Every Wednesday all of my students write for the entire period. Those students that cannot read, yes their are high school students that do not read, tell me what they want to write, I put it on the board and they copy the letters.
Writing is an important function for us all. We freeze our communication in a temporal sense through writing. It requires organized thought and language. This is how it fits in within the purview of speech and language. Our association has been trying to get Speech and Language to tackle writing for the past decade and a half. It has met with resistance primarily because we were not trained in its use in the Universities.
That reminds me about my good friend deceased, Jim Morris. We was a Speech and Language Specialist that was trained at the University of Oklahoma. In the 1960s we were called speech correctionists. Our field focused on the spoken part. In the 70's The field opened up to include language. Delayed language and its neurological ties. The experts in the field realized that dysfluency, dysphonia, dysarthria, and dyspraxia could have some linguistic ties and should include dysphasia. Jim was not convinced. He spent ours with the cadavers in the medical wing dissecting vocal folds and intercostals and pieces of esophaguses. This was not an area that we should be rushing into. It is more "language arts."
The profession did not follow his interest. It headed to the aphasias and many speech and language professionals have worked their entire career helping rehabilitate stroke patients, largely a language therapy.
These same pros are reluctant to get into writing. It opens the field to broadly. They would also be reluctant to deal with the autistic, its a psych disorder in their viewpoint. Behind every autistic client is a social language issue that we need to be working. The challenges are great here. Its not really one we can walk around.
So I work in a classsroom setting with my speech students. Many of them are autistic. Our focus is to develop communication. Wednesday it is written. It is functional in the sense that relays a common shared experience. Some weeks its about a movie that we have watched together and dissected. Sometimes the topic is about events of the day and how they are effecting them. Soemtimes its more general. Write about what you did on your three day vacation honoring MLK. That is on the docket today.
Have a great day! Pat
Of course, we can work with writing. Unfortunately, I think this tends to spread us a little thin. With the caseloadI already have... I think the RSP people can work with this. Your high school is lucky to have such a talented speech therapist, who is willing to work on so many levels to help his kiddos become functional communicators.
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