Does your child have speaking difficulties?
In a situation where a child is using two or more languages for daily life it can be difficult for parents to estimate how well the child’s speech is developing.
The following difficulties can occur:
- The child chooses short words from different languages for communication, avoiding the use of longer, more difficult words and grammar constructs. It is impossible to estimate, whether a child has a speech disorder, as languages have very different phonological systems. For example, from the viewpoint of a French speech therapist the child’s ability to reproduce sound is perfectly fine, but from the Russian speech therapist’s view it is not.
- The child freely uses several languages, but cannot master the “subtleties”, i.e. finds it difficult to conjugate words, grammatically correct word order and so forth.
- The child can communicate in Russian at home, but is unable to explain an event in detail, retell a text or to come up with a story for a picture.
- The child does not wish to speak Russian as everyone around it is speaking different languages.
It is possible that these issues will solve themselves, if the child does not have “logopaedic” problems.
However, if you truly want to safeguard your child’s knowledge of Russian in all its richness, then you should not avoid the help of a specialist.
What to do?
We offer two directions of development.
Sessions with a speech therapist – developing monological speech and correction of possible speech disorders.
Musical therapy – use of Russian language during the process of musical activity (singing, coming up with musical fairy tales, musical improv)
A combination of these sessions enables formation of strong neural links inside the brain of a child due to the use of the language being associated with strong positive emotions.