Speech and Language Services
The White Oak School faculty includes a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) who is certified by the American Speech Language and Hearing Association. The SLP provides direct services to individual and small groups of students and collaborates with our teaching staff to remediate the speech and language needs of our students.
The curriculum of our Oral Expression Program targets a multitude of communication skills including: following directions, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonological processing, narrative language, pragmatic communication (verbal and non-verbal) and language reasoning. This class provides an ideal context for our SLP to implement and model (through consultation and coteaching) language strategies necessary for expressive and receptive language development.
Goals:
- To improve comprehension and speaking skills
- To improve academic and interpersonal performance
- To increase staff awareness of speech and language development
- To consult with parents in the appropriate development of student communication skills
Primary Functions of the Speech and Language Pathologist:
To Evaluate:
- receptive and expressive language
- speech sounds, fluency, and voice difficulties
To Collaborate:
- with teachers to provide speech and language services that support the Massachusetts Core Curriculum
- -modeling of strategies
To Provide:
Language services for students who have difficulty related to:
- answering questions-expressing ideas-recalling information/sequences
- word retrieval
- following directions
- using grade level vocabulary
- formulating grammatically correct sentences
- written language-listening or reading comprehension
- phonemic awareness-reasoning/critical thinking
- interpreting verbal and nonverbal cues
Speech services for students who have difficulty:
- being understood when speaking to others
- producing speech sounds correctly
- using smooth, fluent speech in conversation