International Speech Therapist Day

International Speech Pathologist Day is celebrated on November 14th. On this day, speech correction specialists celebrate their professional holiday, organize experience-sharing conferences, forums and other events. In the famous Soviet film “For Family Reasons,” there is a scene where a speech therapist comes to a girl and tries to eliminate “fiction defects,” without having the correct pronunciation. However, the question of how he will teach if he himself does not know how was decisively rejected by the statement that a speech therapist should not be able to teach himself, he should be able to teach another to speak correctly. Of course, this opinion is wrong - in order for a child to learn to pronounce a sound, all people in his environment must pronounce this sound correctly, so that he hears and can imitate the correct pronunciation. Moreover, a speech therapist should be able to pronounce any sound clearly and without errors; moreover, he must explain the correct position of the tongue, lips, teeth when pronouncing a particular sound or their combinations. Speech therapy is a science that studies speech disorders in people and helps prevent them and even predict them. Today, almost every preschool and school institution has a specialist on staff who monitors children’s pronunciation and helps correct it. This is achieved through special articulation exercises, tongue twisters and even massage. A speech therapist is a specialist who works not only with children. Many modern show business stars used the services of a speech therapist to improve their pronunciation, voice timbre, and develop the desired sound of certain words and sentences. After all, correct speech is the key to clear thinking, and even writing. It’s interesting, but few people think that if a child does not know how to pronounce sounds, pronounces them incorrectly, replacing them with others, then he probably will not be able to write them without errors. After all, when saying the sound “l” instead of “r”, most likely the child will write the word “mole” as “klot”. Based on these observations, it is so important to teach children to pronounce the correct sounds in words as early as preschool age, when they have not learned to write. There is one more observation - habit. When a person gets used to saying a sound incorrectly, then, even if he knows how to pronounce it correctly - with the correct placement of the articulatory apparatus, without proper control, the person will speak the way he is used to. That is, the task of the speech therapist is not only to establish pronunciation, but also to control its correctness - of course, this is difficult to do if the patient himself does not monitor his own mistakes.