Unk Clinic Observation

On March 14, I observed Ashton Watson from 9:00-9:30 am in room A114 at the UNK clinic. The client was preschool-aged. The graduate clinician informed me that the objectives of the day were increasing MLU and using prepositional phrases, such as “on top.” Before the client arrived, the graduate clinician arranged the room by setting up the toys for the client. The clinician chose toys of cars, airplanes, and a track that the cars could “drive” up and down. The clinician set up certain toys to be played with and put the rest under a table to control the environment. The session started with the graduate clinician greeting the client. The client did not respond back. His mother was present at the session in the room. However, she did not

This was used during parallel play. The clinician was trying to elicit “on top.” The clinician set the cars on the very top of the race track. She then said, “The cars are on top!” She then proceeded to ask the client, “Where are all the cars at?” The client did not respond. When the client would race the car up the racetrack, he would say, “Up!” The clinician would respond, “Going up!” The clinician used expansion and responded with slightly longer utterances than the client. The graduate clinician also used language modeling. “Going up”, “Car is on top”, and “Flying over,” were linguistic models that the graduate clinician provided for the client to elicit communication. She also implemented time delay. When the client wasn’t engaged in the session, she blocked his car from going up the race track to wait for a response. At the end of the session, she let the client pick out a sticker to put on his chart for positive reinforcement.
Overall, the client showed problems in receptive and expressive language. He had a hard time staying engaged. He also did not maintain eye contact, or even glance in response to some of the clinician’s questions. He did provide an understanding of “on top”. When asked to place the cars on top, the client did so after a couple verbal prompts. The client produced mostly one to two word utterances and is in stage I. According to the clinician, she wanted him to produce two and a half