Developing Children’s Vocabulary and Word-Retrieval Skills
Difficulty storing and then retrieving vocabulary is a common feature of a Developmental Language Disorder. Children may:
- take a long time to find a word they would like to use, saying “um”, pausing for a considerable amount of time whilst they try to find the word or stating: “I know what it is!”
- produce a word which is from the same category e.g. “lion” becomes “tiger” or “shirt” becomes “trousers”
- pronounce words incorrectly, particularly when they have several syllables e.g. “grater” becomes “scraper” and “confused” becomes “fused”
- attempt to describe the word e.g. “stamp” becomes “queen sticker” and “calendar” becomes “It’s got so many numbers”
- use a generic word e.g. “doing” instead of “baking” or “hoovering” and “thing” instead of naming the item
Leaning new, topic-specific vocabulary becomes increasingly important as children progress through school.
The course will include clear descriptions of a range of approaches which can be used within a mainstream classroom to teach children and young people of all ages to store new vocabulary more accurately so that they are able to:
- pronounce the words accurately, which improves their spelling of them too
- use the words within grammatically acceptable sentences in both spoken and written form
The course aims to enable teaching staff to:
- identify children who are displaying word-retrieval difficulties and work out the reason(s) for this
- use a range of strategies to teach children vocabulary more effectively so they are more able to retrieve the words when they need to use them
The workshop, which lasts for 2 hours, can be delivered to up to 30 members of staff on site within the educational setting in a staff meeting, twilight training session or inset day.
Contact Glynis Haines, an Accredited Shape Coding Trainer, to arrange a workshop in your setting