Today we're going to chat about five evidence based strategies that we can use to boost students' mean length of utterance or MLU, in a way that's fun, functional, and easy to keep track of. I'm really excited that we'll be sharing some strategies that you can use in your very next session.

And then we will tie it all together, and show you what it would actually look like in context when you're applying these strategies. Our first strategy is to identify the baseline, using a language sample. Language samples can be a really helpful way to calculate the student's current MLU, and also see what types of utterances they're using and tracking that progress over time.

Regular language sampling helps us ensure that we're modeling at the right level. I love language samples, but a lot of times when I mention them to SLPs, I get a little bit of an eye roll, because they feel really time consuming and difficult.

I put together a, spreadsheet, maybe a decade old at this point, but it still works really well. it helps you calculate. So you just use it to type in your transcript, and then you separate it out by utterances, and then it automatically calculates the MLU and it helps you grab some other metrics so you can write a really fancy report based on the data or include it in your evaluation area or progress monitoring. It makes it really easy to grab the data that we need,for easy progress monitoring. I'll add the link to the language sample sheet that I made in the show notes. It includes a video and walks you through how to set it up.

That is a really helpful starting point, because we'll use this data as we go through. Our second strategy is to make sure that we're embedding targets in meaningful contexts, like, play, books, songs, routines.

And I'll share some specific strategies, of what we actually do in those functional contexts, but if we are embedding our strategies in those types of activities, we are thinking about generalization from the start and setting our students up for success and making sure that the targets are very meaningful.So that brings us to strategy number three. Different research articles will share different strategies, but there's a lot of overlap between the strategies and, I just wanna share the names of the strategies and what they are, and you'll see that there's some overlap.

I'll wrap up with a general takeaway of what we can do with these strategies. Expansions are where we add grammar while keeping the child's meaning. If the child says, "dog jump," you can say "the dog jumped," or "the dog is jumping."

An extension is adding new information. If the child says "the dog is jumping," we can say "the brown dog is jumping."We can do an extension where we add new information, but that's still related.

And then focused stimulation is when we're providing models and recasts without requiring imitation. It's just strategically using, those strategies. a recast is when we restate the child's utterance, but maybe do a correction, which is really similar to an expansion.

There's also research talking about modeling one level above the child's MLU, which expansions and extensions kind of naturally do. If the student says "dog run," and then if we suddenly go, "the excited dog is running quickly."

We're expanding and adding the grammar and we're adding multiple new pieces of information. It's helpful to think about just going one level above the child's MLU and not having a whole, massive expansion.

So if the child says "truck stuck," we can say, "yeah, the truck is stuck." Or we can say "stuck in the mud." We get to use our clinical judgment to decide if that is appropriate because if they just say "truck stuck," but their MLU is five, then I think "The blue truck stuck in the mud" might be okay.

That's why we collect that MLU to know what might be appropriate for the student.

Strategy four is to use sentence frames. In SLP Now, we have a Sentence Pack. It's a booklet based on the modified Fitzgerald key. It has nouns verbs prepositions and all the components we use to build a sentence.

And it also includes sentence strips based on Brown's research of all the different utterance types. So you have tons of utterances that you can go with . We also have sentence frames with just like for one MLU, and two, and three, and four, and five. And so you can build sentences with any of the components.

If I notice that the student is only using nouns, or if there's a part of speech that's completely missing, I might strategically try to include that more and expand the utterances in that way. That's, a visual that I really like to use. We grab the icons to create sentences. It's really nice because the pieces are movable, It's a tactile experience too, and the students can build it and then you can point to it as you're modeling.

If the student just says truck, truck, truck, and we're trying to expand from one MLU to two MLU. We have like an icon for truck, and then we have one for stuck, and then we would just build the sentence using those icons. Once the truck is out, we can say truck out or truck in if it's in the mud.

Having those icons is really helpful. Verbal strategies help the majority of my students, but there are those who need something extra.

And including those visuals is something that has worked for a lot of the students. So that's how the Sentence Pack came to be. I also use it for different grammar goals. If they are dropping the auxiliary verbs or if they're having trouble understanding that pronouns replace a noun.

So there's lots of ways that I use that, but it's especially helpful for those MLU goals and for those students who need those extra visuals. And then the fifth strategy, which is just too provide contingent responses and time delay. So we really just wanna give our students space to respond and give them some processing time.

And we don't have to fill every second. It's okay if we have some silence in the session. If a student starts to say something, if they say truck, we can just pause a second and see if they say anything else first.

Or if we turn the page and give them some time to look before we really jump in and start talking at them. So that is just a reminder for myself because I sometimes go a little too fast. In terms of what this would look like actually applied. Let's say we're using the therapy plan an SLP Now for a Little Blue Truck, which is a super sweet story about a truck who gets stuck in the mud.

We like to use literacy based therapy units based on Dr. Ukrainetz's research. The first step is pre-story knowledge activation. We might do a virtual field trip of a farm, and we're gonna be doing a lot of talking during that activity. And we can target the MLU goals during that conversation.

As we're reading, we can model expansions and recasts. The third step is comprehension. We can ask simple WH questions and use those sentence starters in the sentence frames to support the student. And then, the fourth step is focused skill practice.

We often have mixed groups, so we're targeting multiple goals with students. We might have some play-based activities related to little Blue Track. We might be reenacting the story or whatnot. This is a early language unit, so it has play-based activity suggestions and all of that.

So that's how that would work. That's just a peek at how we might incorporate this in a literacy based therapy unit.

And then, a quick recap. We wanna start with a language sample. So we know the students' baseline and we can easily see like, oh, they're only using nouns.

Seeing it on paper helps us come up with a good plan.We want to make sure that we're embedding our practice in meaningful context, whether it's play stories, routines. And we want to model just above the child's level and use those verbal strategies. once I set up parents and teachers with that strategy of modeling one level above and then how to do that, it skyrockets from there. If our students need more support using the Sentence Pack and those sentence frames can be really helpful.

And then also just giving them time to respond using some of that wait time. So those are our strategies that will hopefully help you see meaningful growth in your students when it comes to communicating and building beautiful sentences. Head to the show notes to check out the Sentence Pack and the Therapy Plans. If you're new to SLP now, you can do it for free. if you're a member, type in Sentence Pack to find that download or go to the Therapy Plans to check out Little Blue Truck. I hope this was helpful and we'll see you real soon.