Hi friend!
Here's an overview of literacy-based therapy, or literature-based intervention, and why it is a great framework to use in your therapy sessions!
Literacy-based therapy is a contextualized framework where intervention activities are organized around a book or story.
The goal of literacy-based therapy is to improve language skills that support students’ ability to participate in the general education classroom in both oral and print modalities.
As a school-based SLP, the goal of therapy is to help students access the classroom and support educational (e.g. social, emotional, academic, vocational) success. What better way to accomplish this than with a framework that aims to do just that?!
This approach is a great way to:
Promote language development in children with language impairments
Target a variety of language skills (e.g. semantic, syntactic, narrative, pragmatic)
Align your therapy with common core standards
Make your therapy functional and relevant to the classroom
Save time with planning therapy
How It Works
With literacy-based therapy, therapy is planned around a book or story. Books can be aligned to a chosen them. If you'd like to read more about book selection, read this post.
Once you have a book, you'll follow a five-part framework that builds your students language skills through a variety of discussions and activities.
Literacy-based framework
The literacy-based therapy framework has five parts:
1️⃣ Pre-reading knowledge activation - seeing what a student knows about the theme/topic and engaging in activities and discussions to activate knowledge, fill in gaps, and pre-teach concepts that will support story comprehension
2️⃣ Shared storybook reading - reading the story aloud to students in an interactive and engaging way using prompts, pointing to pictures, and props/visuals
3️⃣ Post-story comprehension discussion - asking yes/no and wh questions about the story events, story grammar, etc. to ensure student comprehension (not testing the student)
4️⃣ Targeted activities - engaging a variety of activities to target language skills (e.g. semantic, syntactic, narrative) in the context of the story/text
5️⃣ Creating a parallel story - generating a narrative using the story/text as a guide
Hope this introduction was helpful! Have a great week! 🩵
Sources:
Paul, R., & Norbury, C. (2012). Language Disorders from Infancy Through Adolescence (Fourth ed.). Elsevier.
Ukrainetz, T. A. (2006). Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding Prek-12 Literacy Achievement (1st ed.). Pro Ed.