Using Storybooks in Speech-Language Intervention: From Theory to Practice

All material Copyright © 2007 Bilinguistics, Inc.
Reprinted with the express permission of Bilinguistics as originally published on their website.

By: Bilinguistics, Inc.
The mission at Bilinguistics is "to enhance the communication of Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential. Additionally to support monolingual and bilingual professionals working with bilingual children and English language learners through workshops, presentations, and continuing education.


This is a Continuing Education Course offered by Bilinguistics, an ASHA Approved CE Provider. To take the test and receive Continuing Education Units for this course, please visit the Bilinguistics website test page for this course HERE

• Content Area: Professional
• Instructional Level: Intermediate
• Continuing Education Units: .1 (1 hour)
  

Objectives:
Participants will be able to demonstrate knowledge in and identify:

Basic theory and research related to storybook intervention
• The implementation of common scaffolding techniques
• Book qualities important for speech and language intervention
• The design of intervention activities used with storybooks
  

Introduction

Storybooks have long been used as educational tools. They provide a structure for teaching concepts while keeping the student engaged and interested. Story structure additionally assists in retention and retrieval of classroom concepts due to familiarity with stories, repetition, and formulaic patterns. Book themes can be selected to allow students to explore fantasies, learn more about the real world, further students’ knowledge about current classroom subjects, and introduce new topics. These benefits of literacy-based lessons also have gained popularity in speech and language intervention.

Storybooks are beneficial to the work of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) from both an educational and a practical perspective. They provide an excellent way to keep students engaged while addressing their speech and language goals. Storybooks can be used with all ages and cultures to address a wide range of goals, including articulation, semantics, syntax, comprehension, pragmatics, and discourse skills. Clinicians can work at different levels depending on the student’s needs ranging from decontextualized discrete skills to skills that require more global processing, such as inferring meaning in stories, understanding characters’ feelings, and producing story sequence. Clinicians can use story themes and contexts to help students generalize skills learned in storybook reading to other settings. On the practical side, using sets of storybooks with activities increases the efficiency of the often busy SLP by decreasing preparation time once the materials have initially been created. Additionally, parents can easily become a part of the treatment process at home, which can greatly increase learning and retention of new skills.


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This is a Continuing Education Course offered by Bilinguistics, an ASHA Approved CE Provider. To take the test and receive Continuing Education Units for this course, please visit the Bilinguistics website test page for this course HERE



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The mission at Bilinguistics is "to enhance the communication of Spanish-English bilingual children, enabling those children to achieve their highest communicative and academic potential. Additionally to support monolingual and bilingual professionals working with bilingual children and English language learners through workshops, presentations, and continuing education."

For more information about this organization please visit Bilinguistics