Hello there and welcome back to the SLP Now podcast. Today we are going to be chatting about five evidence backed strategies that we can use when targeting past tense verbs.

A lot of our students have these goals, and it's helpful to have some good strategies in our back pocket, especially if students aren't making the progress that we would expect.

And taking another step back. Why do we even write these goals in the first place?

It is a very important communication skill and being able to mark tense is really important when telling stories and being an effective communicator. It is also a diagnostic indicator, so if students are not marking tense, that is a very reliable indicator of language impairment.

This is according to Guo and Schneider in their 2016 article. I'll link all of the different articles in the show notes, if you are wanting to dig into anything in a little bit more detail. I also apologize if I butcher any of these names. I always read this and don't hear it talked about quite as much.

I think we're all on the same page in terms of why we might want to target these goals and why it's important, so now we can dive into five strategies.

The first strategy is to build awareness through auditory bombardment. We provide rich, meaningful exposures of these past tense verbs. We can use this for other grammatical morphemes and grammatical targets as well.

We want to give multiple exposures to these targets and emphasize them. Focused stimulation is what some of the studies call that. The main goal here is giving them lots of meaningful exposures to those targets.

So first strategy is that auditory bombardment, focused stimulation. This is a strategy that I often share for intervention, before a student might be on my caseload.

I teach this to parents and teachers. just having them give that focused stimulation, and recasting. So if a student says I run during recess, we can say, yeah, you ran during recess today. That is a helpful strategy and I find that teaching that strategy and getting parents and teachers on board often helps students start using that target. They just need a little bit of extra exposure, and for some students that does the trip, which is amazing.

Now on to strategy two, which is contrastive imitation. There's a whole protocol for this in the research article.

An example of what this could look like is if we're using the present and the past tense verb. Today we jump, yesterday we jumped. You can use picture cards potentially having a picture of a girl jumping and then having her be done jumping.

She jumped. Just having that contrast and semantic representation of the meaning. You don't have to have materials for the contrastive imitation. Have the student actually jump or push or tap or whatever.

You can be like you are tapping and then, oh, you tapped when they're done tapping. You can do this with a lot of different games and activities that you already have in your therapy room.

The protocol might include having the students actually repeat the targets as well. I'll link to that in the show notes so you can see what that looks like.

Then strategy three is using kinesthetic and visual supports.

in the SLP Now membership, we have different visuals to help students so that we can point to an indicator of this is present tense, this is past tense. We also have different cards that can help with that strategy one and strategy two using a bunch of different verbs.

There's lots of different ways that we can do this. There's also shape coding. There's some research behind that as well. in just giving students some different types of visual supports.

So considering some of those options, especially if students aren't making progress with focused stimulation and contrastive imitation from the first two strategies. That brings us to step four, which is interactive prompting. This is an example of what this would look like.

You pull the cart or you pulled the cart. You give them those two choices. If you are doing different jumping activities, like you are jumping or you jumped, like which one is true. if they're doing it while they're jumping, they can say, I am jumping. If they finish jumping, then they can say, I jumped.

If they don't answer that independently with that forced choice, you can say, say it just like me. You jumped, and scaffold that production. And then you can combine that with your visuals and your other strategies as well.

Giving those choices and eliciting those imitations can support grammar when recasts aren't enough. That's something that we have seen in the research as well. The fifth strategy is to have high lexical variability. Instead of using the same verb over and over again, we want to rotate the verbs that we're using in the session.

So instead of just doing tons of practice with jumping, we would include different types of verbs like play, climb, wash, call, sit, stand, and being mindful of whether we're doing a regular or regular past tense verbs. But then that helps students learn that pattern more versus just memorizing, oh, the past tense of jump is jumped if they're generalizing it to a bunch of different words.

Plante et al their 2014 article is really an interesting read in looking at that lexical variability. if we have more variability that can facilitate morphology learning. and so being strategic with the words that we're selecting. And that article gives some suggestions for that.

So those are our five strategies. Hopefully this is a confidence boost of things that you're already doing. And if you're listening to this because a student isn't making the progress that you would expect, hopefully you have some great strategies now that you are reminded of, that you can try to implement.

So just a quick recap. Our first strategy was that focused stimulation, auditory bombardment. The second strategy is using that contrastive imitation, and the third strategy was incorporating visuals or kinesthetic supports. Strategy four is some of those interactive prompting strategies like giving that forced choice, that elicited imitation.

Okay. And then strategy five is making sure that you're including a variety of verbs in your session and not just drilling one over and over and over. And then check out the Plante at al article from 2014, for some different strategies on lexical variability.

So those are our strategies. We are going to continue this series of different strategies we can use for grammar intervention. This will partially be based on any questions. So if you have a question, send us an email hello@slpnow.com or dm us on Instagram at slpnow. Some of the future episodes will be focused on generalization and focusing on that from the start and having those meaningful context for this intervention.

But if any, if you had any questions about anything that we chatted about today, let me know. That's all for now. Thanks for joining us, and I'll see you very soon.