Often times, there is a lot of confusion as to what occurs in speech and language therapy and why it is so important to student success. There is a direct correlation between language and literacy, which effects a student's academic career. Students will work on many different things in therapy throughout the school year, including but not limited to: following directions, speech sound production, topic maintenance, fluency/rate of speech, auditory comprehension, phonological awareness, and answering questions. All of these things will fall under one of the five areas of language.
These are the five areas of language which we will address in speech and language therapy.
1. Phonology- Sounds in language and the rules that determine how the sounds are used (a-apple-a-ate)
2. Semantics- vocabulary of language
3. Syntax- sentence structure (verb, noun, etc)
4. Morphology- meaning of language
5. Pragmatics- how we use language to communicate socially.
We hope this helps clear up some of the confusion regarding speech and language therapy!