The Art of the Structured Syntax Lesson: Assessing, Planning and Prompting

Audience: Pediatric speech-language pathologists and teachers of the deaf

Children typically acquire new language without drill or structured practice; however, a child with hearing loss, even when fit with the best hearing device tuned to provide her optimal access to sound, requires a great deal of practice to learn to listen and talk.

This course is designed to help speech-language pathologists make their structured syntax lessons more effective by learning to assess, plan and prompt in the course of a structured syntax lesson. It provides a variety of techniques professionals can use when teaching children with hearing loss listening and spoken language. Participants learn how repetitive structured syntax lessons can help a child gain facility with various syntactic structures so she can use them on her own, outside of the therapy room.

Topics

• How to identify the child’s current language abilities
• How to identify syntactic structures the child needs to learn
• How to determine vocabulary and syntax targets
• An approach to designing weekly lesson plans and activities
• The role of repetition and practice in lessons
• Modeling techniques
• Prompting techniques
• Strategies for making adjustments during a lesson

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

• Identify the child’s current language abilities and setting appropriate long-term syntax goals and targets for the lesson
• Design structured language lessons
• Conduct syntax lessons using modeling, imitation and prompting

Length:  Approximately 30 minutes

Continuing Education Credit(s)

.5 LSLS CEUs, AG Bell Academy

Disclosure Statement

Financial: At the time this course was produced, Ms. O’Donoghue was working as a speech-language pathologist on the staff at CID.
Non-financial: No relevant non-financial relationship exists.

CID – Central Institute for the Deaf has developed and published an assessment system trademarked as TAGS (Teacher Assessment of Grammatical Structures) Revised. This presentation will reference, but not focus on, the TAGS assessment system and will include limited or no information on related products.