Jennifer Taps Richard is a speech-language pathologist in San Diego Unified School District. She provides classroom and small group services to children grades UTK-5. Additionally, Jennifer teaches graduate students at San Diego State University and owns SLPath, promoting best practices in speech sound disorder intervention through online resources and intensive workshops.
A significant body of research has demonstrated that teaching complex clusters induces system-wide learning for both treated and untreated singletons and clusters, thus increasing overall intelligibility for children with phonological disorders. Thus, target selection is the key to efficient phonological intervention. Teaching complex clusters may constitute a substantial (and intimidating) paradigm shift for practitioners. This session will feature performance-based assessment tasks, an overview of complexity principles, and a range of multisensory techniques and activities for teaching complex two-element (e.g., /fl-/) and three-element clusters (e.g., /sk?-/). In San Diego Unified School District, speech-language pathologists have utilized these
methods to teach complex clusters to children with phonological disorders only as well as children who present with concomitant language, fluency, or intellectual impairments, leading to more efficient outcomes.
After completing this 3-hour training participants will be able to:
1. Fully characterize a child’s sound system following a thorough assessment and analysis.
2. Select the most effective targets that will maximize the individual's intervention potential.
3. Describe a variety of multisensory cues and creative coarticulation strategies to teach complex clusters.
March 14, 2025 - 12:00 to 3:00 pm via Zoom - 3 SCECHs available