For a variety of reasons, some children and young people continue to experience difficulties with unclear speech into secondary age and may need support to develop strategies to improve the clearness of their speech when it breaks down.

Awareness of Listener UnderstandingInitially the child or young person may need help to learn how to tell if someone has/has not understood them and that they may need to repair their speech.

Brainstorm ‘How do we know someone has not understood us?’.

You may need to model the different ways people use to indicate they haven’t understood, e.g. listener frowns, stops nodding, looks away, looks puzzled, responds with an unexpected answer/topic, says ‘what?’ etc.Write down all the ideas on a large sheet of paper.

Develop the child or young person’s ability to identify these different signals. Ask them to perform a simple task, such as counting or reciting months of the year, and explain that they need to stop when the adult signals that they have not understood e.g. when she frowns etc.

You can then make this harder by asking the child or young person to identify these signals whilst performing a more demanding language task, such as during conversation or when providing an explanation.

Repair StrategiesBelow are different strategies the child or young person can use when their speech production skills have broken down. Spend some time exploring and developing each repair strategy through discussion, modelling and role play, plus the additional activities mentioned.

Non-Verbal Strategies Drawing: a specific activity to develop this strategy includes ‘pictionary’. Writing: a specific activity to develop this strategy includes asking the child or young person to

write the key word for a picture they want when there are several pictures shown on a board. Gesture: a specific activity to develop this strategy includes ‘charades’. You can spend some

time illustrating how gesture is often used to support our spoken language i.e. we often use pointing, objects, simple iconic hand movements when we talk in noisy environments/in situations when we are not allowed to talk but want to communicate!

Strategies to support speech production in older children and young people children

Speech Strategies Increase the volume Talk at a slower rate and focus on the articulation of the problematic word Emphasise syllable structure Place stress on the key word(s) in a sentence Repeat the key word only

Meaning Strategies Use an alternative word with the same or very similar meaning e.g. ‘beach’ for ‘seaside’. Describe the meaning of the key word/problematic word (e.g. ‘the place where you go on holiday

to sunbathe…’) – you can play a ‘guess what?’ object description activity to develop this skill. State the topic e.g. ‘I’m talking about…’

Environmental Strategies Move to a quieter place Face the communication partner Reduce the distance between the student and the communication partner

After discussing when, where and how each of these strategies could be applied, the child or young person can practice applying the strategies within role play scenarios and also supported real life situations at school. For example, the child or young person needs to ask the school nurse for a plaster – how will they make themselves clear? They can also practice at home or out and about, for example the child or young person needs to check how much a bag of crisps costs – how will they make themselves clear?

Initially, the child or young person is likely to need reminders to apply repair strategies in their spontaneous conversation and support to decide which strategy is the most effective for the situation. Provide these reminders as the situation arises, praise them when they use a specific strategy and highlight why this was appropriate for the situation and how it helped you to understand.