Expanding Receptive and Expressive Skills Through Stories Express ─ Language Formulation in Children With Selective Mutism and Other Communication Needs

This handbook outlines a treatment approach for working with children with selective mutism and other language delays or disorders, such as language learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, social (pragmatic) communication disorder, or children learning English as a second language, at varying stages of language development. It uses a story-based program to help to expand receptive and expressive language skills with five levels of communication from nonvocal stages through spontaneous vocalization, and promotes social engagement, communication, and literacy by building vocabulary and phonological awareness, promoting comprehension through question-answer turn-taking, practicing grammatical sentence constructions, and engaging in storytelling. It builds on the Social Communication Anxiety Treatment Model developed by Elisa Shipon-Blum and uses children’s popular stories that increase in complexity to progress linguistic vocal output through each level. It includes story activity modules for 25 popular children’s stories (not provided), with information on the literacy level, communication level, and materials needed, as well as activities, word lists, lists of sentences, directions, and progress monitoring score sheets. A companion website includes video links to the stories and downloadable resources. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)