Childhood Apraxia of Speech: Considerations for Selecting Target Utterances for Treatment

Presentation Transcript

Amy: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's e learning expert seminar series entitled "Childhood Apraxia Of Speech: Considerations For Selecting Target Utterances For Treatment" presented by Margaret Fish.

Amy: At this time I would like to introduce Margaret Fish. She is a speech language pathologist working in private practice in Highland Park, Illinois. Over the past 25 years she has worked primarily with children in educational and clinical settings. Her primary professional interests are in the areas of children speech sound disorders, language disorders, and social language development. She conducts workshops around the country on the topic of evaluation and treatment of childhood apraxia of speech. Margaret is the author of the upcoming book, "Here is How to Treat Childhood Apraxia of Speech," so welcome, Margaret, today and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us.

Margaret: Thank you, Amy.

Purpose of Presentation

When I was working on my book I really thought about the importance of selecting target utterances for treatment. This is what we'll be covering today, keeping in mind that we need to always look at the whole child regardless of the type of speech and language disorder we're treating. I have narrowed it down to five particular areas that I consider when I select target utterances for treatment. Those are (1) the child's speech skills or what speech skills they're lacking, (2) their language development and where they are linguistically, (3) what their environment provides for them and what their needs are environmentally, in terms of what they need to be talking about in school, home and the community, (4) what motivates them. A lot of children who have apraxia of speech have difficulty taking risks so I really like to look at what motivates them to want to work really hard at this thing that is so incredibly challenging for them, and (5) their social skills.

In addition, we will be looking at how to support generalization of the skills that we're working on into other settings, because that is one area that frequently doesn't get addressed enough and toward the end of this presentation we'll practice specific target selections.

Target Selection Considerations

When I look at my target utterances I'm looking at all five of the areas provided below.