What is Literacy Based Therapy?

Updated: Oct 24

Hi friend!

Here's an overview of Dr. Ukrainetz's literacy-based therapy, or literature-based intervention, and why it is a great framework to use in your therapy sessions!

Literacy-based therapy is a contextualized framework where intervention activities are organized around a book or story.

The goal of literacy-based therapy is to improve language skills that support students’ ability to participate in the general education classroom in both oral and print modalities.

As a school-based SLP, the goal of therapy is to help students access the classroom and support educational (e.g. social, emotional, academic, vocational) success. What better way to accomplish this than with a framework that aims to do just that?!

This approach is a great way to:

Promote language development in children with language impairments
Target a variety of language skills (e.g. semantic, syntactic, narrative, pragmatic)
Align your therapy with common core standards
Make your therapy functional and relevant to the classroom
Save time with planning therapy

How Does Literacy Based Therapy work?

With literacy-based therapy, therapy is planned around a book or story. Books can be aligned to a chosen theme, time of the year, and/or student interests . If you'd like to read more about book selection, read this post, and for a list of my favorite books to use throughout the year, take a look at this post.

Once you've selected a book, you'll follow a five-part framework that builds your students' language skills through a variety of discussions and activities.

Literacy-based Therapy framework

The literacy-based therapy framework has five parts:

1️⃣ Pre-reading Knowledge Activation

Before diving into your awesome book, start by engaging in activities and discussions about topics related to the story (e.g. theme, story grammar, moral or lesson learned) in order to activate students' knowledge, fill in gaps in thier knowledge, and pre-teach concepts.

The goal of this step is to support story comprehension and help students incorporate new knowledge into an existing schema (Ukrainetz, 2006).

2️⃣ Shared Storybook Reading

After you've activated knowlegde and pre-taught key concepts, it's time to dive into the book. The goal is to read the story aloud to students in an interactive and engaging way. You can do this using prompts (e.g. dialogic reading, hypothetical statements) and props/visuals to support engagement and comprehension.

I'd also highly recommend supporting literacy skills, especially for emergent readers. For ideas and examples of how you can easily support emergent reader using print referencing, take a look at this post.

3️⃣ Post-Story Comprehension Discussion

After reading the story, it's time to check for comprehension by asking yes and no and wh questions about the story events, story grammar, etc. Remember, the goal is to ensure the student comprehends the story - we are not testing the student.

If the student does not understand the story, it will be difficult to move on to targeting higher level skills in step four.

4️⃣ Targeted Activities

This is where you will engage in a variety of activities to target language skills (e.g. semantic, syntactic, narrative, pragmatic) in the context of the story.

While this framework primarily supports addressing language skills, you can also use this step to work on articulation and fluency skills with those mixed groups. Just be sure you're getting enough trials!