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Having a good understanding of words improves one’s comprehension and understanding of what is being read.
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Words are our primary method of communication, which means that having a wide vocabulary positively impacts all areas of communication (listening, speaking, reading, and writing).
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A robust vocabulary means having good command of words when expressing thoughts and ideas. This in turn boosts their confidence, both in academic and social settings.
Word-Finding Difficulty
Aside from students with decreased vocabularies compared to peers, some students have what is called word-finding difficulties. These students often have trouble retrieving words more frequently than would be expected despite good comprehension of these words. Problems in word-finding can manifest in single-word retrieval or discourse contexts.
Single-Word Retrieval: This refers to difficulties in accessing specific words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and numbers. At school, a student with word-finding challenges may have trouble answering questions that need a particular information or specific facts. When trying to access words, a student may be:
- slow and inaccurate
- fast but inaccurate
- slow and accurate
Discourse Retrieval: Trouble with discourse retrieval is characterized by difficulties in conversation and relating experiences and events. When speaking, a student’s speech will often be short or have behaviors associated with word-finding difficulties. These include repetitions, revisions or reformulations, substitutions, insertions, empty words, time fillers, and delays.
Word-finding difficulties are particularly common in students who have:
- specific learning disabilities
- reading difficulties
- specific language impairment
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- fluency or stuttering problems
(Find out more about our stuttering, stammering, and fluency speech therapy.)
How to Help Your Child
We use a variety of effective techniques in our vocabulary and word-finding interventions, with in-depth procedures that involve listening, speaking, and written contexts to help vocabulary development.
Our strategies include:
- word-mapping (graphic display of word/concept relationships)
- word substitution (teach new words related to the word found in the story, etc.)
- semantic relationships (e.g., how are the words related)
- discussion of words in a text
- incorporating techniques students can use independently
- expanding and deepening student’s knowledge of word meanings
- acting out meanings
- focusing on word structure (root words and derivations)
- reflective pausing
- imagery and gesture cues
- mass practice
At Brooklyn Letters, we use explicit teaching methods, such as pre-reviewing difficult words, repeated exposure to vocabulary in a text, and word maps. We also use implicit teaching methods by helping children build their context skills to master more vocabulary.
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