with these types of problems during their lives.
When I first started to research APD back in 1998 to help my son, leading USA researchers were talking about 4 subtypes of APD, they have since broken that down further to 13 different subtypes of APD. So this is really on the cutting edge of research.

So in the void of how to help those who have APD organisations such as APDUK have tried to learn from those who have APD, the nature of the problems they face on a daily basis, and how they try to compensate and work around these problems. We have a Learning Style section of the APDUK web site which tries to suggest some ideas, especially with regard to visual learning and my one Eurika this is about me article I think in pictures, you teach in words: The gifted visual-spatial learner
We have also included some information from Rosalie Seymour from the AIT Institute

The best online description of APD can be found at AudiologyOnline and you may find some useful help from Australian Speech and Language pathologist Caroline Bowen who has helped the APD cause downunder.

If you need more information you can contact me off list and i can provide my email address, or contact the APDUK help line

*working9while5'

Regrading more specific coping strategies used by many who have APD, we have tried to use the APDUK web site to demonstrate how APDs prefer text to be presented, using different colour fonts. This was done by consulting with the many adults who have APD who are members of the OldAPD Yahoo forum which is now over 10 years old.
The problems we have processing speech and specifically new words is due to problems processing the gaps betwen the sounds which can make up a word. So those who have APD learn to whole sound of a word, and try not to brake words down into different constituent sounds. This is what the GAPS test identifies, when i took the test there was not a gap large enough for me to be able to process the existence of two sounds. Although i worked out as a coping strategy, that one sound took a longer time to hear than a single sound.

You might like to have a look at the design (if not the contnet) of my own web site and this is how I would prefer a links web page to look like.

There some programs using colour to teach letters, new words nouns verbs, etc.
I have to use a word processor whni get a long email or read a research paper, so that i can re format the text using different coloured fonts, and formatting options so that i can have some visual guides to what is being said.