Hyper-excited

I have to say, although I was uneasy (ok petrified) at the beginning of the year when I realized I had students with nasality issues on my caseload, I now find it to be somewhat invigorating to get to try new things and come up with my own solutions.

Today, I am happy to report that my hypernasal “er” kid made a breakthrough. His /er/ sound was hypernasal basically because his tongue position was too high, (which is funny because that’s what I spend 99.9% of my time with /r/ kids trying to get them to do; hopelessly pleading “make that tongue high” “it’s being lazy!”). But, in this case, too high of a tongue means that air can’t escape through the mouth like it’s supposed to, and instead the air goes through the nose. Which ain’t right.

We spent weeks of doing “yawning” exercises (which was the only technique I could find in my hopeless and tedious researching) in order to relax and help approximate the back of his tongue into a lower position. It was helpful, but only about 70% successful. It was time to move on, but I didn't know to what. However, today, in the middle of therapy no less, I had a “lightbulb” moment. I realized that prevocalic /r/ was essentially “normal” for this kid. So, we drilled prevocalic /r/ words (words with /r/ at the beginning of words like “red” “reel” “road” “rope”), then after awhile I started having him produce /er/ in front of these words. I would have him say “rope” then “erope”, nice and short. This worked fabulously for getting that lower /er/ sound established. After only about 20 words practiced this way, I went back to the more “traditional” /er/ words (urban, bird, mother, teacher, etc.) and voila! Just like that we were at about 90% accuracy with only needing 1 yawn cue to re-establish that lower tongue!

I think that is what makes working with these kids actually kinda fun. I can use what I know and then tweak it until I find something that works. I kinda feel like a scientist.