Exciting news! We have 3 ASHA approved online courses for CEU credit. Learn more about our courses and how to master our 10 step process to vocalic /r/ assessment and remediation. http://www.sayitright.org/onlinecourses.html

There are actually 32 unique /r/ allohones, 42 acutally if you count medial /r/ blends as in words such as apricot. Here is the breakdown of the 32 unique /r/ allophones or sounds: 19 vocalic /r/’s where the vowel is before the /r/ as in words such as Archie, barn and father 11 initial /r/ blends a consonant occurs before the /r/ sound as in words such as bread, print prevocalic /r/ words have /r/ at the beginning of the word as in...

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...