I had the opportunity to speak at last year’s Social Thinking Provider’s conferences in San Francisco and Philadelphia on clinical methods to improve writing skills. Being invited by Michelle Garcia Winner was truly a career highlight.
Here’s a picture from a dinner party for presenters hosted by Michelle in her northern California home (I’m still “star” struck):
I feel that SLP’s have a unique skill set that should be part writing remediation. My personal passion for writing has fueled my interest in understanding why our students are having so much difficulty and how therapists and educators can help them. To gain insight, here’s a quick task:
write a sentence comparing a table and a desk
using the word “however”
When you finish, think about the skills and/or neurofunctions you recruited while writing. Here’s a list:
1. Working Memory (WM): Research pioneers Baddeley & Hitch (1974) described WM as a limited capacity, short-term storage system. The interesting aspect of WM is that simultaneous processing is involved. WM is responsible for holding onto concepts and language while performing a task. This cognitive function is a component of executive functioning and critical to writing skills.
2. Attention: Many of our students struggle with attentional issues. In addition to difficulties with internal and external distractions, blocking out irrelevant information is a challenge.
3. Executive Function: An umbrella for many skills, importantly planning & organization. Our students usually just sit and write, constructing loosely related narratives. They usually do not know how to plan, revise and organize their content.
4. Language Processing: Phonological processing, semantics, morphology, syntax and pragmatics (more on this in a future post) all come into play when writing.
5. Spelling: A base skills related to phonological processing, morphology, orthographics and memory.
6. Grammar: Another base skill rooted in the same foundations as spelling.
7. Graphomotor Function: Think about how many of our students struggle with grasping a pencil and forming letters.
Writing is the only literacy-based task that requires the recruitment of so many cognitive functions at the same time. Add to the mix that research utilizing brain imaging has shown that the brains of our students on the spectrum have reduced cortical communication. This behaves like a road block in the processing highway–especially problematic when simultaneous processing is involved.
Since writing is so complex, students expend a lot of energy on base skills and lose the context (and joy!) of writing. How many of your students continually ask how to spell a word and erase, erase, erase!
What do you think is an SLPs role in writing remediation? To SLPs, teachers and parents: how do you address writing skills?
