Linguistics and Language Therapy: The Sentence Construction Board
This paper describes the use of an apparatus called the sentence construction board (SCB) to facilitate therapy involving sentence structure. The SCB was developed from basic linguistic principles and from Fitzgerald’s method for teaching language to deaf children. Several authors have suggested use of structural linguistics and transformational grammar to guide the selection of syntactic patterns in language therapy. Therapy should progress from using simple structures such as kernel sentences to using minor and major transformations. Fitzgerald’s method employed key words and symbols to represent grammatical classes and to be arranged according to syntactic rules. The SCB contains lights that are employed as symbols for grammatical classes. The light symbols and key words may be arranged to depict kernel structures and different transformations. The SCB is intended to assist a patient in constructing standard or nonstandard English sentences in response to simple pictures. It may be applied in therapy for a variety of language pathologies, including training hard-of-hearing children and retraining aphasic adults. It may also be helpful in teaching English as a second language or dialect. The SCB also shows that linguistic theory can have practical consequences for the language clinician.