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From: Judy
Date: 05 Oct 2009
Time: 07:51:42 -0500
Remote Name: 74.104.112.9
Pam, I would love to visit your blog; would you mind sharing the web address? You are way ahead of me in terms of taking full advantage of what Audacity can do. I'm afraid I have a long, gently sloping learning curve. (I am presently wading through "Google Sites & Chrome for Dummies"!Learning more about Audacity is next on my list.) You bring up such a crucial point - the emotional component of stuttering (or anything else about oneself that has been judged unacceptable.) I always feel like I am walking on a high wire in a circus act when I am telling children that they are wonderful just the way they are - including their stuttered speech - but, they are visiting me to learn a new way of talking. If children leave me having interpreted my message as: my speech is bad; then, I have fallen off the high wire and need to climb up and try again. How do we teach self-acceptance and change at the same time? I try to make analogies to whatever else it is they are learning. For example, although children are wonderful, they still need to change their behavior regarding math, science, and social skills. I ask them to look back at how they used to be at younger ages and realize how much they have grown and changed. Learning to change speech is just a part of growing up, I say as I hold that long pole in my hands and balance myself on the high wire. So, with that in mind, the child approaches Audacity like a scientist, voluntarily changing the waveform on his own by changing how he speaks. It's fun. There is never a goal of: the waveform should look like this ______. Rather, we discover together how the waveform can change as he changes speech. It is a feedback device with which to discover and monitor CHANGE. We never edit out anything. The choices of when and how to change speech is up to the child, except when I say, 'Let me see you try ______ so we can see what it looks like and I know you are able to do it.' I find the analogy of learning a second language especially helpful for adult listeners. It is the parents who bring their child to speech therapy to "fix" the speech. It is the parents who generally pressure the children for more and quicker speech improvement. I do ask children to shift into this 'second language' called more-smooth-speech at specific times and I expect that to happen. As the SPL, I guess I am supposed to know the difficulty level at which a child can shift into his 'second language' successfully. It's tricky. I REALLY appreciate your point that seeing (or hearing) the stuttering can be a very emotional experience. It is why I tried showing a video tape of a child's speech to him (an older child) only once!! I never did that again with anyone!!He was very upset to find out his secondaries looked the way they did. (It was many years ago, but experiences like that can haunt us clinicians.) Learning to change speech is NOT exactly like learning math or science or the piano. It is much more emotional than that. My goodness, I've really chatted on an on here. Thank you so much for giving me an excuse to talk about this enourmously important part of speech therapy. I hope you are feeling good about your speech these days, moments of silence and all. Judy :)