What is the vocabulary improvement programme?

What is the vocabulary improvement programme?

The vocabulary improvement programme (VIP), is a small group language intervention designed by the speech and language therapy service in Sheffield to develop your child’s ability to learn new words or vocabulary.

What are vocabulary difficulties?

Children with vocabulary difficulties find it hard to learn and remember vocabulary and may have difficulty retrieving the words they need during conversations. You might notice difficulty understanding what they read, or you might see that they have difficulty explaining their ideas, or using ‘filler’ words such as “thingy”, “that” or hesitations in their talking.

What are the core skills for learning vocabulary?

The programme aims to develop the core skills required for vocabulary learning and retrieval. Alongside learning and remembering the word meaning, these core skills include:

• Identifying and learning which category the word belongs to. For example that apples or banana are both ‘fruit’, or that a car or an aeroplane are both types of ‘transport’
• Identifying and learning the sound sequence. This is also known as the ‘phonology’ of the word. For example, a-pple, ba-na-na, ae-ro-plane
• Learning what type of word it is, and therefore how to use it in a sentence. For example, ‘the girl is eating a red apple’. The person or ‘subject’ is ‘girl’, action word or ‘verb’ is ‘eating’, describing words or ‘concept’ is ‘red’, object or ‘noun’ is ‘apple’

Alongside this programme, your child will benefit from ongoing support to over-learn vocabulary that they hear in their everyday life and vocabulary heard in school. For example topic or curriculum, cross-curricular, and those associated with behaviour policies.

Please read more information about pre-teaching vocabulary interventions here.

In addition to children or young people with a language disorder, individuals with a range of diagnoses may struggle with this area of communication due to their profile of needs. For example, attention or hyperactivity, memory or retention, social communication or inferencing skills and emotional dysregulation can all impact on individual’s ability to remember and recall vocabulary.