274: Making Word Segmentation Work for Older Students
Show Notes:
In this episode of SLP Coffee Talk, Hallie tackles the often-overlooked skill of word segmentation. She discusses the challenges of teaching segmentation to older students and provides five no-prep, age-appropriate activities that connect to their interests. Whether you're an SLP looking to enhance your therapy sessions or seeking fresh ideas to motivate your students, this episode is packed with practical strategies and fun approaches to make word segmentation relevant and engaging!
Here's what we learned:
- Word segmentation is essential for decoding, spelling, and vocabulary comprehension.
- SLPs are equipped to teach segmentation as part of their scope of practice.
- Quick, relevant practice can be integrated into existing therapy sessions without extensive prep.
- Engaging activities can be tailored to students' interests and real-world contexts.
- Movement and competition can enhance memory and engagement in learning.
RESOURCES
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Hallie: Hey. Hey. And welcome to another episode of SLP Coffee Talk, the podcast where we keep speech therapy real, practical, and fun, especially for your older speech students. Because I know it could be a challenge to keep them motivated and find practical resources for them. And I am your SLP to help you motivate those older students.
00:00:23 Hallie: Hi. I'm Hallie Sherman. And today, we're gonna be diving into a skill that is often overlooked in middle school and high school or even upper elementary, but it is so important. And that is word segmentation. I recently asked my SLP elevate members to throw me curve balls and share with me some challenging mixed groups that they have that they're struggling with. And one of them had a word segmentation student goal in their group.
00:00:50 Hallie: And I had so much fun coming up with ideas for them that I wanted to be able to create a whole podcast episode on this topic. So if you ever had a student who stumbles over longer words when reading aloud, misspells words in unpredictable ways, struggles to pronounce multisyllabic words accurately, or has difficulty understanding new vocabulary and content areas, then word segmentation might be the missing piece.
00:01:15 Hallie: But here is the challenge. We can't teach it the same way as we might do for our younger speech students. They're not going to clap out some syllables for us. Let's be real. High, eye rolls, daggers, all that fun stuff. And they're not gonna play with that Elkonin boxes. Those boxes where they're like moving chips into them and putting their finger on the boxes. They're gonna give you a side eye. If you want to get your middle school and high school students mad, that's one way to do it. So we can't do things the same way as we would for our younger students.
00:01:47 Hallie: So today, I'm gonna cover how you get segmentation fits into phonological awareness, why it is in our scope as SLPs, how to tell when a student needs segmentation support, why us as SLPs often avoid working on it, and a five no prep activities that can make it engaging and easy and age appropriate to work on this goal. So grab your coffee, and let's get into it.
00:02:10 Hallie: So how does word segmentation fit into phonological awareness? When we think of phonological awareness as SLPs, we often think of rhyming, blending sounds, manipulating phonemes, like deleting or substituting sounds, syllable awareness. But word segmentation is a key part of this framework. It is actually the ability to break words down into their syllables or meaningful parts. And that is essential for our students to be able to decode. Right? For in order to decode, they need to be able to break down words into smaller, manageable chunks for reading.
00:02:46 Hallie: Of course, if it decoding, it also is gonna impact spelling, understanding how words are structured. Word retrieval, when students struggle to recall or say multisyllabic words, and it also can impact morphological awareness, understanding prefixes, suffixes, and roots. So if our students can't segment words, they will struggle with reading fluency, comprehension, and even spoken language. So ding, ding, ding. That is our scope of practice.
00:03:12 Hallie: So why us as SLPs should we be working on this? Sometimes we assume segmentation is the reading specialist job. And a lot of the things we work on in speech, we often, you know, wonder whose role really is it. But us as SLPs, we can focus on – we do focus on phonological awareness, morphology, and language processing, all of which is connected to segmentation.
00:03:34 Hallie: And ASHA has made it clear that phonological awareness, including word segmentation, is within our scope of practice. And we are the language experts. We are the experts of phonemes. Okay? So if a student is struggling with spelling, reading fluency, word retrieval, or even speech, you know, articulation with multisyllabic words, segmentation is a % something that we could be working on.
00:04:01 Hallie: But we don't need to work on it in isolation. But we'll get into that. How do we know if a student is struggling and needs help with this? If you're not sure whether or not we should be working on segmentation, here are some red flags you can look for. Reading and spelling struggles. Are they skipping parts of words when they're reading? Are they struggling to break words apart and spell them? Are they not producing multisyllabic words correctly? Are they inserting, deleting, mixing up syllables when saying multisyllabic words?
00:04:30 Hallie: Are they slow and choppy when reading? Do they sound robotic or struggle to decode big words? There might be something that we can assist the reading specialist with. And also, this is a big, big one, vocabulary difficulties. Do they struggle to understand or remember longer academic words? Because they might be struggling with those prefixes, suffixes, and root words. If you see any of these, you might wanna consider tapping into and addressing their ability to segment words and helping them break down words into manageable parts.
00:05:02 Hallie: Okay. So yes, the reading specialist might be working on it, but we can work on it with a different lens. So how can we – why do we often struggle with this? Right? We often struggle knowing whether or not or how to teach segmentation because it often feels like it's a reading thing. We might feel like we're stepping on the reading teacher's toes. And it's not as well known as phoneme work. Right? When we think of sounds, okay, that's our jam. Right? Even just syllables [inaudible] and some other phonological awareness stuff, it just seems like it should be more of our thing.
00:05:36 Hallie: But we often focus on phoneme level tasks, but forget that segmenting whole words right? Words are still language. That's still our jam. And we also don't have engaging enough materials for our older students still to work on this skill. We often assume it's been addressed at the younger levels. It's a younger SLP's job. By the time they're older, they should have mastered this by now, but they might not have. And it's really hard to find engaging materials in general for older speech students. Hey. That's why I started making my own. But especially for this skill, it's really, really challenging.
00:06:08 Hallie: So the activities that work for younger students feel too childish for our middle school and high schoolers where they don't see how it's relevant to them. They're not motivated by it. They're like, “Why am I doing this?” But here's the good news. You don't need specific materials just for segmentation for your older students. You don't need elaborate, fancy, prep heavy materials. You don't need to bust out your laminator or Velcro to be able to work on this skill with your older speech students.
00:06:36 Hallie: I'm gonna share some five simple engaging ways that you can work on this skill using what you have and just playing simple, simple games. So one, clap rap and clap segmentation. You can choose multisyllabic words related to their interests, even or even curriculum. Sports, pop culture, career related words. And you can say the words together, then break it into syllables while tapping on a desk or making a beat. And you can make a little rap together. You can challenge them to rap or chant using these segmented words.
00:07:07 Hallie: And it works because rhythm and movement actually boost memory and making it more engaging way than just saying the syllables. So, “Hey, we're gonna make a rap together on, I don't know, the Super Bowl that was just on.” Or your favorite sports team, we're gonna make a wrap and tap out the different syllables of the words. Okay. Like, that doesn't require any prep. It's coming up with a theme, giving them a topic, and letting them jam.
00:07:33 Hallie: Activity number two, hashtag it. What do you gotta do? Have students take longer words and break it into syllables and turn it into a fun hashtag. You even can do it to – like, take some Google images and have them create hashtags on it and then tap it out. So, that is in #incredible or #motocrosschampion, whatever you are looking a picture at or they can even create hashtags about their weekend and tell about it, but then tap it out. And why this works? Well, it connects segmentation to social media culture, which is making it relevant and engaging.
00:08:09 Hallie: All right. Activity number three. Syllable code breaker. What do you gotta do? You can write some multisyllabic words on index cards. Again, simple easy prep. And you can even have students do it for you. And then cut them apart by syllables and mix it up. Have students reassemble the words by putting the syllables in order. A bonus challenge is you can have them guess the meaning of the words based on the syllable clues.
00:08:32 Hallie: This works because it gamifies segmentation and it also taps into some problem solving skills. And if you're struggling to come up with some words, use their curriculum based words, some vocabulary from their science or social based curriculum, or pop culture, their interests. Let them have some fun and have some ownership of the words they are selecting. You're not just picking basic CBC words like they might have done in the earlier grades. You're using words that are relevant to their world. Maybe Sephora, Stanley Cup, whatever you gotta do.
00:09:04 Hallie: Number four. Acting it out. To play to do this activity, you can then give students some multisyllabic words and challenge them to act out each syllable. So for example, volcano. You can act out vol, pretending to explode. Cano, pretending to paddle a canoe. And this works because you're teaching them the different parts of a word has a specific meaning. And they can look it up and learn about parts, prefixes, suffixes, and act it out while learning about the different parts and blending and putting it all together. And this works because it adds movement and makes it memorable for your kinesthetic learners.
00:09:39 Hallie: And the last activity, video game boss levels. What you can do is you can pretend each syllable is a boss in a video game and that students have to defeat it. Must say each syllable separately before blending it to win the game. And if your students are gamers, they're gonna love this activity because it's incorporating video games, and it has a little competitive fun twist while working on this skill.
00:10:04 Hallie: And your bonus activity. If you are an SLP Elevate member, all you gotta do is take any of the articles, any of the activities, pull out some multiple meaning words, that are relevant to the text that you're working with, put it on an index card, cut up the syllables, and practice it before reading the article. They can guess what the article is gonna be about. They can feel more prepared and ready to go when they are getting to reading the actual story, and it's just relevant to what you are already doing.
00:10:32 Hallie: You're not making a whole separate activity. You're just taking the words out of the activity that you're already doing and just practicing segmenting before it. That's it. It could be as simple as that. You don't necessarily need – I gave you a whole bunch of fun activities to practice, but you can do those things quickly and then go into the other activity. You might not need a whole lesson just on this goal at hand. It could be a blip, a quick little review, something before doing the full therapy activity. I'm working on something else. Okay?
00:11:07 Hallie: I'm giving you permission that you don't have to – like, you can address something quickly, easily, and then move on. But doing it over and over again and giving that your students the repetitive practice, building that routine in so they know what is expected of them, but they also know why it is relevant to their world.
00:11:24 Hallie: Word segmentation doesn't need to be fancy or high prep. The key is tying it into their real world interests, making it feel age appropriate. Feel free to use movement, problem solving, competition, and just using the activities that you already have at hand. If you have older students struggling with word breakdowns, try some of these no prep therapy activities that I shared with you here today.
00:11:48 Hallie: And as always, I'd love to hear from you. If you tried any of these activities or have something else that you've tried, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram at speech time fun. Let me know which one you've tried. If you had any “aha” moments with this episode, maybe just realizing that this is something that we need to work on and how it is relevant to our scope of practice. I always love hearing from you guys how these tips, tricks, therapy ideas are inspiring and motivating you and giving you that jolt of inspiration that you need.
00:12:17 Hallie: So thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of SLP Coffee Talk. And as always, I'm gonna see you next time. But before we do, I have a joke as always. What is the best time to wash your slinky? During spring cleaning. All right, everyone. Until next week, stay out of trouble and have a ton of fun.
