Part 1: Laying the Foundation
Alice Polaschek (Kyoto)
When you hear your students say something like, “There’s a hire in the hallway!” or “I went for a rong walk,” what do you think is the best response? Maybe you’d try to correct them every time they make a mistake and reply, “No, it’s fire. Repeat after me, fire.” However, a Speech Language Therapist (SLT) might say, “Oh no, where’s the fire? I hope my work isn’t on fire, I don’t want the fire to burn my things!”
Can you spot the difference?
SLTs and English teachers cover a lot of the same material, but their approaches can look quite different. Teachers often give direct feedback, while SLTs are more subtle. After working as both an SLT and an ALT, it’s clear that there’s a lot we can learn from each other.
Unlocking Communication for Everyone
How many times in a day do you have to use or understand language? If you sent a text, listened to a podcast, or used an ATM, you used language today! SLTs break down communication barriers and help make everyday communication like this easier for their clients. They assess, diagnose, and treat things such as speech, language, swallowing, voice, and cognitive-communication disorders (like dementia) in adults. An amazing thing about speech therapy is the range of settings you can work in—medical, educational, and community settings ranging from babies to seniors. For example, within the New Zealand education system, SLTs are key in helping students overcome communication challenges to thrive in school.
- Language is a huge, fascinating part of the SLT’s work. It can be divided into sections like grammar, vocabulary, social communication rules, and storytelling skills. A child with a language disorder might have trouble understanding the finer grammatical details of a sentence or forget common words and talk around them.
- Outside of SLT, people call Speech “pronunciation”: the process where we make individual vowel (ah, eh, ee, or, oo, and more) and consonant sounds (p,b, f, v, sh, s, etc) in words, speech rate, stress, and intonation. It’s all about clarity! For a child with a speech delay, it might be difficult to understand and replace some sounds with easier ones, while a child with a speech disorder might use the seemingly random sound “-ch” instead of most consonants.
- Communication is the holistic lens that SLTs apply to their work, where they assess how speech, language, and other communication methods contribute to getting a message across. A child might know ten words, but be expressive through gestures, sounds, and facial expressions. This child is an effective communicator, despite having difficulties in one area. Conversely, another child might be able to tell elaborate stories, but the way they muddle their speech sounds means they struggle to be understood. For them, clarity is a challenge in their communication.
Speech therapy is already in your classroom!
In the speech room and the classroom, we try to make complicated ideas comprehensible and fun to practise! When you teach grammar, are you talking about past participles, to be verbs, plurals, and subordinate clauses for the whole lesson? However, there are other methods too. Games, activities, and skits are all common in speech therapy. Saying “chips” and “ships” fifty times sounds boring, but you are a child’s favorite teacher when you have them say “chips” five times while moving up spaces on the Snakes and Ladders game board.
It’s no exaggeration to say SLTs and English teachers use heaps of the same linguistic theories in their work! Working on speech sounds and teaching pronunciation requires knowledge of the same mechanics, and if you’ve ever contrasted two similar words with minimal pairs (two words that vary by only a single sound), you’re using the bread and butter of speech therapy for young children.
You may also already be using the optimal input hypothesis. Everything you say should be easy to understand, interesting, and repeated to enrich the English classroom. Language therapy for preschoolers does the same thing and uses these ideas to fill a child’s home and preschool with language usable in real life.
Different Roles, Common Goals
Although they use similar methods and aim for communication, SLTs and teachers work with different populations. Teachers help students acquire a second language, while SLTs work with their clients’ first language. Speech therapy is unique to each individual and generally focuses on just a few areas. As a teacher, you usually cover every aspect of speech and language in your curriculum and teach large groups.
Build Your Communication Plan!
Interested in how to implement speech therapy methods in your classes? Here are some goals and strategies below.
Goal: Help students speak English clearly.
Strategies:
- When practising pronunciation, have students look at how your lips, tongue, and teeth move together. Describe the location of your tongue, or show pictures. When presenting words for students to practise, exaggerate the pronunciation so that mouth movements are clearer.
- Give specific feedback for hard sounds. Mention which speech sounds you’re noticing and let them know it’s clear. When they don’t get it, you can remind them of where to put their tongue, and how to shape their lips.
- Don’t give corrections to everything all the time! This is overwhelming. Instead, recast: repeat the word they used with the tricky sound back to them, slowly and carefully, but use correct pronunciation. Repeat this in natural contexts up to twelve times (a word of warning: more than five times in rapid succession starts to feel unnatural).
Goal: Help students better understand spoken English.
Strategies:
- Use shorter phrases and repeat keywords. Keep your sentences grammatically correct, but keep in mind what’s appropriate for your students and structure the language you use to match their level.
- When you introduce new words, give plentiful examples and details about the word. If you’re introducing a noun: show some of the different actions that it can do or can be done to it, and talk about its features and things it’s related to.
- Include gestures and pictures to support what you’re saying. Allow students to use information other than the words you’re saying out loud!
You may already be doing things similar to these techniques, while others you might have to actively implement. Pick one or two to have a go at, and keep improving the classroom experience!
Alice Polaschek was an ALT in Miyazu, Kyoto. She spent her year in Japan finding new favorite foods and walking along Northern Kyoto beaches. She returned to her hometown, Wellington, New Zealand, and job as a speech-language therapist in August 2024. When she isn’t working, she is probably knitting, reading, attending pilates classes, or trying to recreate her favorite Japanese foods with Western ingredients.