Responding to oral directions

This is an instructional program for speech-language pathologists, special educators, elementary level teachers, and parents to use with children who can improve their critical listening skills. Many children seem to act as passive listeners when presented with listening challenges that result in comprehension breakdowns. Instead of asserting themselves in an effort to repair such breakdowns to lead to successful comprehension, naive or untrained children often choose to remain silent and confused or clueless rather than communicating their problem to the speaker and their need for repetition or clarification. This phenomenon is a major barrier to learning in the classroom and also has a negative impact on effective interpersonal communication. This flexible and fun program consists of various units and activities that teach survival strategies to children that they can easily use to increase their listening comprehension. Lessons are brief and scripted and require little to no preparation time for trainers. An accompanying audio CD is included that contains a recorded pre-/post-test that can be optionally given to measure progress. It also contains all stimulus items for the only unit in the program that is best administered via the soundtrack rather than by the trainer due to the particular content of that unit which requires special audio manipulations of the spoken messages to train the listener in how to respond to distorted audio information. It is believed that all children especially in grades 1-5 and older persons with special listening challenges would benefit from this program! Robert A. Mancuso,CCC-SLP, Author