Positivity

By a long tradition in education, positive experiences are more motivating than negative ones. Children learn better by the sensation of success than the sensation of failure. By focusing on success rather than failure, it is possible to proceed from one positive experience to another. This is the rationale of what I describe here as Possible Words Therapy  –  trying to

• Make the actuality of the intervention as far as possible invisible;
• Mirror the natural process of learning to talk;
• Sharpen the focus on particular points of need;
• Essentially be more like a guide than a teacher, following an idea from Lada Aidarova (1982);
• Make therapy fun.

So I keep most of the toys in my clinic in clear plastic bags hanging from strings along one wall. A castle and a doll’s house, as much fun for boys as girls, are in prominent positions. There is a riddle in the design of the house which so far only one person has solved.

Being positive

By my approach, the first and most important thing is to listen very carefully to the child. Here parents can make a critical contribution.

In my treatment, I mostly try to hide the fact that I am trying to help a child to say something which he or she has not said before. Some small children are well aware of the fact that they need help with their speech. But to my way of thinking there no advantage in making this more evident than it already is. So unless a child actually asks for explicit feedback (and some children do), I prefer just to congratulate them for whatever they say, no matter whether this is right or wrong. If they don’t say things quite right I proceed on the basis that I should have adjusted the task to make sure that the child’s effort was successful. Success is more motivating than failure – and more fun.

The learning is from the structuring of the tasks. (See Nunes, 2002, 2006, 2023).

The natural process of speech and language development is obviously both subtle and unconscious, normally by small steps over nine or so years. A view on the first seven steps is outlined in the Proposal here. The steps are internally complex, a bit like a pitch in mountain climbing with a series of dynamic moves each requiring the climber to swing or jump. Only the steps in learning to talk are a great deal more complex than any physical action. Aspects of these steps can happen overnight.