Speech class for teen who's an awkward speaker
My older teen son is kind of difficult to listen to when he speaks. So many "ums," pauses, repeating phrases, starting over, etc. Sometimes I ask him to stop, take a couple of minutes to think about what he wants to say, and come back. It's painful. I don't know how much feedback he gets at school but he'd like to get some support on how to present himself better. I think that planning out his message and having some idea of how to structure a message would be a big help. Although we could record/video him, I think even if he agreed to it, it'd be easier to take from someone else. And an expert would also have better ideas, I bet.
He doesn't like on-line resources or classes, even skype tutoring. It'd be great to find something over the summer. Recommendations?
Thank you, BPN community!
Parent Replies
I would recommend Tanya Loker at Speech Inc in Oakland. My son has similar issues - disfluency in speech, and she made a big difference. Part of his issue was lack of awareness of his disfluencies and she worked a lot on this part, which was key to his improvement. She had a lot of good ideas and works with teens. She would likely want to do a speech assessment first, which is common when you start speech classes.
Have you ever had him evaluated by a speech therapist to see if he has a language processing issue?