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From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 10 Oct 2008
Time: 16:30:48 -0500
Remote Name: 68.107.236.82
Dave, thanks for writing. Yes, students do get a kick out of instructing their teacher. I work in an elementary school that had an enrollment of close to 1400 children for my first 5-6 years. Now we are down to about a 1000 children. For the past nine years, I have had between 45-60 children on my caseload every year. I have so few students on my caseload with articulation issues that it is almost shocking. I have had more students who stutter than students with artic concerns. You ask, “How successful have you been with kids who have articulatory problems and kids who stutter?” Well, it depends what you mean by success. With the exception of maybe two 7 year old students who cognitively did not seem ready for exploring speech production, my students have had great success in learning how speech sounds are produced and practicing moving through blocks. However, I work with young children and teens (the teens are in my private practice) who understandably have much more on their minds then practicing speech tools in challenging situations. I see my job as “planting seeds” to quote or paraphrase a friend of mine. I can show my students some skills that will aid them in moving through stuttering and initiating speech, but in the end, it will be up to my students to decide when they wish to implement these ideas. I read and hear a lot from my colleagues about “transferring” skills and I will wonder aloud why so many SLPs assume that young children have the motivation, interest or to be blunt, the work ethic needed to “transfer” the skills I show them to challenging speaking situations. Sure, we go out and practice speaking strategies in public, but I really think that for many people who stutter, one needs a strong reason or motivation to practice, such as reaching rock bottom with his or her stuttering, and many young children are nowhere near rock bottom. To answer your artic question as directly as possible, I have worked with two students over the years with significant stuttering and significant articulation issues. In both cases, I did not feel that the articulation issues were inflamed by working on easy initiations and in fact, I think that working on normal speech production, easy initiations and pull-outs were productive for both artic and stuttering issues.