By Christine Ristuccia, SLP Conversations with hundreds of clinicians that work with all grade levels of articulation students confirm that remediating the /r/ phoneme can be one of the most frustrating of all of the speech-language pathology tasks.Why? Because in traditional articulation intervention, evaluation and treatment procedures for /r/ do not consider all the allophones of /r/.  All of the vocalic /r/s (e.g., ar, er, or) are grouped...

By Christine Ristuccia, M.S. CCC-SLP When qualifying students for /r/ intervention, it is important to begin with a formal assessment, such as the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation.  This test gives limited data about which specific /r/s have been mis-produced.  I recommend utilizing the Entire World of R (EWR) screening tools to specifically identify which /r/ has been mis-produced. Below is an example of a summary of the EWR screening....

By Christine Ristuccia, M.S. CCC-SLP Administration of a speech screening does not take long, yet it is a critical first step in being able to successfully overcome speech disorders with your students. I initially qualify my students for speech services and then re-administer the single word screening approximately every five sessions to assess their progress and current performance levels. Here is how you can administer speech screenings in 10...

I have been blogging about prevocalic/r/ intervention in regards to gliding or w/r substitution  Example:   rain vs. Wayne   In intervention for /r/, I teach students that if a /w/ is produced instead of an/r/ as in Wayne vs. rain that the listeners would most likely get confused and think that they are referring to a boy named ‘Wayne versus rain like the weather.  I worked recently with a first grade student who used the Entire World of...

    I met with a parent this week for a student who has a phonological disorder. It was an annual review meeting and previous goals were  reviewed. The previous goal was written in jargon that only a speech pathologist would know with no baseline results.  This made it difficult for me to measure progress, the parent, teacher  and school administrator did not understand the phonological processes jargon. It made me reflect on...

The school year is nearing-5 weeks left!   I have begun to accelerate my students especially my 5th graders.  I have found the following technique to be quite effective and has lead to generalization of other /r/ allophones that had been misproduced.   I re-administered the Entire World of R Advanced Screening tool.  Afterward, I made two lists: 1).  All correctly produced /r/ words from the 4 /r/ categories\ prevocalic /r/, initial /r/...