What kind of speech and language disorder affects children?
Speech and language disorders can affect the way children talk, understand or process information. Speech disorders include the clarity, voice quality, and fluency of a child’s spoken words, whereas language disorders include a child’s ability to hold meaningful conversations, understand others and express thoughts through spoken or written words.
How do speech, language, and hearing disorders affect learning?
Communication skills are at the core of life experiences. Children who develop languages critical to their cognitive development and learning should be able to relate to those communication skills early on. The language just isn’t the words being spoken, written or read but gesturing and listening are also forms of languages.
Learning takes place in forms of communications. To succeed in any school environment it’s paramount that a student should effortlessly be able to communicate with friends and adults in a school environment.
What are the signs that a communication disorder is affecting school performance?
Problems with language development can introduce difficulty in learning to listen, speak, write or read. Students with reading and writing problems also may experience difficulties in using language strategically to communicate, think, and learn.
Children with communication disorders, be it with their speech or language frequently struggle with reading, show poor judgement, have difficulty understanding social cues and expressing language. They often perform at an insufficient academic level and would frequently have difficulties with tests and avoid schools.
How do speech and language therapists work in a school to ensure children get the support they need?
Speech therapists provide services to students with communication problems either individually or on small groups. The sessions are usually held in classrooms occasional teaming with teachers and parents. They will usually integrate students’ communication goals with academic and social goals.
Children’s communication problems are assessed and treated with a collaborative approach. A speech therapist will collaborate efforts with parents, social workers, classroom teachers, special education teachers, guidance counsellors, doctors to asses a child.
How can speech and language therapists help children with speech and language disorders?
A speech-language therapist can help children overcome their fear, achieve pride and improve self-esteem. Using techniques such as memory retraining, cognitive reorganisation, language enhancement, and efforts to improve abstract thinking; speech therapists can ensure children can benefit from a more successful and satisfying educational experience as well as improved peer relationships. All-in-all a speech therapists like Unlocking Language can help children become effective communicators, problem-solvers and decision-makers.
Can Unlocking Language help?
At Unlocking Language, we work closely with all those involved with the child to ensure that speech and language therapy is embedded into their daily routine. This includes a focus on working with and supporting parents, carers and schools.
We work in over 40 schools to provide speech & language therapy in school settings and pride ourselves in offering a functional and impairment-based therapeutic approach.
Unlocking Language is an independent speech and language therapy service boasting excellence and expertise in assessment and intervention of speech, language and communication disorders.
