Clue into Your Cues: Verbal Cues

This month’s theme is talking about cues and prompts.  How often are you thinking about the cues that you are giving?  I think it is such a second nature type of thing, that I often forget that I am doing it.  Cues are part of our skilled service.  It’s not the only thing we use to work with our students, We also use teaching strategies such as focused stimulation, restating answers, scaffolding, shaping etc. I use these to develop language-but I’m not usually using them to try to elicit a response from my client or student.   Today I am going to be talking about Verbal cues.   For the sake of a good rhyme, I’m not going to differentiate between a cue and a prompt. I will be using these terms interchangeably.

What is the most common verbal prompt?  I’m just guessing-but I think it is modeling.  Modeling is providing a demonstration for the child of what needs to be done.  Modeling providing a demonstration for the child of what needs to be done. Modeling works best for children who are able to imitate and who are able to visually attend to other’s actions.   I use modeling when I am training young language, working in articulation therapy or when teaching sentence structures.  I model correct social behaviors or take a few minutes at the beginning of a session to model how to share a quick story with friends.  We can teach our students  to model their peers as a strategy for social skills.  We model others behaviors when we watch what others are doing as cues for what we should do (ex. watching what fork people use at a fancy restaurant.)  We can vary our models by providing a full or partial model.

I’m going to review some of the different verbal prompts and give an example of a cue that I might use to elicit the correct response for several scenarios.  One of the things I think is interesting with this is how it becomes clear that some prompts or cues are probably more effective to work on specific skills than others.

• Articulation:  Saying an initial /b/ sound
• Syntax:  Using regular past tense -ed
• AAC:  Have a student tell you to “turn on” radio to listen to music.
• Pragmatic language: Greet another student
• Receptive language: Identify objects by function
• Vocabulary: Define a vocabulary word by category and function.

Direct Verbal Prompts:  We use these prompts when we want to tell the child what they need to do to perform a task.

• Articulation:  “Put your lips together and say “bah.”
• Syntax: “When something happens in the past tense we say -ed.  Tell me I walked.”
• AAC: “Tell me ‘Turn on’.”
• Pragmatic language:  “Say ‘Hi” to Johnny when he sits down.”
• Receptive language:  (What do you sit on?)  “Touch the picture of the chair.”
• Vocabulary:  “Tell me what chair means by saying the category and what you do with it.

Indirect Verbal Prompts:  We use these when we want to give our client a verbal reminder of what to do next-but they don’t need to be told exactly what to do.

• Articulation:  “Do you remember what you need to do to make your sound?”
• Syntax: “I think that happened yesterday.  How would you let me know if happened yesterday?”
• AAC: “Is there something you needed me to do?”
• Pragmatic language:  “I see Johnny walked in, is there something we should do when we see people?”
• Receptive language: “Can you find the one I am talking about?”  This was a hard one-this is not a great example.
• Vocabulary: “How could you describe something so an alien would know what it was?”

Inflectional Verbal Prompts:  Emphasizing a particular word in a sentence.  (If a child is having difficulty producing pronouns he/she, the then therapist would emphasize HE in the sentence.  (Ex. HE is walking and the child is able to imitate correctly.  It’s similar to using recasting but I would call it a prompt if you expect the child to respond.

• Articulation:  Say, “I got on a BOAT” (over exaggerating the plosive /b/)
• Syntax: “”Yesterday, I walkED.”
• AAC: “Before I can listen to the radio I need to TURN it ON.”
• Pragmatic language:  “I hope you say HI to Johnny.”
• Receptive language: A CHAIR is something you sit on.
• Vocabulary:  A chair is a piece of FURNITURE that you can SIT on.

Phonemic Prompts:  When you provide part of the target word or answer.  (Ex. Therapist asks “what do you use to brush your teeth (then provides a partial word (too…)  Can fade cue by just producing initial /t/ or putting your tongue behind your teeth to indicate the /t/ phoneme to the child.

• Articulation:  What vehicle goes on water (bo…)   I feel like I don’t use this prompt often in articulation.  I might use it to give the beginning part of a word-especially if I was targeting a sound in the final position.
• Syntax: “Remember I wa…”  I would be more likely to use a CLOZE procedure than a phonemic prompt in this particular example.  There may be other syntactic forms (for example cuing for the correct conjunction or pronoun) where I would be more likely to use a phonemic prompt.
• AAC: “You can say, “Tuh”
• Pragmatic language:  “Tell Johnny Hhh__”  It’s hard to come up with a phonemic prompt for HI since it is so short.  I would be more likely to use that if cuing for asking questions or commenting. 
• Receptive language:  “What is something you sit on?  Can you find the Cha….” Although you could use this prompt with a receptive task,  I feel like it would be more effective to use a visual or gestural prompt.  I tend to use phonemic prompts to cue a verbal response.
• Vocabulary:  “A chair is a piece of Furn_______ that you can sssss_______ on.”

I don’t know that these would qualify as verbal prompts-but I often use questioning techniques to gain a response such as providing choices or compare contrast questions to gain responses-especially with vocabulary items.

How about you?  What verbal cues to you use with your students or clients?  I’d love to hear your thoughts below.