As the capabilities and the use of the internet have developed, the views and consumption of online videos have increased at an exponential rate, but how many of you reading this are aware that as well as education and entertainment, online video can be used for speech pathology?
Actually, videos of all kinds are used in speech pathology, including movies on digital platforms or DVDs.
Almost everyone loves a great movie, and for children, this is especially the case, which is why billions of dollars are spent every year by studios like Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, MGM, and Universal in making movies that are specifically targeted at younger audiences.
Mind you, the returns for those studios might give us some inkling as to their motives given that the worldwide wide gross revenue can now exceed 1 billion dollars for a single movie.
So, what have “Frozen”, “The Lion King”, and the latest viral funny video on YouTube got to do with speech pathology, you might be asking.
It is a great question, and the answer is quite simply that movies and online videos have become excellent tools for parents and those who care for children to use in helping those children develop their speech and language skills.
Before we go any further, we are not suggesting that simply placing a child in front of a TV or computer monitor is going to transform their speech and language development.
However, if videos and movies are used correctly they can help progress that development. Read on and we will highlight seven ways that speech pathology experts have determined how this can be done for specific speech and language skills.
#1 – Describing: This is an exercise where you close your eyes and then get the child to describe the image on the screen of a movie or video that has been paused using words related to colours, sizes, shapes, and locations so well, that you can guess what clip they were watching.
#2 – Categories: Watching a movie or video with the child, ask them to tell you what categories a group of items or characters belong to.
For example, Beethoven is a large animal or dog, so ask if they can think of other large animals or dogs.
#3 – Pronouns: The process here is to pause the movie each time a single character appears on the screen.
Start with the child identifying “He”, or “She” characters before moving on to pronouns such as “Hers”, “His”, “They”, “It”, and so on.
#4 – Sequencing: For each clip of a video or movie watched, ask the child to describe to you what happens in sequential order.
For example, “first”, “second”, “next”, and “last”. A variation of this is to ask them to draw each part of the sequence or write them down.
#5 – “WH” Questions: There will be hundreds of opportunities for you to ask the child about a video or movie clip they love.
Ask them questions such as “Where was the princess held captive?”, “Who rescued the puppies”, “What was the wizard wearing?”
#6 – Constructing Sentences: This is a variation on the “describing” example in that you are not trying to guess the scene from the child’s description, but rather, asking the child to use proper sentences to describe the scene such as “The large reindeers were pulling the sleigh”, or “The king was dancing with the queen”
#7 – Comprehend Negatives: Another exercise where you pause a scene, but this time you construct your questions using negative words.
Examples of these include: “Which monster wasn’t breathing fire?”, “Point to the animal that isn’t a horse”, or “Which dog doesn’t like swimming?”.