[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Kathy Swiney
Date: 08 Oct 2012
Time: 12:09:42 -0500
Remote Name: 99.153.185.119
The comments I hear the most are—“He’s talking more.” “She really speaks up in class.” Or, “He has really come out of his shell.” This often means the TWS has the courage to speak more in class. Sometimes a teacher will say, “I never used to hear her stutter and now I do.” That could mean, the teen didn’t speak class before, didn’t have a “voice” and now she does. Speaking more is what we want, but as a TWS speaks more there is also the opportunity to stutter more. The goal is effective, confident communication, not stutter-free speech. Over time, the teachers usually say the speech is more fluent. Often it is the teen’s peer group that points it out first. Several teens reported that they used phrasing in their presentations. One young man put off public speaking until his senior year. He wrote his first talk out word for word, then marked the phrasing points in the text. He read it a few times out loud before presenting it in class from note cards. He reported an excellent result. As I recall, he got the maximum number of points for his talk. His comment was interesting. “For most of these guys, this (giving a speech) is the only time they have speaking fears. I deal with it all the time. This was just another day for me