WRITING SPEAKING THERAPY TUTORING

A house without a foundation is like the movie The Money Pit . It is bound to crumble down. Likewise, verbal language is the basis for written and social language. Poor verbal skills result in difficulties in expressive writing, academics, and social skills.

Let us quickly introduce three types of verbal language (narrative, expository, conversational); two of them play integral parts for developing appropriate expressive writing skills. Narrative language (emerges in preschoolers) includes the ability to share experiences, describe ongoing activities, and/or plan/predict future activities, explain and tell stories.

Narrative language is different than conversational speech because the former is typically told by one speaker, while others listen. The last type of verbal language to develop is called expository language. Its main purpose is to instruct. From third grade on, students are expected to describe, define, and explain information, e.g. oral and written reports for history or science etc., in a coherent manner. As academic demands increase over the school years, there is a larger emphasis on expository verbal language and expository literacy.

Narrative and expository language are the bridge between oral and written language development. Kind of like how the Verrazano connects Staten Island to Brooklyn. However, some children will require a little assistance in the form of writing and speaking tutoring to develop their narrative language skills. And that’s where we come in.

Our language experts are like the Olympic coaches of speech. When we are working with students, we specialize in both written and verbal skills. After all, you can’t have one without the other. That would be like peanut butter minus jelly.

Writing Speaking Therapy Tutoring, Brooklyn Letters

Writing Intervention

Writing requires mastery of different skills and processes, including spelling and handwriting. It also involves planning, organizing, and revising of ideas. Children with learning disabilities often have problems with phonemic processing (representing and manipulating sounds), alphabetic principles (recognizing sounds represented by letters), and letter-sound connections. This leads to difficulties in the transcription aspect of writing. Thus, affecting one’s ability to communicate thoughts and ideas. Learn about The Language Literacy Network– the many language components that unify into skilled reading and writing. The infographic is attached and may be freely shared –unaltered and for non-commercial purposes.

Effective writing intervention must address all aspects of the writing process using a particular strategy. At Brooklyn Letters, our writing tutors focus on specialized and individualized intervention to improve the student’s oral and written language skills including:

Analyzing complex sentences – Students flush out the meaning of the complex language and vice versa: students combine simple sentences into complex sentences.
Creating complex sentences – Teaching connecting words, such as temporal words, e.g. then, before, after, etc., causal relations, e.g. because, so, etc., conditional relations, e.g. if-then, etc.
Elaborating noun phrases, e.g. adding the clause “who study dinosaurs” to the word “paleontologists”, e.g. “Paleontologist, who study dinosaurs,” etc.
Elaborating verb phrases, e.g. teaching adverbs, e.g. extremely, sadly, quite, etc.
Teaching vocabulary (nouns, action words, descriptors)
Grammar (sentence construction, verb tense, etc.)
Improving organization/cohesion of ideas (map out setting, identifying problems, goals, and episodes, connecting ideas, visual and verbal organizers, etc.)
Facilitating social skills.

Click the link to find out more about Brooklyn Letters’ writing intervention program.

Speaking Therapy

Acquiring communication skills is a landmark milestone in young children that determine whether a child’s development is typical for one’s age. As children grow, they begin to put their thoughts and feelings into words. But in some cases, they may find it difficult to find the words to express themselves and have trouble speaking with others.

Communication delays in young children is not uncommon. However, some children may exhibit significant speaking difficulties compared to peers, such as late-talking. This could be a sign of an expressive language disorder (also known as spoken language disorder) or an expressive language delay (for children four years and younger).

(Related: Everything You Need to Know If You Have a Toddler Who is a Late Talker)

Expressive language disorder refers to problems using spoken language to express thoughts and feelings. It affects at least one key area of communication, which are: spoken vocabulary, grammar (complexity of what the child is saying), and pragmatics or the social use of words. These issues become more apparent when children, older than four years of age, have difficulties telling stories and making friends.

Treatment of an expressive language disorder often depends on the child’s age (preschoolers and elementary school children). Visit this link to find out more about expressive language disorders and how to best address it.

Sharing is caring. We let the students know what we are doing, so they can be part of the process. We also take their interests, strengths, and learning style into account, maximizing effectiveness and ensuring the students don’t get frustrated. After all we are not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If your child likes music and flying saucers, let’s incorporate it! Drawing and imaginary animals? For sure! These skills are targeted during fun activities for remediation, and they are also implemented in the student’s curriculum.

When developing activities to enhance oral and written language skills, we include activities such as pictures (including drawing), books (including wordless picture books), imagination games, personal experiences, art activities, dramatic play, journals, book reports, music, editing (including correcting the tutor’s mistakes), and several other fun and effective exercises.

Find out more about our literacy tutoring services and get to know our literacy specialists here! We also provide spelling intervention and vocabulary tutoring to further enrich your child’s language skills.