efore attempting to produce the target word themselves.
Paraphrasing is used to reword text or a student’s statement. It can be used to define a difficult word or reword a complex sentence into
shorter simpler sentences.
Example: Text – ‘The sun shone for a moment, but its warming rays were quickly engulfed by the angry and bruised sky.’
Clinician: ‘It sounds like the sun shone through the clouds. So while it was able to shine it provided some warmth. It didn’t last very long though. The angry and stormy sky enveloped the sun’s rays again.’
Oral Language Techniques -Questioning
Avoid yes/no questions, as they only require a simple response. The best questions are what/, why, how, who questions. What/why questions
tend to be open–ended and require the student to provide more information with more detail. Good questioning encourages expressive language use. For example, Clinician, ‘Did the girl save the bird?,' can be followed by “Why did the girl save the bird, how did she save the bird,’ etc.
Choice and contrast questions are an excellent way of giving the student choices to think about. For example, Clinician, ‘Why did the frog
follow the boy back home?’ No response from child. ‘Was the frog lonely or was he just curious?’
Question to the student’s response. After you have asked a question and received a response, use the student’s response to probe for more
information. This does require a bit of practice but can produce good results. For example, Child, ‘The man is climbing a ladder to the roof.’
Clinician, ‘Yes he is. I wonder what he will find on the roof. Is there anything that can go wrong when he gets to the top of the roof?’
Good questions require us to ask for increasingly more abstract responses from a student so that they may think of a statement or written passage in more complex ways that requires more involved and varied responses. The three main types of questions we use when prompting student thinking are literal, interpretive and inference questions. Inference questions in particular require the student to go beyond surface details in a story or passage to find the meaning.
Example passage from text: ‘The storm tossed the tiny boat on the seas as if it were a matchstick. The sun shone for a moment, but its warming rays were quickly engulfed by the angry and bruised sky.’
Literal Question: A question that has a specific answer. ‘What happened to the warming rays of the sun?’
Interpretation Question: A question which asks about something that is implied. ‘What would a bruised and angry sky look like?
Inference Question: A question that does not rely on textual information. ‘Will the boat and its crew survive the fierce storm?’
DeKemel, K.P. (2003) Intervention in Language Arts: A Practical Guide for Speech-Language Pathologists. Butterworth-Heinemann.
Paul, R. (2007) Language Disorders from Infancy through Adolescence. Assessment and Intervention. Mosby
Wallach, G.P. (2008) Language Intervention for School-Age Students: Setting Goals for Academic Success. Mosby Elsevier