Child Observation Paper

Over the past few months, the class has been discussing typical and atypical language development and the assessment and intervention of children with language delay or disorder. In line with this, the students were asked to observe children aged 0-12 years old with language problems for 2 hours. For this requirement, I went to a therapy center situated in Quezon City last November 16, from ten (10) A.M. to twelve (12) N.N. The center has multiple rooms that are used for speech therapy and occupational therapy. During my observation, two speech pathologists and two children with language disorder were sharing one speech therapy room. In the first session, I observed a four year old boy diagnosed with communication disorder. From the data

The speech pathologist targeted these goals through a clinician-directed approach. He utilized drills to elicit the targeted responses (i.e. banana, orange, bread). Through the use of pictures, he asked (i.e. what is this) the child to name the item presented. The task was highly structured and controlled. During training, the words expected were repeated a number of times before testing the child. Before doing the actual testing, the clinician provided the child with two rounds of practice. The four year old boy was able to correctly name five items spontaneously. However, he had difficulty remembering and producing certain items such as cookie. In instances where the child could not label the exhibited food items, the clinician provided minimal prompts and cues (i.e. co- for cookie). At times, the speech pathologist would provide maximal cues through imitations. When given prompts, the child would immediately produce the expected response.
Moreover, after introducing the items to the child, the clinician elicited ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses from the boy by asking if the item the therapist labeled is correct (i.e. is this a banana). The boy was able to utter ‘yes’ without cues; however, he struggled with ‘no’ and would generally need visual cues (i.e. shaking of head/hands) in order to yield the right