One of the key goals of speech therapy services is to help improve kids’ ability to function in activities of daily living.
Understanding Isolation Level Practice
To help achieve this goal for severely unintelligible kids, particularly young toddlers and preschool aged children, we often focus on building a core vocabulary that can be understood. Because the sounds contained in these words can be variable, a traditional articulation hierarchy may not be used—in fact, some SLPs argue that isolation level practice is actually NOT functional for kids.
Writing Functional Objectives
First, we need to remember the basics of goal writing and how that helps to inform, or lay out the road map, for our treatment plan. A common long term goal, which is the big picture, 'where do I want this kid to get to' goal, could be something like 'Child will improve speech intelligibility in order to communicate wants, ideas, and needs clearly for activities of daily living.'
When to Move On from Isolation Drill
Using data tracking of performance on a short term objective leads to the next point—when to advance up the hierarchy. One of the limitations of isolation practice with respect to functionality is that yes, it is true that we don’t speak in isolated phonemes.
Addressing Low Accuracy Levels
But what if the accuracy level for isolation production is never as high as 80%? This is a complicated problem for a number of reasons. First, there’s the issue of perception of whether the production is correct.
The Importance of Progress
So, to sum up, the ability to lead kids systematically through a process of learning to produce a sound that was previously not in their phonetic inventory has huge potential for improving their speech sound production skills.
Conclusion
If we keep these two guidelines in mind—make sure it’s possible for them to produce the sound in isolation before working at word level, but don’t spend forever there, then we’re going to provide functionally relevant therapy services.