Children and Speech Therapy

Although we may have in our heads the image of a child in a doctor's office or some other professional surrounding, children in need of speech therapy may receive that therapy in any number of different environments. Indeed, most children who are receiving speech therapy now receive that therapy in school and at home as the concept of "service delivery" has become validated by research as well as by the demands of our complex modern lives. Rather than removing children from their regular environments of home and school and providing therapy in an environment that is unfamiliar and even potentially somewhat frightening to a child, much of speech therapy today is "delivered" to the child in his or her ordinary classroom or at home.

It should be noted that the venue in which children receive speech therapy varies by the level of therapy needed. While in general professionals prefer whenever possible to provide speech therapy to students in the general-education classroom, sometimes this is not practical and children have to be removed from the general education classroom (although usually for only part of the

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e family in an attempt to create a total environment that will allow the child either to acquire or to improve his or her language skills (Fay etal, 1993). This model of speech therapy tends to be especially effective when family members believe that in-school therapy may stigmatize the child. "Classroom-based" therapy involves a speech pathologist giving services directly to a child in his or her regular classroom as well as in other "natural environments" such as the home. This model includes special-education as well as general-education teachers in a team-teaching approach (Whipple, 1987). In a "pullout" model, a speech pathologist along with (usually) pathology aides work with general-education teachers to provide services to individual students or (more commonly) to small groups of children. Usually the speech pathologist and his or her aides provide therapy in a specialized speech/language resource room. Special-education teachers and speech therapists (who are employed by school districts and who are trained as educators as well as therapists) usually work with the children in such a model (www.ahsa.org). In a "self-contained model" of speech therapy, a child who needs speech therapy receives both therapy and education
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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