Spoken English Program

This program involves speechreading, auditory training, and oral language development. Practice and learning experiences are delivered through games, role playing, simulation activities, interactive computer games and text based activities. Because phonemic awareness is fundamental to reading and English vocabulary development, student goals are established in the areas of:

1. Routines and expectations for voicing, responding, imitating
2. Pragmatics: eye contact, turn-taking, asking for clarification, using questions, sentences, social greetings, social conversation
3. Imitative skills: imitation of gross movements, one lip shape, one mouth shape, words, phrases
4. Phonics: awareness of the relationship between sound and letter
5. Speechreading: lip shapes, vowel patterns, names of people, colours, numbers, single words, phrases, sentences
6. Speech: spontaneous use of voice, appropriate use of voice, syllabification, suprasegmentals (duration, intensity, pitch), word pronunciation
7. Auditory: awareness of sounds, discrimination of sounds. The SPICE (Speech Perception Instructional Curriculum and Evaluation) curriculum is a resource.
8. Development of oral vocabulary: colours, numbers, animal names, holiday vocabulary, vocabulary used in social situations, common expressions, adjectives, opposites, etc.
9. Semantics: idioms, similies, metaphors, figurative language
10. English language and grammatical structures: verb tense, prepositional phrases, suffixes, contractions, negation, adverbs, etc.

Assessment

Assessment is done through informal observations and checklists. Each student is programmed and assessed individually. Speech correction is incidental and a speech and language pathologist acts as a consultant to this program. Various resources are used and followed – The SPICE Curriculum, Dave Sindrey’s “ Learning To Listen” program.

Students are withdrawn from class twice weekly for twenty minutes.