Listening Group is Part of Speech Therapy

Written by Julie Taylor

Listening Group Therapy - What's That?

Yes!  Listening therapy…  I was so sure I didn’t need this and I was so sure I would score 100%.  My ears and hearing were just fine.  However, I went just out of curiosity and I’m so glad I did!

I went into my first session and found about ten people, sitting around a large table.  Everyone was very quiet and set themselves up with a pencil or two and a sheet of paper.  When our group leader came in she spoke fairly quietly – and quickly.  Very clearly she gave instructions just the once and we had to try and remember them and do the best we could.  The pace was deliberately fast – just like it often is in the real world and she went straight from one task to another…  Just as you would ‘outside’.

Suddenly I understood exactly what listening group was…  And I realized too that I really did need this.  To be honest, I was a little bit shocked.

• We listened to a telephone message and had to answer questions on it…
• We had a simple map in front of us and answered simple – fast – questions
• We listened to popular sayings and filled in the missing word
• We chose meanings for synonyms

There were many other 'daily' tasks that we were able to try.  I did badly that first day…  But over the weeks I gained speed and accuracy and my scores went up.  Most everyone made mistakes at first and seemed surprised to learn of their own level of these very basic skills.  Only the fairly advanced patients – post stroke, heart attack, brain injury, chronic disabilities - were encouraged to join this group because it really was quite hard to keep up - we get so used to everything being at a slower pace 'for us'.  And although this was my second injury, it turned out that I had almost forgotten what it was like at the beginning sometimes...

Slowly, methodically, bit by bit the cognitive skills and memory of everyone in the neuro-rehab group were being put back together.  The patience, skill and dedication of all these staff – speech therapists, occupational therapists and recreation therapists - is quite remarkable.

My hope is that through this website we can make the exercises we were so fortunate to be offered available to anyone with computer access. Eventually I want to put some of these exercises on this site but at the moment I'm at 'that phase' when I don't yet have an income to hire someone to help with that...

There is also a wonderful new series of speech and language therapy books by top specialists Hilary Dibben and Anita Kess for those with higher functioning speech and language loss called 'What I Mean Is...'  This book is full of exercises that, whilst not listening exercises, are part of the necessary regime of exercises to put back together your language.