Have you ever experienced when you try to take on a piece of recommendation from your Speechie to give as much as language modelling to your child during his play, but you suspected he could not reference to what you said because your child is too busy exploring a toy? You might question, 'Do they even hear my voice?'
There may be multiple times you tried to model language verbally for your child but you still don't see any signs of him looking at you while you speak or him changing his play according to what you said. BUT don't give up yet! We are offering some tips to help your child understand you better.
When modelling language, did you...
use short, simple language i.e. between 1-3 words at a time?
slow down your speech rate and emphasise key words?
add gestures and facial expression big enough for your child to look at you?
join in and expand the play with your child instead of being a voice-over?
The above are the important points when you repetitively model language to your child with typical development. However, children with language delays or communication disorders require even more language exposure to focus on or to acquire new sound or words before being able to associate them with objects and events. Some have not yet developed the pre-linguistic skills e.g. visual tracking or shifting eye contact between object and person/sound, to show themselves that they are listening to you.
Here are a few troubleshooting tips to help you jump the hurdles of lack of social referencing and in language modelling.
Explicit Teaching of Eye Referencing
Adjusting proximity often helps the child know where to focus and shift his gaze. You may need to continually adjust the position of the items in relation to your child i.e. moving items closer to the child's face then move close to your face/eyes to encourage him to look at you with them eye tracking on the item.
Use of Strong Motivators
If you or peers are not interested enough to your child, it is hard to get attention from them when they are too focused on playing their favourite toys. Moving and jiggling toy items e.g. hot wheels car (#hotwheels) or light-up toy that are highly-motivated to your child can be a good visual prompt to shift their eye contact and attention.
Teaching eye referencing to peers in a social environment is another topic as it is completely voluntary whether your child is interested to interact with peers when they prefer to play solitarily. One simple trick is how to use toys that have a shared interest between two children and how scaffolding is done to maximise social interaction when they choose to engage in parallel play. This will be discussed in another time.
Aided Language Stimulation (ALS)
ALS is a communication strategy that has been widely used in teaching language to younger children or children with communication difficulties. It means where a communication partner e.g. parents, teachers, therapists models language by combining his or her own verbal input with references to visuals/symbols as a form of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) e.g. communication board, communication devices or systems, visual strips, etc.
Just because they don't talk, it doesn't mean they don't have anything to say.
Here is the example of an activity-based communication board I used to model play and language in my therapy sessions using the Hot Wheels Stunt & Splash car wash that a lot of my clients would go crazy for it. Stringing a few words together to enhance the effectiveness of your language modelling!
Requesting: I want water.
Commenting: car (is) clean. /Water (is) cold.
Asking Questions: What colour (of) car you want?
Social Interaction: My turn. You wait.
The visual cue of play sequence on the top of the board also allows you to model play sequence of car wash effortlessly.
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