Elianna and Writing Goals

After watching conversations in class with Elianna, it’s noticeable that Elianna’s speech needs remediation. From calculating mean length of utterance, her first conversation “Home,” had an MLU of 4.41, which was in comparison to a 4 year old. Elianna’s MLU for “School,” was 2.9, which was equivalent to a 3 year old. Lastly, for “Plant,” Elianna’s MLU was 7, which is equivalent to an individual older than 5. These results indicate that she is very inconsistent. Our results indicated that she does not use all of Brown’s morphemes. Children at her age should be using all of them. She was very repetitive. Elianna was good at contractible copulas, using plurals and nouns, and was talkative. Overall, Elianna needs help with intelligibility, using more vocabulary, and generalizing her verb usage. This activity was informative because it allowed students to revisit different assessments. Mean length of utterance, and assessments for pragmatics, semantic and syntax were popular. The goals for Elianna were easy to make because she had a lot of inconsistencies within the conversations. Our goals consisted of better eye contact, use of Brown’s morphemes, and correct responses to –wh questions regarding the purpose of the activity.
This activity tied in nicely with the presentation by Sam and Jackie. This activity allowed the class to develop appropriate goals for Ben. I liked the addition of materials to add to the goals. One aspect of the activity that Dr. Vogler-Elias brought up, were other considerations for answering questions when devising an activity. For answering questions, Ben answers questions correctly in a quiet environment. This is important to think about when devising a lesson plan and planning the activities. Because Ben prefers quiet environments, maybe the lesson can start in a quiet room with just him and the clinician. From there, the clinician can bring in another person, and keep doing this as he gets more comfortable. The clinician may need to give an explanation to Ben that there will be more than one person in a classroom, and that all of the children answer questions. This may decrease the fear or anxiety he may have if this is the cause for his short answers. Also, during the activity, I liked Emily’s idea for the white tabs as a way to gather data during the session. This seems like a good way to take data because it keeps the child from getting distracted and it’s easy and quick.