ACQ Vol 12 No 2 2010

Our top ten resources

Paediatric private practice Illawarra speech pathologists in private practice

We are speech pathologists who work independently in private practice in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven regions of the south coast of NSW. We meet four times a year to share information on clinical matters, practice news, professional development and clinical resources.

1. Digital recorder

story” or, for an older child, his “speech”. • memory support in a writing task: students with weak sentence memory and poor spelling and writing skills generate a sentence, rehearse it and then record it. They can then replay the recording as many times as necessary so that they can write the sentence down. • alternative response method for poor writers: students can plan a piece of writing and say it from the notes. Once they have composed a “speech” in this way, they record it. The parent may scribe this speech to be handed in as a written text, or the student’s own recorder can be taken to school to be marked by the teacher as a verbal text rather than a written one. • memory support when teaching note-taking, summarising and paraphrasing: I read a passage to the student and record it as I read. The student replays the recording and takes notes, stopping the recording after each piece of key information to make a note of it. The student replays the recording again if necessary to fill out the notes, stopping and starting as needed. The student retells the information in their own words by referring to their notes; this summary is recorded. The student can listen to the original passage and then their own retelling and analyse how well they did. As the student’s note-taking skills improve, only one replay is allowed and gradually fewer or no stops are allowed.

(suggested by Jenny Adams) Devices such as the Sony 1GB Digital Notetaker USB are available from Dick Smith (www.dse.com.au). I use a digital voice recorder with an inbuilt microphone. There are various models available; for example, the JNC USB 350. It has 5 hours of memory that is organised in a series of folders. Recorded data can be stored on a computer and played through the computer speakers. The recorder is helpful to supplement written notes when assessing a number of children in a limited time, such as at a kindergarten screening, or when testing for research. Language samples, test responses and clinical observations can be recorded and analysed at a later date. In the clinic I use my digital recorder as a(n): • motivator for eliciting speech and language: children love to press the buttons to record and play back their voices. • reward for multiple-sentence memory: the child imitates and then learns to say a sequence of sentences using action picture cues (may be a four- or five-part narrative, recount or procedure). The picture cues are turned face- down one by one as the child rehearses and memorises the sequence of sentences several times, finally being able to say all the sentences without any pictures to help. When the child can say all the sentences with no errors, he can record himself and listen back to his “perfect

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ACQ Volume 12, Number 2 2010

ACQ uiring knowledge in speech, language and hearing