How to use the news in speech therapy

TalkPath News is a practical, free tool that can bring real-world news content into speech therapy sessions. It works across a wide range of speech, language, and cognitive goals. This article will show SLPs several ways to use TalkPath News with their clients.

TalkPath News is Lingraphica’s specialized news source for people with aphasia and other communication disorders. Built for an adult audience that benefits from simplified language, it offers current event stories across a range of categories including National, World, Business, Education, Entertainment, Health & Lifestyle, Science & Technology, and History.

TalkPath News features

With each TalkPath News article, your client can:

• Read or listen to the news story as it reads aloud
• Follow along as sentences are highlighted
• Answer auditory and reading comprehension questions at the end of the story

Using TalkPath News to target speech, language, and cognitive-communication goals

TalkPath News can serve as an excellent stimulus to target a variety of skills and speech therapy goals beyond reading comprehension:

• Sustained focus, attention, and topic maintenance: News stories are a natural entry point for conversation. Ask your client what they think of the article to target many of the skills used in back-and-forth conversation. You can also have your client practice metacognitive strategies during this task, such as those used for self-monitoring.
• Auditory comprehension: Play the article with the screen turned away from your client. Pause at key points and ask specific yes/no, who, what, or when questions. They can also answer the comprehension questions included at the end of the article. Adjust the complexity of your questions based on your client’s needs.
• Expressive language: After reading an article, ask your client to answer “who, what, when, where, and why” questions in their own words. They can refer back to the article if they need cues to help with word retrieval.
• Reading aloud: Ask your client to follow along with the sentence highlighting while the audio plays. Then mute the audio and ask them to read the same sentence aloud using what they just heard as a model.
• Short-term memory and recall: After reading or listening to the article together, cover the text and ask your client to recall as many specific details as they can. You can utilize this task in conjunction with metacognitive strategies (such as PQRST) or compensatory strategies (such as note-taking).
• Sequencing or narrative organization: Ask your client to retell the key events of the news story. Use the forward and reverse buttons to review specific sections as needed. For a task with more visual support, write the key events from the story on index cards and have your client arrange them in order.

How to access TalkPath News

TalkPath News is free and available to you and your clients in three ways:

• On a Lingraphica device — accessible directly via the “News” app tile
• On any browser — visit TalkPathNews.Aphasia.com to use it for free
• On an iPad — download it from the App Store

Through the TalkPath Therapy clinical dashboard, you can assign articles for your client to complete between sessions. Ask them to read an article, answer the comprehension questions, and come to the next session ready to discuss what they read. It’s a functional home exercise task that bridges the speech therapy clinic and daily life. In addition to TalkPath News articles, TalkPath Therapy includes more than 11,500 speech, language, and cognitive exercises.