Key Elements of Practice, Part 2: Conscious Practice

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab with day two, talking about the key elements of practice: the elements the Case Speech Lab and the NYU Motor Speech Lab came up with to talk about what makes motor speech therapy motor speech therapy, and how you can go about making the shift in your practice.

Last time I talked about structured practice, and today I'm going to talk about point number two, which is conscious practice. I know we do this anyway, but the first step in raising the awareness of how the child is moving and feeling while they're saying their target words really starts with us.

What we want to step back and think about is: what is our experience saying the target word? What does it feel like for us to say "me," or "open," or "bye"? What do our articulators feel like? Once we have that awareness, we can begin to describe it to the child we're working with and bring their attention to it.

So as you're working through these targets, you want to encourage them to really feel how their mouth is moving while they're saying the words. Let's say the target word is "open." You want to start with, "Oh, do you feel how your lips are rounded, and how your mouth is open for that?" Or the target word is "apple": "Do you feel how big your mouth opens?" Or if you're starting from "me": "Do you feel your lips together? Do you feel how your lips push together like that, on each other?" You're bringing a level of conscious awareness to the production that they didn't have before.

You'll notice gains quickly once you start to do this.