Contemporary approaches to working with a family educating a child with speech disturbance

Abstract

The following article presents speech-therapy guidance for the families, who have kids with speech disorders, and outlines directions and means of solving the problem. The authors view speech-therapy guidance as interaction of all the participants in the correction process. Its implementation goes as a simultaneous, coherent system of work, which begins with interaction between the child, the therapist and experts in other specialties (psychologist, doctors, and rehabilitation specialists). Afterwards the work is meant to continue by parents supervised by the speech therapist. The article touches upon both group and individual work done in cooperation with parents. Group work – parents’ meetings, guidance, round tables, exhibitions, seminars, frontal-work lessons, workshops, games and exercises’ libraries, visual libraries, open days and conferences. Individual work – individual discourses, practicing, watching individual lessons, recommendation notices, homework notebooks, conducting surveys and home libraries. The authors claim that the system of a speech-therapy guidance can be introduced as two general aspects in work: 1) Speech-therapy aspect involves acquiring knowledge about phases and peculiarities of the child’s speech development, enhancing speaking communication among children, forming awareness of pre-school children speech disorders, motivation for cooperation with speech therapists, teachers and children, acquiring skills to follow the therapist’s advice and use all the correction exercises. The points mentioned above help to do the speech therapist supervised correction work, to adhere to the same requirements and the sequence of speech influence and conduct systematic correction work in accordance to the speech therapist’s advice. 2) Psychological aspect involves forming the knowledge about age-based psychological peculiarities of children’s development, fostering motivation skills for speaking communication, developing the skill of providing appropriate conditions for effective speech development, promoting ways of successful communication of children and parents. Nowadays there are different ways and forms of speech-therapy guidance for parents. The ones that proved to be the most informative and interactive are contemporary information technologies.