Second Blog About M

My client, M, is a 14 year old female with a diagnosis of delayed speech and language and auditory processing disorder. She has been in treatment for 9 years at the speech clinic.

Right now, a couple of the goals we are working on are improving reading comprehension and memory skills. With reading, I usually read to M and then she reads back to me. Then I have her answer questions about what she has read. We do a variety of different things for memory skills. In the beginning of the semester we started with 3 word phrases. M does really well with those but when I tried 4 word phrases she did poorly. We moved on to pictures and games. When she met the accuracy criterion for pictures, we moved on to the ABC game. We are now trying a board game where she has to listen to phrases.

The one thing both of these goals and what I am doing have in common are the strategies M uses to remember things. Categorization really helps her and she can use rehearsal up to a point. What really seems to help her though is mental imagery. If she can see a picture and then remember it in her mind or create mental images from what is being said it helps her remember.

In the article Comprehension problems in children with specific language impairment: does mental imagery training help? by Joffe, Cain, and Maric (2007), the use of mental imagery in children with specific language impairment greatly helped improve their reading comprehension. Mental imagery training enhanced the story comprehension of children with specific language impairment and helped them answer questions about short narratives.

M enjoys games where we use pictures to help her remember. She also really responds to pictures better than words. So when we work with words and remembering things from her reading, I have her make mental pictures. This helps her focus and really pay attention to what I am reading. Then when she reads she is familiarized to what is going on in the story and the words. By using mental pictures, she is able to answer questions in great detail. I have made my questions I ask her more detailed because she just keeps improving on her reading comprehension.

Mental pictures have really helped M in remembering sequences of words too. Her accuracy rate for 3 word phrases always now meets 90% or above. She is using the strategies she learned and during our last session she finally started to correctly remember 4 word phrases.

Joffe, V, Cain, K, & Maric, N. (2007). Comprehension problems in children with specific language impairment: does mental imagery training help. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 42(6), 648-664.