Language and the ability to share thoughts is a basic skill. Children who have a difficult time with language organization skills miss many opportunities for development and friendships.
Language serves many purposes. We use language to share our needs, our wants, our feelings, and our thoughts. We use language to become a part of our shared community and socially interact with others. Language skills help build strong social connections and friendships as well as allow us to absorb information from teachers and the world around us.
Language Development
Most people learn language organically as they develop from an infant to a toddler and beyond into adulthood. As children learn the meaning of words and gain the ability to speak in sentences they begin to understand how to communicate. The more language a child accumulates the more cognitive skills they need to sift through their fund of vocabulary to find the right word to express themself. The structure of sentences and the speed of processing language start to play an important role as children grow in their language skills.
Language Organization
There is a growing population of students who are struggling with the organizational component of language. Many of these students have acquired basic vocabulary and language skills but they get overwhelmed when they are required to organize their thoughts to effectively communicate their idea to others. I have begun to call this a “Language Organization Deficit.”
Many of the students who experience this difficulty have a background history of dyslexia, ADHD or language processing difficulty. Some students with Language Organization issues experience word-finding issues, but more commonly they have trouble quickly and clearly conveying information. They may talk around an idea without ever stating what they are trying to communicate. Students with Language Organization issues can have trouble keeping up with the pace of the conversation, leading to difficulty in social situations. They also struggle with organizing their ideas to write a paper.
Students with a Language Organization weakness need to build both their language skills and their executive functioning skills.
- Strengthening the phonological loop with rapid naming exercises can help speed up the word finding component of language.
- Teaching the Executive Functioning skills of Stop, Think, Plan, Do can allow the student to slow down to organize ideas.
- Building a strong vocabulary base, learning antonyms and synonyms, will increase the choices a student has to express his ideas.
- Learning to breakdown ideas into parts and then organize them can help a student start a task without feeling overwhelmed.
- Building flexible thinking skills can help a child with language organization issues find new
Think, Talk, Laugh Workbook for Verbal Fluency and Language Organization Skills
The goal of Think, Talk, Laugh!: Increase Verbal Processing Speed and Language Organization Skills is to help students think and organize information quickly so they can join in the conversations around them and laugh at jokes along with their peers. The activites in Think, Talk, Laugh Workbook are divided into 4 sections:
Organization of Thoughts
The activities in this section will help students make associations between words. Students will learn to consider how words can be viewed in different ways allowing the word to be used in multiple ways.
Word Retrieval
Word retrieval, or word finding, refers to the ability to efficiently find and say the word you want. Students who have difficulty in this area know the idea they want to convey but struggle to find the words to share the idea. There are 5 activities in this section.
Rapid naming
Practicing quickly naming overlearned words/concepts like letters, words, numbers, shapes and pictures helps students drill quick processing.
Rapid retrieval
To increase efficiency with Retrieval, students will now practice the activities from the Organization of Thoughts and Language and Word Retrieval sections with an added timed element.
