Improving Overall Intelligibility

Ages: 3-12Grades: PreK-7

Systematically improve intelligibility and reduce your students' frustration of not being understood. Designed for students with apraxia, weak or imprecise articulation, and/or autism, this therapeutically-sound resource is based on best-practice methods.

Auditory bombardment and self monitoring backed by solid research and best practice methods make this program unique. Designed to help students with motor speech disorders or mild to moderate apraxia achieve 100% intelligible speech, it's easily adapted to individual student needs.

This program is divided into two sections: Early and Late Developing Sounds. Base your choice of which developing sounds to target on your diagnostic articulation testing:

• Early Developing Sounds include: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /ng/, /m/, /n/, /j/, /h/, and /w/
• Late Developing Sounds include: /f, /v/, voiced and voiceless /th/, /l/, /dg/, /ch/, /sh/, /s/, /z/, and /r/

The Improving Overall Intelligibility program includes:

• Tier 1 ExercisesùThese exercises use auditory bombardment to teach single consonant sounds. Students who are severely unintelligible will benefit from instruction within every unit of Tier 1; other students may need instruction in only a few of these units. Target the sounds that most impact your student's intelligibility. Students learn by listening to specifically designed, uncomplicated examples of their target sounds in:
• an illustrated poem
• exercises designed to improve comprehension and auditory skills
• Tier 2 ExercisesùStudents learn the subtleties of blended sounds using auditory bombardment in these exercises. Choose the sounds that most impact your student's intelligibility. Both blended and single consonant sounds are targeted in:
• an illustrated poem
• exercises designed to improve comprehension and auditory skills
• Tier 3 ExercisesùThese exercises focus on word position. There are 12 pictured words that contain the target sound in either the initial, final, or medial position. Since research has shown that children focus on learning to say words as whole units (Velleman & Vehan, 2002), Tier 3 begins by teaching the target sound in phrases and systematically narrows the instructional focus to the word, syllable, and isolated sound.
• Rate, Quality, Pitch, and VolumeùRate, quality, pitch, and volume are key features which can impact overall intelligibility (Mefferd & Green, 2010). The exercises in this unit are designed to improve these characteristics and are used at any time during the program.
• Carryover ActivitiesùCarryover, an important and often most difficult step to master, is critical for dismissal for therapy. There are four carryover activities at the end of the Early Developing and Later Developing Sounds sections. The activities review all of the sounds in their respective section and target them in the initial, medial, and final word positions and in consonant clusters. The picture scenes carryover activities in color are included with the program. All the activities are designed to help your student achieve intelligibility in connected speech and include:
• picture scene
• scene-related page, varying in language difficulty, which includes types of questions from:
• wh-
• category
• inference
• compare/contrast
• paraphrasing
• problem solving
• social communication
• sequencing
• list of target words
• answer key

Improving overall intelligibility is difficult but with the right exercises becomes an achievable goal for your students. End the frustration of not being understood with Improving Overall Intelligibility.

• 197 black & white pages, plus 86 full color printable pages • ©2014