Resources:
Speech and Language Development

For many children speech and language skills are acquired easily and quickly. However, some children face a constant struggle to communicate their thoughts and ideas with others. This can be a part of normal development or can be a symptom of more serious speech and language disorders.

There are many ways of encouraging children to improve the skills that they have whilst still having fun. Using technology is just one of these ways.

Sound Beginnings is a voice reactive software program aimed at encouraging early communication skills. It is completely configurable, which enables you to set options for individual users and allows users to progress through levels of difficulty at their own pace. Sound Beginnings can be used to encourage vocalisation, length of sounds and sentences and language development in a fun and easy to use way - right from first sounds to words and sentences.

Titles such as At the Doctors and At the Café encourage children in the important language areas of role-play and social skills, as well as promoting vocabulary and concept learning. In addition, SEMERC have produced Emotional Literacy Assessment and Intervention 7-11 CD-ROM, Think About!1 and Phoneme Factory Sound Sorter, to help support literacy and communication skills.

The Leaps and Bounds series contains non-text activities that can be used to encourage concepts and language development for younger users.

There is also a range of hardware that can be used to support speech and language difficulties:

The Big Mack is a device that records up to 20 seconds of sound that is replayed with a simple touch of the switch. It allows children to make choices, join in literacy and numeracy activities or listen to their own voice.

The Go Talk range is a series of lightweight easy-to-use communication devices that store up to 36 programmable messages. They are particularly suitable for teachers or therapists who are assessing the use of communication aids for individual children, without incurring the expense of some of the more sophisticated communication aids. They are ideally used with symbol support in the form of Boardmaker or Writing with Symbols 2000, or if you require photographic pictures look at Picture this ProV3, or Flash Pro.

Useful websites for this group include

• The Royal college of Speech and Language Therapists
• BECTA (Information sheets for Supporting Speech and Language Development using ICT go the home page and type in Speech and Language Development in the search box).