SALT - what is the whole word approach please?

[cansu]

Dd ASD has very limited speech, mainly one word and her articulation is very unclear. She has difficulty sequencing sounds and finds some sounds very difficult. SALT has told me she will be working on her speech sounds through the whole word approach. What is this? Is this approach better than other approaches such as Nuffield? Any ideas gratefully received.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it is memorising words by looking at the whole word, rather than phonetically decoding the word.

Is this actually an approach though?? How will this help her to make the sounds she finds especially difficult? DD has no trouble picking up new single words receptively. The problem is making these words intelligible to others. I am quite bewildered by this, as I am surprised this is an approach used by SALTs.

Why not work on her sequencing?

I know you do ABA - do you do echoic imitation ? ds1 is similar and still has many unclear sounds but we have improved things by using this method

We don't do any ABA now. dd has been in school for over two years now. What is echoic imitation Willow? Star - I think she does need work on her sequencing of sounds as she misses the ends of words off. She also has problems with some sounds but SALT believes she has not yet reached the right developmental stage or something or other? I have had lots of messing around really and after being quite relaxed and trusting the professionals again, I am now thinking I should start asking more questions about the approaches being used. I would like to see whether the SALT is being effective for dd and if not, why. Frustratingly it is really hard as of course there doesnt seem to be any data and SALT is vague and hard to pin down on what she is doing and why.

This? And this. No idea if it works, but this seems to be useful background

Framing all the questions as 'I want to make sure I really understand it, so you can trust that I'm doing the practice right at home' can help

Thanks Marreeya. Yes the poor mum is confused approach, I like this as it is hard to be openly hostile to!