CLASSIFICATION OF CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS IN THE PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY OF SPEECH THERAPIST

Abstract

The author has characterized various concepts that refer to children with special educational needs: “developmental disabilities”, “mental dysontogenesis”, “special needs children”, “problem child”, “children with developmental delays”, “at-risk children”, “abnormal children”, “children with disabilities”, “children with disabilities in psychophysical development”. The author has established that these concepts are obsolete as they are segregated, indicating the inferiority of a child who has been placed in a closed, isolated system of special education, which significantly limits child’s rights. These concepts are ambiguous, correlated with the structure of a group of children with special educational needs, and in their significance no component indicates the negative features of the child’s development. The article reveals that in the modern sense it is appropriate to refer to the concept of “children with special educational needs”, by which we mean a group of children who experience various biological and social causes of persistent difficulties in learning educational programs. It has been determined that the category of children with special educational needs includes children with impairments of hearing, speech or sight, children with mental retardation, children with disorders of the musculoskeletal system or the emotional and volitional sphere, children with complex developmental disabilities, children with severe speech disorders, children with social problems, gifted children. The author gas traced a new kind of speech disorders, which are associated with digital dependence of children in the current era of digital technologies. The author emphasizes that the speech therapist should carry out his activity with the defectologist, teacher of the deaf, the blind and the mentally defective, psychologist, rehabilitation teacher, orthopedagogue and social pedagogue. The author has proved that it is necessary to create special conditions for children with special educational needs to learn educational programs that will allow them to acquire the skills of social adaptation and to realize their own vital competence.