Learning Language

I remember sitting and watching one of Miss Kat's speech sessions just after her implant. She was working on discriminating between two fairly different sounding words. Then the therapist read a story that targeted one of the words. I saw that while she was gaining vocabulary, the therapist was having to teach one word at a time. In that moment, I was struck with the pure impossibility of teaching a child every word in the English language individually. It was an task that surely no one could do. There just simply wasn't enough time.

I was absolutely right, but I was also wrong. It is impossible to individually teach every word through therapy. But, I was missed was that because of her CIs, Miss Kat would NOT need to learn them that way. She would eventually be able to pick up language through context, brief explanations, conversation and reading. When these skills fell into place, her language exploded.