This program involves speechreading, auditory training, and oral language development. Practice and learning experiences are delivered through games, role playing, simulation activities, interactive computer games and text-based activities. Because phonemic awareness is fundamental to reading and English vocabulary development, student goals are established in the areas of:
- Routines and expectations for voicing, responding, imitating
- Pragmatics: eye contact, turn-taking, asking for clarification, using questions, sentences, social greetings, social conversation
- Imitative skills: imitation of gross movements, one lip shape, one mouth shape, words, phrases
- Phonics: awareness of the relationship between sound and letter
- Speechreading: lip shapes, vowel patterns, names of people, colours, numbers, single words, phrases, sentences
- Speech: spontaneous use of voice, appropriate use of voice, syllabification, suprasegmentals (duration, intensity, pitch), word pronunciation
- Auditory: awareness of sounds, discrimination of sounds. The SPICE (Speech Perception Instructional Curriculum and Evaluation) curriculum is a resource.
- Development of oral vocabulary: colours, numbers, animal names, holiday vocabulary, vocabulary used in social situations, common expressions, adjectives, opposites, etc.
- Semantics: idioms, similies, metaphors, figurative language
- English language and grammatical structures: verb tense, prepositional phrases, suffixes, contractions, negation, adverbs, etc.
Assessment
Assessment is done through informal observations and checklists. Each student is programmed and assessed individually. Speech correction is incidental and a speech and language pathologist acts as a consultant to this program. Various resources are used and followed – The SPICE Curriculum, Dave Sindrey’s “ Learning To Listen” program.
Students are withdrawn from class twice weekly for twenty minutes.