Encourage the use of gesture and accept all forms of communication e.g. pointing, vocalising, words etc.

Give your child time to plan what they want to say or formulate their response to a question.

Ask open ended questions which encourage the child to give more information e.g. “What is the dog doing?” “Where is teddy?”

Repeat back (without correcting) what the child says clearly using accurate grammar so that they hear a good model e.g.

Child: “Teddy drinked the juice”Adult: “Teddy drank the juice”Child: “Yes all gone”Adult: “It’s all gone”

Expand on the child’s sentences by adding one or two words e.g. if the child says “Boy walking park” you can model back “Yes, the boy is walking quickly in the park”

Emphasise the words you want to draw the child’s attention to by placing slight stress on them as you say them e.g. if your child says ‘Him seed a lion” then model back “Yes, he saw a lion”.

Use visual supports such as narrative grids/story plans, pictures, written words

Provide plenty of opportunities for talking/ answering questions/ giving news

Provide sentence starters e.g. “Yesterday we went to …..”

Support your child with forced alternatives e.g. “Did we go to the shops or the park?”

If you are working on developing the use of a particular area of spoken language e.g. use of past tense, plurals, pronouns etc. then provide your child with lots of repeated models of these forms

General strategies to support spoken language skills