Making Speech and Language Therapy a Visual Activity

Do you want a concrete way to increase your clients’ results?  A way to help them retain what they have learned?  If so, then consider this…

The articles I have read indicate that in the general population about 65% of people are visual learners, compared to only 20-30% who are auditory learners, with the rest being “hands on” learners.  Now think about the population of people with speech and language disorders.  It seems quite possible that even fewer than 20% are auditory learners.

So, what can you do?

Go VISUAL!  Think about every activity you do and use some sort of visual to go with it.  Most speech and language tasks rely on auditory skills.  But, by pairing them with visual cues, you can significantly improve the chances that your clients will “get it”.

For speech sounds, use a hand cue (e.g., touch your throat for /k/ and /g/) or a picture of the lip position for a sound (e.g., smile for /r/ and pucker for /w/).  Pictures of minimal contrast pairs help make sound differences much more concrete.

For language goals, use pictures or objects that go with your activity.  For example, for working on possessive pronouns, have a picture of a boy and a picture of a girl and pictures of things that belong to them.  For writing activities, use mind maps or other visual planners.  When teaching categories, have pictures that the child can manipulate and arrange by groups.  Have pictures of the vocabulary words you are working on.

You will be amazed how much more your clients will be able to “get” when you teach to their strengths.