By Pam Marshalla
Q: Can you give me some ideas about getting my clients to use final consonants? Here are a few ideas. These can be used alone or in combinations together. Auditory Bombardment Read a list of words that all have the same phoneme in the final position: cat, hat, rat, light, boat, kite, meat… Do this while the client is playing quietly at a table task such as drawing or clay. The client’s job is to listen. Amplification Amply your productions…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have an 8-year-old student, in a regular second grade classroom. She can say a few words and carries a diagnosis of apraxia. She is below average in intelligence. The parents are insisting on sign language training only and are refusing other forms of augmentative communication – computer, pictures, etc. She can do up to five signs in sequence with prompting, but verbal speech is not coming along. She is failing further and further behind in academics because of…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: Where do you get the very specific word lists you use for the articulation training you describe for R and the Lisps? You are talking about organizing word lists by vowels when working on phoneme R or the sibilants. I use a variety of dictionaries, thesauruses, and rhyming dictionaries. I also use the popular book called 40,000 Selected Words: Organized by Letter, Sound, Syllable by Valeda Blockcolsky, Joan M. Frazer, and Douglas H. Frazer. I always keep on hand a…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have heard you say that although most school districts seem to have excellent entrance criteria for therapy, they tend to have very poor exit criteria. Could you speak to this in regard to a client’s willingness to participate and in regard to cognitive level? Because I have been in private practice for 25 years, I have not had to agree with anyone on exit criteria, and therefore I have taken it on a case-by-case basis. In all honesty,…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: What is your opinion about writing goals for oral motor exercises when a client has a functional articulation disorder? My training would suggest that working on oral motor skills is appropriate only when there is a motor speech disorder. When asked how to write OM goals, I say, “Don’t write OM goals!” Oral movement is not your goal. The speech sound production is your goal. Write speech goals. Speech is movement. Whether you are working with clients who have…
