Group Intervention For Language Disorders

by Juleen Kleiman, Speech Language Pathologist

Language therapy within a group context has been shown to be useful in children with language disorders. The primary purpose of intervention would be to help children develop social interactional skills, language skills and cognitive-social knowledge which would enable them to participate more successfully in peer contacts and their academic environment. Speech, language and social interaction goals are targeted in a variety of group contexts, including theme-related activities, stories, games, crafts and group routines (e.g. show-and-tell, snack). The goals are targeted within language based activities which are meaningful for the children. This maximizes motivation, functional communication and generalization.

Some examples of activities introduced during the group sessions include:

• Stories useful to target understanding and use of vocabulary as well as facilitate language formulation skills such as problem-solving, predicting, and sequencing of events. Story-related activities include reading/telling a story, acting out a story with small props, sociodramatic play (role-playing) with simple costumes and props), story related crafts.
• Sequence cards to further develop story-telling ability
• Barrier games to promote language formulation skills - giving or requesting information, giving directions, asking questions (e.g. the children take turns giving verbal instructions from across a barrier so that group members can reproduce the picture that has been described without seeing it.)
• Absurd/'silly' pictures to note what is wrong, to develop explanations and descriptive language skills (e.g. Why is the picture silly?)
• Categorization of information whereby each group member gets a chance to describe a common object so that the others in the group could guess it's identity. This activity will also focus on question forms and negatives. Communication is built into the activity as each child asks each other and takes a turn.
• Listening lotto games to encourage the children to become more attentive to auditory information. The goal of the activity is to attend, process and discriminate auditory signals.
• setting up a pretend 'snack store' provides many opportunities for social communications.

What I have described can also be done on an individual one to one basis. I like small groups and have found that the small group setting provides opportunities to use more naturalistic activities focusing on specific aspects of language development, as well as the development of conversational and peer interaction skills.

Reference

Hayden, D.A. & Pukonen, M. (1996). Language Intervention Programming for Preschool Children with Social and Programatic Disorders. In J.H. Beitcham et al. (eds) Language Learning and Behaviour Disorders, Cambridge University Press.