Building Success with Intelligible Speech

Pam Boerner and Arnelle McNary

Skill: Speech Pronunciation

Grades: 4 – 12 and adults

Population: Deaf or Hard of Hearing Accent Reduction Other Speech Pronunciation Issues

One of the basic premises of education is that students will be fully engaged and be able to fully participate in their classrooms, including during classroom discussion, deep-learning group or partner projects, and other school communication. Students with poor speech intelligibility and pronunciation issues often have had repeated experiences of not being understood resulting in situations that are a negative communication experience, which ultimately impacts participation in the classroom. The primary purpose of Building Success with Intelligible Speech, is to improve student success by inproving speech intelligibility and communication self-confidence. It is not possible to teach students all of the words they will ever say; however, we can teach them the TOOLS for correctly pronouncing new words they encounter. These tools can be found in this assessment and intervention book. English is said to be one of the most difficult languages to learn because of the inconsistencies and exceptions to word pronunciation. Thus far, detailed analysis, comprehensive assessments and remediation of English pronunciation skills have not been available for students with pronunciation issues.

BUILDING SUCCESS WITH INTELLIGIBLE SPEECH for Students with Hearing Loss or Others with Speech Pronunciation Issues was created to be used by the Speech Language Pathologists (SLP) and Teachers of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TOD). This book includes:

• Comprehensive Pronunciation testing for 3-year evaluations

• Pronunciation subtests for Developing IEP Goals

• Sample IEP Goals

• Intervention recommendations

• Intervention activities

” I LOVE THIS!! WOW! Building Skills with Intelligible Speech makes so much sense! I think this is a great assessment for teachers and SLPs. The explanations are excellent and I didn’t feel like I was reading something that was too technical. The intelligibility explanation versus articulation also made sense. Many students who are DHH may never reach full articulation with some sounds, but this would assist with intelligibility. I liked the suggestion to record the student and then score it, starting with just syllables and scoring that, then listening again for the second component and so on. The first few times would be difficult to score, but that is explained and expected for a new assessment. The Exceptional Word List and Abbreviations information is also spot on. I really want to give this to the SLPs to use with their assessment of my kids with reading skills grade 4 and up.”  – Educational Diagnostician for DHH, Texas