As you are a parent attending the Champion Centre with your child, you are probably concerned with how your child comes to understand the language (or languages) around them, how they become able to use the language(s) and how clearly they are able to pronounce their words. These are all legitimate concerns. Answers to these concerns are, however, all connected, and this statement is designed to help you understand how we see speech and language therapy at the Champion Centre, and how we work with parents to help them help their children in the most appropriate way.

The big picture is that there is only one way to become a speaker of any language: through

meaningful exchanges with meaningful
people on meaningful topics over
an extended period of time.

If we unpack this statement a little, we can see that it means that working on language and speech cannot be isolated from meaningful activities; that it needs to include you (the most meaningful people in your child’s life), and that it doesn’t happen quickly. Speech and language is not like learning to roll a ball or ride a bike; something that can be practiced as an isolated skill. It is much more like learning to play a duet or dance a waltz: while solo practice is useful, it does not become a duet or a dance until you do it with others. You are your child’s greatest assets; you are their most effective communication partners (not the speech language therapists). You are the ones who give them the incentive, the desire and the motivation to reach out and communicate. It is you who attach meaning to their efforts, affirm them for their attempts, and can invest in their development every minute of every day.

At the Champion Centre we recognise various broad stages of speech and language development supported by a wide range of research. In the baby clinics, the focus is on comprehension of language, on learning the give-and-take of meaningful interaction with another, learning to share the world with another, and beginning to speak. To support this stage, our speech and language therapists monitor the development of your child’s language carefully; suggest and demonstrate activities to increase the interactive value of your time with your child; and provide the opportunity for using some signs and gestures as a way of expressing what cannot yet be said. These goals are supported by the other therapists in the team as they, too, support communication and interaction in their work with your child.

In the middle years clinic, the programme changes somewhat, although it remains based on the same, research-supported beliefs. Now that you as parents are skilled at communicating with your child, and have as a result, cemented a healthy relationship with them, we can put the focus more directly on the language your child needs as they grow up. Now it is time to encourage specific language for aspects of the world (spatial relationships, colours, numbers, etc.) and to provide help designing and doing activities that will encourage this. Again this is done against a background of careful monitoring of your child’s language development, and tailoring suggestions and demonstrations of activities to just above their actual level of development so as to stretch them without moving too fast. Vygotsky has called this way of doing things as working within the ‘zone of proximal development’: helping a child do today what they will be able to do alone tomorrow. Get too far ahead of the child and it ceases to make sense; make it too easy, and they will not develop to the next stage. Getting this right takes a lot of talking, a lot of observing, and a lot of attention. That’s why we need to talk to you so much! In the middle years clinic, other therapists are also part of the language programme: the music therapist, the computer therapist, the physiotherapist and the early intervention teacher. All these therapists work with the Speech language therapist to make the language programme coherent and a proper foundation for success.

Finally, in the transition clinic, we work on the language of school. Here again, multiple therapists deliver the programme. The SLT provides to the team information about the child’s stage and needs in language, suggests activities to therapists that will be appropriate, and works with you to support your language work with your child. Advanced skills of story-telling, of providing “news” in school, of describing a picture, and of playing with language all form part of the programme. So, when your children are singing they are developing language; when they are counting their way upstairs they are using language; when they are telling you about their day, looking at books, or choosing items on a computer programme, they are developing language.

Underlying the entire Champion Centre language programme are the research supported beliefs that:

1.	Comprehension precedes production; so comprehension of language, at every stage, must come before expecting a child to use what they know in speech.
2.	Speech serves language, not the other way round. While some specific games and activities can be developed to help a child with specific sounds, most speech development happens in the act of using language for meaning.
3.	Language serves communication, rather than being an end in itself. Some language work such as rhymes and songs or language play can be seen by an adult as separate language work, but children will see it as communication. Just as well, because if they get wise, they’ll stop cooperating!
4.	Communication serves relationships. Language, important as it is to daily living, is still in the service of relationships, and those relationships must come first and foremost. Accepting and loving your child for who they are is the basis of a healthy relationship and from there, language development can grow.

Learning language may not be easy for your child, but both research and experience teach us that carefully following the natural progression of language development, and helping our children reach each milestone in order is by far the best way to achieve success. We know about language development; you know your child. Together we form a powerful partnership!

_ Dr. Patricia Champion, Centre Founder, did ground-breaking research into the development of children with disabilities; Dr. Christine Rietveld, past ESW coordinator, completed doctoral research into the transition to school for children with disabilities, and Dr. Susan Foster-Cohen, current Centre Director is the author of two books on language development: The Communicative Competence of Young Children, Longman 1990, and An Introduction to Child Language Development, Pearson Education, 1999. Other accessible research reading about language development can be found can be found in Pathways to Language by Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Smith (Harvard University Press, 2001) and in From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development published by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine in 2000.