Wh-Questions in Speech Therapy
Mattie Marks, M.Ed., CCC-SLP
Many children who are in speech therapy for language difficulties may have difficulty answering wh- questions (e.g., who, what, when, where, why). There are many different types of questions and different levels of complexity of questions. As a parent, you may wonder how you can support your child if they have difficulty answering simple questions. Below, I will go over some tips for how to support these children. Today’s blog post will focus on supporting answering simple what and where questions. Children age 2-3 should be able to answer simple what and where questions.
I will began with a tip of what NOT to do. Sometimes parents are so eager to support their child and want to support their children as well as see how many words they know, so they begin to ask questions all the time, “What’s that? What’s that? What color is that?” What sound does that make?” and the day turns into quizzing the child all day long. This is what we do NOT want to do. Quizzing your child all day can increase pressure unnecessarily, actually decreases the amount of language you are modeling for your child, and is just not a pleasant communicative environment. Imagine if you were having a conversation with someone and all they did was quiz you? You probably wouldn’t want to talk to them very long.
So how do we balance working on questions while still having a positive and rich communicative environment? I like to follow “the rule of 3.” Which means to have three declarative statements for every question you ask. So, instead of an interaction that looks like this: “What is that? What color is it? What does it say?” You would have an interaction that looks more like this: “Oh wow! That’s a cool animal, it’s big and furry and says rawr! What is it?” This way you still get an opportunity to ask a question, but it is surrounded by rich language modeling and does not turn in to bombarding a child with questions.
The first level of questions I often work on is “What is that?” questions and “Where is the ___?” (expecting the child to simply point to a location) and I will begin to support the child by both asking a question and giving them the answer. So, our example above would look like this: “Oh wow! That’s a cool animal, it’s big and furry and says rawr! What is it? It’s a lion.” I will work at this level for varying amounts of time, depending on how much support the child needs. Some children may begin to start answering questions after a few days of modeling like this, and for some children, it is a weeks or even longer of modeling both questions and answers. For where questions, I would do the same thing by giving the child both the question and the answer, “Where’s the lion? Right there!” (pointing to the location of the lion.
Another level of support I will give a child who has difficulty answering questions is providing two choices, for example, “What is that? A lion or a bear?” or “Where is the lion? Right there or right there?” (pointing to two different locations). Some children will only need this level of support for a short period of time, some children will need a much longer time with this level of support, and some children may begin to answer open-ended questions sometimes and may need choices still at other times. You can increase the number of choices to increase the difficulty: “What is that? A lion, tiger or bear?” and also eventually fade out the choices altogether as the child begins to answer questions more consistently.
Some children may need visual supports before being able to answer questions without visual supports (e.g., the question, “What animal says rawr?” without any pictures of lions or lion toys may be difficult, but they may be able to answer the question, “What does a lion say?” while looking at a picture of a lion). Also, some children may have difficulty answering questions about past events or things that are not directly in front of them, so we will first work on questions about things they can see and later build to answering questions about past events or things they cannot see. A fun activity to support kids who have trouble answering questions about past events can be to snap some pictures of activities your child does throughout the day, look at them later and talk with your child about the past activities they have done that day. Another good time to try some questions are during story time/book reading.
Does your child have difficulty answering simple questions? Try these tips at home and let your speech therapist know how it goes!