The death of author and illustrator Raymond Briggs last Wednesday is a sad day for children’s literature. A bright light has gone out.
The best help that I can give you and your child is by applying the science of speech and language, known as linguistics. Why does your child have the problem which he or she does? And how does this fit into the problems which children have more generally?
From my experience, research, and reading of the literature, I believe that the learner’s task, looked at generally, is not about words and sentences, but POSSIBLE words and sentences. So the clinical task is one of helping children discover how to build words and sentences as and when they want and enjoy story-telling and conversation.
While the role of the tongue and the lips in speech is obvious, one commonly neglected aspect of speech and language, there is also what is known as the rhythm or ‘prosody’, as in holly and hello, affecting every word in the language.