Technology

This summer we are bringing back the “Summer Study Series!” This series of posts is providing summaries of recent research related to narrative and expository language and Story Grammar Marker^®/ThemeMaker^® in order to expand your toolkit and library of evidence-based practice information for September. So, to our study for the month! We invite you to Spain, this time, for some work clearly relevant in English as well, from García, Sánchez, Cain & Montoya (2019), published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. Their “Cross-sectional study of the contribution of rhetorical competence to children's expository texts comprehension between third- and sixth-grade” looked at rhetorical competence (RC), or knowledge and understanding of certain text cues within expository texts and its interaction with reading comprehension...

This summer we are bringing back the “Summer Study Series!” This series of posts will provide overviews of recent research related to narrative language and Story Grammar Marker^® in order to give you “food for thought” to digest relevant to clinical techniques in the upcoming school year. I was quite excited to discover that a recent study on developing inferential language has a direct connection to SGM^®, as MindWing’s icons were used in story mapping activities included as part of the studied intervention. Dawes, Leitao, Claessen and Kane (2019), developed and studied a specific intervention sequence for improving inferencing in students with Developmental Language Disorder (DVD). Some summarized points from the study are as follows...

When working with students on comprehending expository text, we can often capitalize on their interests for motivation. However, expository sources lack the draw of narrative, so it can be helpful to use technology to add engagement. In this post we’ll update you on five places you can find free expository text material for mapping with ThemeMaker^® maps for List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, Problem-Solution or other associated graphic organizers...

No need to break out the popcorn, we’re not talking about the argumentative kind of argument! I have been working with a high school student over the course of the past year who has particular difficulties in comprehension and discourse formulation. His school has quite a challenging program, and each session brings to the table a contextual assignment in which organizational strategies can be identified for him to apply. Fortunately, he is very engaged in the process and can always identify a task for which he needs help. This past week, he was working on constructing an outline for a debate argument, and I immediately thought of the Persuade organizer from MindWing’s Thememaker^® tool for understanding and organizing expository language...

Illustration by Ariel Davis for NPR

I’m a big NPR person. It’s a great resource for listening, and for narrative! This past month I was intrigued by a feature on “EMOTIONAL GRANULARITY”—being able to name or describe your emotions more specifically. The author described an increase in stress in his life being alleviated by his working on “learning more emotion words and emotion concepts from one’s culture.” There was research to support his assertion that this self-identification was of help; according to Kashdan, Barrett, and McKnight (2015), “evidence suggests that interventions designed to improve emotion differentiation can both reduce psychological problems and increase various strands of well-being.” We can reframe this information in the light of what we might usually address as speech-language pathologists and literacy interventionists...

First of all, you may wonder, what is telepractice? And, if you are not so interested in the answer, this post will still have some tech-related ideas for you to apply in your “in-person” therapies. To quote ASHA’s resource page on telepractice: “Telepractice is the application of telecommunications technology to the delivery of speech language pathology and audiology professional services at a distance by linking clinician to client or clinician to clinician for assessment, intervention, and/or consultation.” All of the exact same principles and practices of intervention via in-person therapies apply to telepractice, just the method of delivery is different. Telepractice is often conducted via a secure web portal such as Zoom, allowing clinicians and clients on the other side to communicate via microphone and webcam, and using visual and interactive tools to conduct activities (e.g., screensharing, giving the client control of the screen for clicking and dragging)...