Visualising and verbalising therapy to improve text comprehension

11 children (aged 12 to 14 years) with a primary language impairment participated in this study. Visualising and Verbalising therapy (Bell, 1991) was delivered collaboratively by class teacher, special teaching assistant and SLT during English lessons twice a week for 30 minutes, for five weeks. We devised a set of comprehension questions to use as outcome measures. The questions were a balance of concrete, inference and inference ‘plus’. Inference ‘plus’ questions involved a higher level of abstract thinking.  Post-therapy scores were significantly better than the pre-therapy scores and there was no interaction between the type of questions and the time of testing. This means that all types of questions improved to a similar degree with therapy.
 

Scott, Turner, Sutton, Vinton & Ebbels (2009). Effectiveness of visualising and verbalising therapy for children with comprehension deficits as part of specific language impairment: a collaborative approach. Poster presented at RCSLT conference, London.