Evidence Based Practice (EBP) is the concept that in order for a treatment approach to be within best practice it needs evidence to back it up. This evidence includes scientific research completed on individuals similar to the client, clinical expertise from the clinician, and the values that the client and their family have. According to the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) this process involves the speech language pathologist doing the necessary research to gain the knowledge needed to make a clinical decision and have the skills necessary to act on the clinical decision and while doing so, making sure the literature they are basing their decision off of is reliable and is of high quality (2005). It was also stated to be …show more content…
He lives with his mother, father and infant sister in a language rich environment in which he receives speech-language services in home twice a week with a fluency specialist. He came to the Nazareth Speech-Language Clinic due to parent concerns regarding stuttering and intelligibility. In therapy with the fluency specialist, as well as at the Nazareth Speech-Language Clinic he is working on fluency shaping with the goal of decreasing the amount of stuttering occurrences that happen. He is reminded to take big breaths, and stretch out his speech to keep the rate slowed, which prevents disfluencies from happening. MK benefits from the visual cue of the clinician taking a deep inhalation or using their hands to make a stretching motion to remind him to slow down and stretch out his words. In conversational speech, it is not uncommon for MK to stutter, especially when discussing a topic he is passionate about, his most common disfluencies are syllable repetition’s on the words “and” and “I”.
A formal goal this semester centered around decreasing the amount of times he has a disfluency on the word “and” when combining two ideas into one complex sentence. At the beginning of the semester he was disfluent 31% of the time when using the word “and”, with fluency strategies and minimal prompting and cuing during our last session he was disfluent 25% of the time when using the word “and” when creating a …show more content…
This is accomplished by teaching the client to speak in such a way that a stutter is less likely to happen (Prins & Ingham, 2009). This was chosen for MK because it is most appropriate for client’s his age (Hegde, 2017). In MK’s case we call this “stretchy speech”, and focus on taking a deep inhalation, and talking in slow stretched out utterances, which prevents stuttering events from happening. Where as fluency shaping has the goal of not stuttering, stuttering management is concerned with reacting to a stuttering event in a calm manner. This approach takes into consideration that the stutterer will have stuttering events, and teaches strategies for getting through them without obvious tension or other secondary stuttering characteristics. Stuttering management also seeks to reduce stuttering characteristics such as avoidance of words or sounds a client almost always stutters on by teaching them how to get through a stutter (Prins & Ingham, 2009), as well as making the stutter less severe (Sidavi & Fabus,