Real Changes in Spoken Language With Sketch and Speak - Ep. 72
This episode is an interview with Dr. Teresa Ukrainetz, who specializes in school-age language intervention.
Her current research centers on how to help students with language impairments gain control of the words and ideas of informational text, and her brilliantly simply method for this intervention is called Sketch and Speak.
Here is a snippet from the interview:
“I really wanted to look at expository. I felt like we were largely at sea trying to figure out how to support learning of informational text and expository discourse, and it's extra hard compared to narrative in that it's based on new learning. . . Kids are not only learning how to tell a story or how to understand a story with expository, they're learning chemistry and biology and history, and so they've got a lot of new content they're handling.”
Research has shown just how valuable Sketch and Speak is for improving spoken language, something SLPs realize as soon as they start using it.
Click on the links below for the basic procedure and to see a clinical example. Visit The Speech Umbrella’s free resource library for a two column note form, which is used in Sketch and Speak.
--- Useful Links ---
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Teresa-Ukrainetz-2 ,
https://www.thespeechumbrella.com/ukrainetz Basic Procedures Download
https://www.thespeechumbrella.com/free Resource Library
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Denise: Welcome to the Speech Umbrella, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I'm Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 plus years. I'm closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and along the way I've worked long and hard to become a better therapist. Join me as we explore the many topics that fall under our umbrellas as SLPs. I want to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness.
Hello everyone. You're listening to episode 72 of the Speech Umbrella. Today, you're in for a treat because my guest is going to share a technique that is so simple, so effective, and so between the eyeballs clinically significant that you'll want to start using it yesterday.
By between the eyeballs clinically significant. I mean, the research results are not dependent on subtle findings. They are real and obvious. My guess is Dr. Teresa Ukrainetz and she's going to tell us about a technique called Sketch and Speak. After I heard Dr. Ukrainetz speak about Sketch and Speak at my state convention this year, I started using it. It's been a game changer for me and it can be for you two. That's why I'm calling this episode Real Changes in Spoken Language with Sketch and Speak. Before I introduce Dr. Ukrainetz, there's some housekeeping themes to mention. This was an online interview and I had some technical difficulties. We lost our connection just before I closed the interview, and that's why you'll hear it come to an abrupt end.
Rather than working out the tech issues just to say goodbye, Teresa and I decided to leave it as it is. Now, let me introduce Dr. Ukrainetz. Teresa Ukrainetz, PhD, SLP from Canada, an ASHA fellow, is a professor and assistant department head in the Department of Communicative Disorders and deaf education at Utah State University. Her research and scholarship pertain to the intersection between skill and context in school age language intervention.
She seeks effective practical interventions that tap the distinctive expertise of educational speech language pathologists. Dr. Ukrainetz is has investigated standardized testing, dynamic assessment, phonemic awareness intervention, narrative intervention, and SLP practices in schools. She has two books on school age language intervention, and her work has appeared in many research journals including language, speech, and hearing services in the schools and Journal of Speech Language and Hearing research.
Dr. Ukrainetz's current research investigates how to help students with language and learning difficulties gain control of the words and ideas of expository discourse and informational text. Gaining control of words and ideas, what a concise and perfect description for what so many of our clients need.
Without any further ado, let's talk to Teresa. Welcome Teresa, and thank you so much for being on the Speech Umbrella. I know that SLPs can benefit tremendously from your knowledge. So let's dive into this method called Sketch and Speak. How did you develop Sketch and Speak?
Teresa: I have a, a long history going back, a long, long, um, ways looking at, uh, narrative intervention, how to support children's storytelling. And back when I was a clinician in the late eighties in the schools, I was looking for a way to support my children in telling stories rather than using isolated words or sentences and in my efforts to look for something to help represent ideas for them. I realized that I used to use quick sketches myself so that I would plan out stories for them that I would use in therapy the next day with them.
And it turned out that what I call pictography or picture writing, these little pictos were really simple, accessible tools for children. She was across the grades I used, I was in an elementary school which went up to grade seven. So from grade two to seven, the children quickly learned how to use the pictographic sketching, and I would line it up with, uh, make a simple pictographic sketch for the first event, then this, then that, then this, and we could chart it out with multiple attempts to solve problems.
We tried this, it didn't work. We tried that. It didn't work. And the children could go back and revise the stories. It wasn't very good for individual words, but for the general event sequence, it worked very well with younger children, kindergartners, first graders, and even preschoolers. What I found was it was more that I was using the pictographic sketching to support their ideas, but I'd have to strictly control them because when they're drawing it takes up All their cognitive space to sketch something and they can't think about a story.
So if you go and look at some of my chapters and articles from early on in narrative intervention, and I talk about how you could use it for very young children in a controlled way, and then once you get into the elementary grades, you just show it to them, they figure it out in a moment, and we get two refrains. One is quick and easy. So it's not art drawings. If you see the girls starting to put eyelashes on the eyes, that's an art drawing and we don't give them colors. It's really the idea that we're using pictographic sketches as a tool, a notation tool. And so we do quick and easy, and we do just enough to remember, and those are our two mantras, quick and easy, just enough to remember.
So I used to use that as a clinician, then when I started in my doctoral program, I ended up looking at pictographic sketching or pictography in my dissertation for using it to help children storytelling and, and then when I became a professor at the University of Wyoming, then we did a group experimental study where I worked with second and third graders looking at how it benefited children better than art drawing or writing to help plan their narratives, telling your stories. I moved away from narrative intervention after that, I went into some other areas. When I look back into an active research program, after I stepped down from being department head in two thousand and, oh goodness. I guess that was uh, 2015 about. Yeah. By then I was very interested in expository information.
It seemed to me like we had a good handle on narrative intervention by then with Doug Peterson's Story Champs, and with Ron & Sandy Gillam's skill programs and other ways of doing narrative intervention. I felt like as speech paths we had a pretty good control on narrative intervention. And so I wanted to go back in, but I really wanted to look at expository. I felt like we were largely at sea trying to figure out how to support learning of informational text and expository discourse. And it's extra hard compared to narrative in that it's based on new learning so much, so that the kids are not only learning how to tell a story or how to understand a story.
With expository, they're learning chemistry and biology and history, and so they've got a lot of new content they're handling. Plus, there isn't that overall structure to expository discourse like there is to narratives. It just can be set up in so many different ways. And so all of that can add to the challenge of working with kids and I'll go back and forth between the terms informational text or expository discourse. I think of discourse as talking more and text is written, but really you can use the two terms interchangeably.
So my book chapter's on expository about using treatment units, thematic units. So we're going to explore butterflies. We're gonna learn all about butterflies. We'll start with expository texts on butterflies. We're gonna end up creating a little presentation or a project or a flyer or something on butterflies, and along the way, we're gonna work on all these component skills within our treatment units in this whole part framework. I had a bigger sense of how you should do expository intervention, but when I was doing research, I really wanted to hone in on a few features that I could control and look at in more detail, in a more controlled manner.
And so when I talked to my wonderful clinical collaborator, Kathy Ross, about where could I go for expository intervention, she said, Well, why not go back to your pictography ? And I said, Well, no, that's for narratives. It's for sequential time ordered events, little stick figures that are running and look sad and happy. And I said oh, it's not gonna work for expository. It's too abstract. And she said oh, don't worry about it, kids can scribble the darnest things and it can help them remember and you know how uncomfortable they are with it. Okay, let's see what I can do. I'll go back, pull up my pictography. But what I learned with Kathy and I experimenting with this is we basically took our pictography notes and then I said, Well, if we're using the informational texts, we should really return also to conventional note taking.
So cuz you can't always use pictography, and so if we're teaching the children to use it as a strategy themselves in subject areas, then let's use conventional note taking and pictography. We also learned as we played with it, we needed to impose a formal oral structure around it, because we tend to, with the upper grades, forget about talking. We get so focused on reading comprehension and written essays, or just give a summary. What's the main idea? What's a quick summary of this? But we forget about our skill, our expertise in helping craft a child's oral language. And so what we added was a very systematic structure, which became Sketch and Speak, which is the essence is basically you sketch a quick note in words or pictures and you say a whole sentence and then you say the sentence again. Done. There, I've just summarized the whole treatment.
Denise: And when we talked earlier as we were setting up this podcast, I really loved how you said you're teaching them to talk like a scientist, because with expository they have to be exact and they don't have to be quite as exact with their narratives. They might switch in a different word for the emotion that works just as well. But exactness is what a lot of my kids are learning as they do sketch and Speak.
Teresa: And yeah, so as you say, Denise, in fact we titled one of our publications Speaking like a Scientist because we would talk to the kids that way. When I used pictography with narratives, it was about children generating their own narratives. When I'm doing expository, what we're doing is we are reading informational texts and I'm reading the text aloud. I'm not doing a reading lesson. I do not wanna get bogged down in children's decoding. And so I'm reading aloud an article to a child and we are stopping to identify important or interesting ideas.
And again, I am not teaching main idea plus three details, create a well formed summary. That's all great, but that's not what I'm focused on at this point. I'm just saying, let's read this article. You're gonna be doing a presentation on it later. What's an important or interesting idea in the first paragraph that you'd like to remember?
And so then we identify the idea and then the student makes a quick and easy, just enough to remember, we start with pictographic sketch, quick and easy, just enough to remember pictography note or picto, as the kids call them, and then I say, tell me a sentence about your picto. And so then the student says his full sentence about the picto and we go back and check the article and make sure that his information was accurate.
And that's, as you say, Denise, when we're using informational articles I am not looking at this point for the child to use his background information, to add some interesting quirk to this. I want his information to accurately represent what was in the article, and his sentence should be understandable with understandable grammar, and if it isn't there, then I'll revise it a little for him. I'll help him fix his sentence, and then I'll say okay, now this is your sentence. Say it. And then he says it. Okay, let's say it again. We wanna get that sentence that's accurate and well formed into his mind.
Denise: And I have found, especially if we're doing history, sometimes I'll have to say okay, you found that fact interesting, but it won't make sense to your audience unless you also include this fact, because history is a little bit of a story. You've got a sequence, and I've had some of the children say, Oh, I think this part's interesting. I'm like that is interesting, but it's not the whole story. So when you get history, you get a little bit of narrative too. It's very interesting.
Teresa: Right. So what I'm working on, and this is where I wanna keep saying with my Sketch and Speak investigations, I am really just looking at the core actions of taking a note about an idea from the text and making a full sentence about it. And then taking another idea, making a note in a full sentence, rehearsing each one in between. And when we're taking our notes, we're putting them on these two column note formats so that we are organizing it by categories, so we're reorganizing the knowledge a little into this taxonomic reorganization for more ownership of the information.
What you are talking about, Denise, I would say is we're moving it to a higher level then, and I wouldn't focus on that while I am teaching the skills of not it simply in words or pictures, say it fully and say it again while I'm teaching that I'm really focused on just getting an accurate oral report of the information and we're doing it sentence by sentence.
Denise: So, um, just in case people are not familiar with the two column note form, can you just describe really quick what Sketch and Speak looks like?
Teresa: Okay, so that isn't Sketch and Speak, it's just the two column note form, and we don't have to use it. We can use a blank piece of paper. We can use the three by three square sheet that has nothing labeled on it, you just put nine pictos for nine ideas in it. What we have used mostly is this two column note form where we have a topic at the top of the page, on the left we've got about five categories, and on the right we've got blank spaces for the notes. And the labeled categories, we change them every time we're doing a different topic area, so we have five categories that fit athletes. We have five categories that fit animals, notable athletes, historical nations, interesting objects, and each one of those, we think of five different categories, and we actually change the category labels so that they get flexibility and vocabulary development about categories, and we change the labels a bit in there.
So that's all the note form is, and it's something that you could adjust for your own purposes. The main idea is that we've got a blank space to put your idea in its pictographic note and that we're reorganizing the information from the source article. We aren't just saying, as you read that source article, write down an idea, write down an idea, write down an idea so that you're gonna repeat the source article or rename it nine main ideas from the source article. One could do that too, that wouldn't be wrong. But that's not the way that we've done it with our kids, our students so far.
Denise: That is one question I had as I've been using that. It wasn't really clear on if you had the categories preset. Okay, we are going to read about animals. So these are five categories that you've already identified. So as you're reading through it, let's find something about their appearance. Let's find something about their habitat. So as you come in...
Teresa: Right, no, we don't lead it that way. So we don't lead with the categories, we just start with the article and start reading. At each paragraph we stop and say, is there an important or interesting idea that you'd like to remember for your report later on from this paragraph. We get them to find one to two ideas for every paragraph, and then we say, now let's look at the note form, where do you think that should go? Oh, that could go under location or that could go under habitat.
And we always have a special features at the bottom where you kind of want down there. Yeah. Habitat is a good place for it to go. And so then we, I sketch our little note in Habitat and then we say now what's your sentence? And then this, the child will probably say, the habitat of the axolotl is, they don't have to, but they often use the category name and embed it in the sentence and it, that's a great sentence. Okay. Say that sentence again, or no, it's not a very good sentence. Let's fix it, make sure it's accurate, well formed, now say your sentence. Now say it again. Say it one more time until they're saying it smoothly. Let's go back to the article and find one more idea.
Denise: And that repeated practice is so important. Yeah, they just don't say it well the first time.
Teresa: That's right. Our tendency is to talk too much. So this is not language enrichment. I have to stop my speech paths from continually changing the sentence. So if the child says the axolotl is also known as a Mexican walking fish, good sentence. Say it again. The axolotl is known as a Mexican walking fish is here I am changing it now. The axolotl is also called a Mexican walking fish. The axolotl is also called a Mexican walking fish. Excellent. Let's go to the next picto. But we don't then go and say yeah, Mexican walking fish is a synonym for axolotl, and isn't that interesting? Da da da da. No, we shut up. You got your sentence. Go to the next item.
Denise: Do you want them to say it the same way every time? Mm.
Teresa: I'm gonna say it the same way every time so that it gets in their memory because they're gonna come back to it a day later and they're gonna look at their little squiggle and you're gonna say, what does that little squiggle say? And they're gonna say their sentence again. Now, they may change it a little the next day, but when you're helping them memorize the sentence, you're trying to get them to use the same sentence 2, 3, 4 times, whatever you need to do until that sentence is firm in their head. A sentence you like that works for them is firm in their head.
Then we go to the next pictographic note. The next day, when they say the sentence, it'll be almost the same. It might be a little bit different. That's okay. And, but they're gonna get them to say that sentence again.
Denise: Okay, that makes sense. That helps that they should just try and repeat the same sentence so they can just get that form down the way they said it and they said it accurately because they will switch up on you all the time.
Teresa: Yes, and speech pass will switch it too. We'll change the sentence up. They'll end up with a perfectly good sentence, and then we'll go and say it another way and mess their little minds up. And we only want one sentence about that idea in their head. And at the end, after they've done all their pictographic notes on their report, then we're going to say okay, tell me your report.
Sometimes we'll stop them halfway through and say okay, you've got six of these down now tell me half your report. I wanna hear the six sentences. And then when they're finished, I'm gonna say tell me your whole report. Excellent. Tell it to me again. Excellent. One more time. Okay. You got it.
Denise: Is there a certain grade level you start using with this? Are there prerequisites you look for before you use this with students?
Teresa: No prerequisites at all. It's all how much help you give them. We explored down to second grade, but in the clinic when we were first trying it out, I started at fourth grade. And so we've done from fourth grade up to ninth grade. With the, the change in focus is younger kids, I don't expect them to use it independently. I don't expect them to take it into the classroom and say, Oh, I'm gonna use pictographic noting, and I'm gonna orally rehearse my sentences on their own outside the speech room. We're aiming for that for the older kids. I'm not, I don't know that we'll ever get there.
A lot of the learning strategies that we talk about teaching the kids, we never see them use outside of under our control. But with the older kids, we're trying to investigate how they can get ownership of at least oral rehearsal and the idea of a, a pictographic note occasionally. With the younger kids, we definitely are saying it speech path controlled. It doesn't mean you can't sit back and say okay, what do you do next? Yep. Yes, you're right. You gotta rehearse your sentence or you're gonna say your full sentence, but we're controlling the situation more with the younger kids.
Denise: Okay. How broad is the application of Sketch and Speak once they have this core technique down?
Teresa: Well right, just back up to being a learner yourself. When do you ever need to take a note about something?
Denise: All the time at my age.
Teresa: All the time. When should you look at your note and say oh, what did that note mean that I wrote? Oh, it means I have to get to the meeting at three o'clock. Okay, you're gonna say that a lot. Now when are you gonna say it again and again? I got, I gotta get to the meeting at three o'clock. I gotta get to the meeting at three o'clock. Now, you may not need to rehearse it a whole lot if you're only trying to remind yourself, but if you say, I've gotta put that sentence into a report I'm gonna write this afternoon and I'm a terrible writer, then I'm gonna say that sentence four times because I gotta be able to write that, that sentence, and I'm gonna forget the spelling, I'm gonna be struggling. I gotta have the sentence in my head. So basically, you can use this anywhere you need to record a piece of information. Think about what that brief scribbled, almost indecipherable note meant. Turn that into a full idea and get it firmly in your head, which means I'd say you could, I can hardly think of a time when you can't use it.
Denise: So with our older kids, we would love for them to be able to take notes in class with it, take it on to higher education if they need to. To learn how to take...
Teresa: Right. Knowing that lectures are really hard and nowadays teachers give students lecture notes. They expect so little. They're pre preparing materials, giving them to them from lectures, even if they even do lectures, cuz you have active learning in groups and all that, and you don't really lecture.
So there's a whole changing world about taking notes from lectures. We've looked at it mainly for the idea from reading, from texts that are static, they aren't disappearing. We don't worry about timelines for getting that information as someone's lecturing. We're talking about the all through the day, you have to read bits of information. And if you knew how to scribble that bit of information in a quick sketch or a short note, and then you knew that before you walked away from that note. My college students, I get this trouble where they've written a note about what I said in class to them, and they look at it and they say, I don't know what that was supposed to say. If they had stopped right then and made a whole sentence from that note and said it a couple of times, then later on they would remember what that quick scribbled sketch note meant.
Denise: So a great, great learning strategy.
Teresa: Yeah. And when you're practicing a speech, you've gotta, you've gotta do all that repetition and you've got your little notes. You don't wanna be reading verbatim. It's anything where you're better off if you can write quick scribbled notes, but you have the ideas in your head and it's an not a matter if I'm gonna write whole sentences down and just read them aloud. That isn't gonna get it in your head.
Denise: Now you told me about a success story, which I thought was really awesome earlier, I think it was a child with apraxia?
Teresa: Oh, yeah, yeah. So as, as you're saying, Denise, this is a study we're doing right now. We were reviewing some of the sessions in the summer, choosing ones that I could show to the teachers this fall because we're working on carryover in the eighth grade with the science and history teachers, and I wanted to demonstrate to them some excerpts that each of our four kids had done in the summer.
And so we have one, well, he was coming into eighth grade, but he was in the summer, not quite into eighth grade, so he's on the speech language caseload. And I don't know, like, I hate to use the term apraxia, I get really nervous about it. What do we mean by that? Me too, most the time I think. No, it's too vague, but I, I'm just not sure that we're there at all.
But this is a boy that's way past severe phonological disorder or something like that. When you listen to his speech, he has a really cool to understand(?), and so his articulation is really problematic. He's got changing errors. He has missing grammatical morphemes, which. I don't know if they're part of the apraxia or it's almost like oh, he is got a little bit of agrammatism, aphasia.
He's, he, he definitely has a lot more intellectual capacity than he can express, and when you listen to him, you might think he was, I don't know, a kindergartner with a language impairment and he's eighth grade, but he is got a lot of ability inside of there. And so we were watching him do his sentence repetitions and he struggled so much to get a sentence out, but every time he said it and the sentence had the word Pennsylvania in, he was talking about Jim Thorpe, the First Nation Olympic athlete from the thirties, and he was talking about him having gone to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and just this state, Pennsylvania, with the multi syllables, and it came out clearer and clearer, and you could see him taking ownership of that sentence and going back to his note and saying it again and saying it again.
And then when he did his whole oral report, he grabbed the notes back. He was doing it without his notes, and then he pulled them back and said, Oh, I forgot to add something else here about that he'd won the championships and so I'd say on multiple levels, I could see the ownership of the language, the ideas, the oral reporting, and then the speech got clearer.
We weren't supposed to be treating apraxia or treating agrammatism, but my goodness, those things were coming through in his repetitions.
Denise: What I always think is that a rising tide floats all boats. So, and when you teach a child any kind of organizational structure, it can organize other areas of language.
Teresa: Yeah, and definitely ADHD, so kids that have intentional issues, this gets them to focus, stay on topic, check for accuracy, organize themselves. So for kids who have attentional issues, I, I had never included apraxia in this list until I saw this kiddo on the videos, and again, I'm still not even sure what to call 'em, complex language child, but not a low level one. He had, he definitely has cognitive abilities, but yeah, you know, one of my colleagues is all about working on it with traumatic brain injury for organization there, so it doesn't even matter really what your disorder label is. If you need help organizing your language and your thoughts and your learning, all of those, this just very simple three, four parts. Note it simply, in words or pictures, say it fully in a sentence and say it again. That little triple...
Denise: That is a great way to wrap it up. Yes, folks, this is where the interview ends because of those technical difficulties I mentioned earlier. Here's a quick reprise, Sketch and Speak is a shared reading experience.
It's not about decoding. The two mantras for students are quick and easy and just enough to remember. When first introduced to Sketch and Speak, most of my clients will start writing entire sentences instead of key words, so you've got to do some teaching there. The core technique to remember as you're teaching, is note simply and quickly and say fully again. Repeating the same sentence exactly once it's in its correct form is really key. It can change from session to session, but it should be the same in a single session. And I've noticed significant progress in my clients when I adhere to this key technique. Dr. Ukrainetz has graciously shared a PDF of the basic therapy procedure. Go to the speech umbrella.com/blog/ 72 to download it. I've attached an example of one of my clients' sketch and speak notes on black widow spiders for you to see. Now you'll no doubt notice that she did a little bit of coloring on one of her sketches, which doesn't exactly fit the definition of quick, but she reasoned with me that coloring the spider would help her remember to talk about them being shiny and having her red or orange hour glass shape and okay, so she won me over. And actually it did seem to help her, but generally we just stick to pencil and paper and it's quick and easy and just enough to remember.
I also have a template of the two column note form that Dr. Ukrainetz uses for this Sketch and Speak method in my free resource library. So you can get that by going to the speech umbrella.com/free. That wraps it up for this episode. Talk about a simple but powerful therapy technique. Sketch and Speak checks all the boxes. Thanks for listening. Remember to download the Sketch and Speak PDF and join me in two weeks for more simple techniques with optimal outcomes. Remember to subscribe and like this podcast and leave me a review.
Dan: Thanks for listening to the Speech Umbrella. We invite you to sign up for the free resource library at thespeechumbrella.com. You'll get access to some of Denise's best tracking tools, mindfulness activities, and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for free at thespeechumbrella.com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, subscribe and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcast directories.
