Clinic Blog 2

I have still been working with A, a 7 year old boy this semester. . A was diagnosed with some articulation problems and has been having therapy in WVU Speech Clinic since spring 2007.

What I have been doing lately with A, for him to earn the correct productions of /r/, /sh/ and /th/ in all positions of words, is still more or less the same technique I was using before; the traditional motor approach with using phonetic placement techniques. I've been using phonetic placement especially with /r/ sound. When we first started to work on his /r/ sound, he quickly picked up the phonetic placement clues and he was able to produce /r/ sound in isolation.

I used the phonetic placement techniques to teach him the /r/ sound because he was stimulable enough and old enough to understand the placements of his tongue. And with the help of a lot of visual and oral cues he was able to produce /r/ correctly. And I thought it would be a good idea for him to be aware of where to place his tongue when he produced the sound. I used the techniques from the book Articulatory and Phonological Impairments. Also, researches show that using placement techniques and visual and oral cues are effective and appropriate in articulation errors in children. My supervisor also supported and thought these techniques were reasonable and would be effective to use.

We have been also working on his /th/ and /sh/ sounds in sentence level lately by reading sentences and producing the sounds correctly in sentence level.

A has been showing some improvement so far with his disarticulations with /r/ sound. He also has been showing a well improvement with his /th/ and /sh/ sounds. He started to concentrate more and it helped him do his work harder.

References:
Shuster, L., Ruscello, D., Smith, K. (1992) Evoking /r/ Using Visual Feedback. AJSLP, 1, 29-34.

Bauman-Waengler, J. (2004). Articulatory and Phonological Impairments: A Clinical Focus. Boston:Pearson.