Page 13 - Literacy Based Speech Language Therapy Activities Digital Version

The Research Behind Why Literacy-Based Intervention Works

1. The Research Behind Why Literacy-

Based Intervention Works

Through studies on race, culture, gender, socio-economic status, and educational experience, we are
increasingly able to understand differences that govern the students that we serve. Our job as

educators, is to identify whether a student is performing academically at an expected grade level.
When this is not the case, we identify how we can intervene to bring performance up to grade level.
Much of how we diagnose and intervene is based on our appraisal of the narrative that a student

generates.

Storybooks have long been used as educational tools. They provide a structure for teaching concepts
while keeping the student engaged and interested. Story structure additionally assists in retention and

retrieval of classroom concepts due to familiarity with stories, repetition, and formulaic patterns.
Book themes can be selected to allow students to explore fantasies, learn more about the real world,
further students’ knowledge about current classroom subjects, and introduce new topics. The
benefits of literacy-based lessons have led to an increased use of storybooks in intervention.

Storybooks are beneficial to the work of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) from both an
educational and a practical perspective.

1) The use of storybooks provides an excellent way to keep students engaged while addressing

their speech and language goals.
2) Storybooks can be used with all ages and cultures to address a wide range of goals, including
articulation, semantics, syntax, comprehension, pragmatics, and discourse skills.

3) Clinicians can work at different levels depending on each student’s needs ranging from
decontextualized discrete skills to skills that require more global processing, such as inferring
meaning in stories, understanding characters’ feelings, and producing story sequence.

4) Clinicians can use story themes and contexts to help students generalize skills learned in
storybook reading to other settings.
5) On the practical side, using sets of storybooks with activities increases the efficiency of the often

busy SLP by decreasing preparation time once the materials have initially been created.
6) Parents can easily become a part of the treatment process at home, which can greatly increase
learning and retention of new skills.

7) Our role as SLPs is to align to the general education curriculum and using storybooks in
intervention enables us to do this with ease.

2
www.bilinguistics.com