[Source: The Bilinguistics Blog]

In our last post, we talked how making your SLP-efforts cumulative helps you be a more effective, efficient, and happier SLP. Check out the post here if you missed it. Today, we are going to talk about how one articulation method can:

1. Get students to generalize their sounds and graduate from speech therapy quicker.

2. Decrease your caseload and earn you more time to tackle your other SLP responsibilities.

Are you seeing your speech students in a group setting while doing turn-taking games? If so, you are likely to get about 20 repetitions of the target sound. The research out there says that doing 5-7 minutes of drill, drill, drill daily can, on average, graduate a child from speech therapy after 7 hours of intervention (Sexton, 2006; Kuhn, 2006). Traditional therapy, however, resulted in 63 hours of speech therapy. That’s a difference of 9 months versus 18 months of speech therapy. Essentially, distributing your speech efforts in small, frequent bursts over time is better than a “mass-attack” of articulation therapy (Willingham, 2002). Remember, this is the research. Let me tell you how this can happen (in real life) on your campus and in your clinic.

First, we acknowledge that it would be ideal to see students every day for a few minutes; however, this may not be feasible. We get it. You are on a campus one or two days a week, or you see your clients in the office or in the home one time a week. Let’s talk about how we can still use drill, drill, drill within the setting you currently have set up. I have been using this method for over 10 years in the schools and in the clinic, and it works. What if your child could leave a speech session with 300+ repetitions of a sound / word / phrase / sentence?!  Let’s get schooled in drill therapy!

Read the Rest of this Article on the Bilinguistics blog