In episode 25 of the Speech and Language Kids Podcast, speech-language pathologist Carrie Clark discusses how to increase self-awareness and carry-over skills for children who do not pay attention to if they are saying things correctly or not.

Boosting self-awareness and increasing carry-over

Self-awareness refers to a child’s ability to monitor himself to determine if he is doing something correctly.  In terms of speech and language skills, we look for self-awareness with the speech and language errors that the child is producing.  For example, if a child doesn’t say “s” correctly in conversational speech, we want to know if the child is aware that he is saying it incorrectly.  Most of the time with speech errors, the child is not at all aware that he is producing it incorrectly.  In contrast, children who have significant stutters are often painfully aware that they are stuttering and become very embarrassed by it.

Carry-over refers to a child’s ability to take a skill that she has learned in an isolated setting (like speech therapy) and begin to use it in other settings, such as in the classroom and at home.  Once we teach a child to do a skill on command, we must then teach her to carry-over that skill to the rest of her life.

If a child is not aware that he is doing something incorrectly, it is very, very difficult for him to fix it.  Children must develop a level of self-awareness before they are able to monitor and change their behavior.  If you are working with a child who can do a skill (for example, say the target sound) brilliantly in speech therapy or practice sessions, but who struggles to remember to use it during every-day activities, he may be lacking self-awareness.

Boosting self-awareness and increasing carry-over

Hi, I’m Carrie! I’m a speech-language pathologist from Columbia, Missouri, USA. I’ve worked with children and teenagers of all ages in schools, preschools, and even my own private practice. I love digging through the research on speech and language topics and breaking it down into step-by-step plans for my followers.

Fun Fact: When my son was three, he once got mad at me and told me he was going to send me to Antarctica in nothing but a t-shirt.  He had an overly large vocabulary for a 3-year-old….along with an overly large amount of sass.  He still has both to this day.

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