Today’s podcast is focused on L. While there’s no doubt R can be a puzzler, L isn’t far behind. Final L can be one of the most perplexing sounds for clients to master.
In this podcast SLP Angie Lewis explains how to elicit precise final Ls. And we find out that it’s not so different from final vocalic R! Tune in as Angie walks us through all the steps needed to master L in all positions.
— Useful Links —
L Workbook from The Speech Umbrella
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Denise: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Speech Umbrella podcast. What is one of the most puzzling, perplexing phonemes we work with? That’s what we’re going to talk about today and surprise, surprise. It is not R. If you’re perplexed by R, check out my online course, Impossible R Made Possible at thespeechumbrella.com. By the way, all of my R and L products are 10% off in August and September of 2022, put in the code elementary in the coupon code area, you can also find them at Teachers Pay Teachers at The Speech Umbrella.
But back to today. Today, we’re going to talk about L. And we’re going to especially talk about that strange sounding distorted final L that makes us all wanna pull our hair out. You’re in for a treat today because my guest is Angie Lewis and she is an L magician. We worked together a few years ago and her clients would emerge from the therapy room sounding so good.
I’m talking absolutely no L distortions in the final position at all, when I would be thinking, how did you do that? So let me tell you a little bit about Angie. Angie’s been in the profession for 24 years. She is Prompt trained, and she’s also trained in Wilson reading. So she has a special interest in dyslexia and also in all things articulation, she currently works in the schools and she is here to dispense her L wisdom.
So let’s get going. Hi, Angie. Thanks for coming today.
Angie: Thank you, Denise, for having me. I really enjoy coming back here and talking with you and especially about the L.
Denise: So are there prerequisite motor skills that need to be in place before you start working on L and if so, what are they?
Angie: So one of the things I’ve worked with with the L, particularly they need to have independent movement between their tongue and their jaw and their lips. And so a lot of times for their errors, kids will do like an O sound for their L right? So you have, especially at the end of words or at the beginning, they’ll do the W sound, right?
So when they make a W sound or an O their lips are rounding into this circle, but for an L, it’s really a movement through the tongue. And so they need to be able to move their tongue up and down without rounding their lips for an O or a W sound or being able to move their tongue separately from their jaw, being able to make that lifting motion.
Denise: Okay. And so are there some special exercises you do or anything like that to get them to that point?
Angie: What I like to use is, I have like a little mouth puppet, right, that all the speech pathologists usually probably would have in our…
Denise: And your kids see that and they just wanna play with it. Yes.
Angie: Well, mine’s well used. And I just show them how, and I lift the little tongue up and have it go down. I also have them use a mirror so they can see in contrast between that O or that W and watch their lips round forward, and then also just watching their tongue lift up. So I’ll have them just hold their jaw open a little bit and watch the mirror. I’m like, okay, you can’t use your lips. You can’t use your jaw and just lift your tongue, like LA LA LA opening it and going up and down.
Denise: Those are all great things that I love to do that I also like to have clients put their finger on their chin to stabilize their jaw sometimes if it persists in going up. But what I found and what’s puzzling is sometimes they get the independent jaw, but they still have that distortion. And I think that’s lip related. That we’ve got to look at the jaw and the lips.
Angie: And the lips, yeah. Yeah. If they have any slight movement at all in the lips coming forward, just a little bit like for either a W or for an O sound it’ll sound distorted.
Denise: Oh, so we’re looking for the very, very slightest movement.
Angie: Yeah. Slightest movement. Yeah. So they need to have that total relaxed and kind of in a neutral position, so we, we work on that a lot, just keeping that very still. And so when I’m teaching, like the beginning L sound, I use the L with certain vowel sounds that help you so you’re not moving your lips, right?
So vowel sounds that move your lips are like the O right. Or even retracting your lips is hard for kids. So like your E’s or your A’s any of vowels that have lip movement with the L is gonna be hard for them. So I stick to more neutral vowels like ahh or uhh or ihh, ahh is a little bit iffy cuz you move your lips a little bit, but that still works also. But so like for example, just saying like the word ‘luh’ for love, you know, we’ll work on just that constant vow, LA LA LA, and then we’ll do a whole bunch of words with the uh vowel in it. And then we can maybe if something’s easier, like maybe the a or the a, or the ih, or the eh, we’ll do those too. And then it can keep your lips straight and neutral, and that really gives them that stability that they need to keep everything still and not moving.
Denise: So what age do you look at for beginning to work on L?
Angie: I start even in preschool, I’m not directly, you know, having a goal for L necessarily, but there’s lots of words that we’ll model and it’s fun for the little preschool kids to try to copy. Okay. You can’t move your mouth, you gotta keep it still and just move your tongue LA LA LA. And we just practiced, you know, that beginning L sound and then with the vowel and kids just love that. And it just kind of builds, you know, some prerequisite things to help them with that tongue movement.
That’s separate from the lips and the jaw. And looking at like the Goldman Fristo Tesla articulation, those norms, they show that 90% of girls, by age two, between two and two and a half that beginning, that L sound can start to emerge. And then for boys, that’s like around age three, so it’s coming, right, there’s gonna be errors, but you know, it’s coming. I typically don’t put it as a, like an IEP goal or something until maybe kindergarten, I’ll do a beginning L or middle L sound, especially if the child’s name starts with an L where they have an L in their name. that’s important for them to be able to say. With the final L, I usually do that a little bit later, cuz that is a more difficult sound it’s later developing. According to norms, that final L for girls can be in like by age five, between five and six is when they get that mastery. And for boys it’s even later. So between ages , seven to eight, so, which is just showing how hard that final L sound is for kids. The beginning, L middle L it’s it’s different, it’s a different L than the ending L.
Denise: Which is why we’re gonna talk about it.
Angie: There is a lot more tension in that final L sound. So like for instance, for, like the word ball, you know, if you think about it or just make the production in your mouth, ball. You can do it with your tongue just kind of curling slightly, but it doesn’t necessarily have to come all the way up to the top. Whereas the beginning L sounds or the middle L sounds like for lion or luck or pillow that L really touches on that alveolar ridge. So in working with kids, I work and focus more on bringing their tongue up.
Denise: Okay, so suppose you’ve gone through all the beginning Ls, even low and lou, and all the medial Ls, now you’re at final L and it’s still not sounding good. So what are you going to do now?
Angie: Right. So a lot of the times, the reason why that ending L doesn’t sound good is because the kids are still making like an OL sound, ‘ull’, so like pencil, even though they’re lifting their tongue up and the placement is correct, they still have that rounded lip movement for that, like an O L sound right? Pencil, apple, and so it can still sound immature. And so what I help kids get is more of a UL sound, this ull, so pens ull, app ull, and it’s just a slight little difference, but it makes a world of difference in being able to sound like they have the L at the end and not just the placement cuz you can look and like, oh yeah, their tongue is up. Why isn’t it sounding right? So just that working with the vowel sound and this last school year, the Articulation Station Hive App, they have some consonant vowel and vowel consonant, little syllable work to work on. And so they have the, the greatest picture that is really like stuck with a lot of my clients is, for that ull sound instead of the OL sound and they have a picture of this person being sick, right, holding their stomach and having this really sick face and going ull, and have this ull sound and it’s. The kids just really get that, you know, trying to say oh, it’s not an oh, it’s a u, it don’t sometimes that doesn’t mean a lot to kindergartners or first graders or second graders. But having that sick person’s face is just really motivating for them.
Oh, I get it, ull, ull, and so another thing that I teach them to help that differentiation is for the beginning L sound and the middle, your tongue is very relaxed. It lifts up and it, and it releases right. So lion, luck, pillow, it’s just up and then down. But whereas the final L sound, there’s more tension in it. The back of the tongue kind of bunches back and the front of the tongue is held there and I tell them to hold it. So, so like fall, we have to hold it. So we practice holding it and then getting that vowel sound, ull, ull, and so we practice that a lot, over and over.
Denise: This is reminding me a little bit of the difference between prevocalic R and vocalic R. Yes, you need to extend your breath all the way through to get the vocalic R. If you chop it off, it’s distorted. It’s not there. Right. And the tongue may or may not do something a little bit differently with the vocalic R too.
Angie: Yep. Yeah, that’s definitely the beginning R sound, it’s kind of the same thing at the beginning R is a little more relaxed for them and it’s easier sometimes for kids to do that, you know, ran run rich, you know, versus at the ending, they do have to hold it and there is more tension. So car, yeah. And if I tell ’em to hold that sound and not let it release, cuz then you get, I teach my kids also about schwa, right? Car-ruh, like we just car. We want it just to hold that R sound. So I do that the same with the L sound. So we have pill. We hold that. We don’t say pill luh, right. There’s not a release at the end or, you know.
Denise: That’s great. That’s great. Because I have found it to not be super effective to try and get vocalic R by saying car-ruh, cause they’re just saying a prevocalic R yeah. You can help bridge. Yeah, you can, you can bridge it. In fact, I have in my R workbook, I have, a bridging worksheet that shows how they can do that and some kids really get it, but unless you can hold the R or the L and not put the schwa on, they don’t really get it. They’re not getting that final sound. Right. Yeah. So that really helps me understand.
Angie: Yeah, lifting it up, holding it there, like not releasing, I’m like just hold it freeze. Right. And then getting the more UL, the ull sound versus the O L sound at the end, ull.
Denise: Do you give them any direction on how their tongue is placed a little bit differently, because I know the tongue is a little bit further back, but sometimes, some directions just confuse kids.
Angie: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t really say that with the kids. I, they kind of clue in more to having it be stronger. Right. We talk about flexing the muscles. And so they’re kind of flexing their tongue muscles.
We talk about that and just holding it there, lifting it up and holding it there behind the teeth, is enough information for children to figure that out. And it’ll just naturally pull back and you’ll get that sound.
Denise: Great, cuz I hate to overload ’em with too many directions and some of our directions are more helpful than others.
Angie: So, but I have found that the hardest final L sounds for kids to do are when we finally get, you know, past the where we’re not using the lips, right, we’re doing the ull, the, L L things like that, but the O L when we get to that, because you, now, we got to add in the lip rounding, right, but still keep the L quality. And then also the, all sound right. The A LL ball, fall, fall, mm-hmm . And I think those two are the hardest, because it requires a little more jaw stability in where you’re opening your jaw a little bit wider for awe or O and we work more, a lot on the vowel sounds to get that, cuz sometimes when they’re struggling with that, the word like bowl, like a bowl of cereal, they have to drop their jaw a little bit to get a nice O. I just tell ’em okay. Round your lips, get that O bowl ull and then we get that ull at the end. So it’s the same ull, but we have to get the O first if that makes sense. A lot of kids just wanna jump right to the end and get bowl. bull and it just comes out wrong, right. It sounds assorted still. So I’m like, okay, make sure we’re really rounding for the O, bowl bowl. And then we start confining it and getting those two sounds together, but they have to hear that they’re still an ull at the end, even though they’re getting an O or like for the a sound pall ball, they have to get a nice relaxed ahh sound first before they can get that ull again. So if that makes sense.
Denise: Mm-hmm. So for, with the O, they have to move from the lip rounding to totally neutral, relaxed lips. Yeah, to get that final L, a word like goal, which I always hate saying on this podcast, cuz I always think I sound weird. Goal. It’s a hard word.
Angie: Yeah. And kids that have to make sure they get a nice open, more goal. You need to have your lips rounded for the O but also your, your chin drops just a little bit to make that more open, rounded O sound goal. And then your lips will kind of relax a little bit and your tongue will tense to get that ull sound, goal. So that’s really tricky. I have to, I had to create my own page, with just O and then O LD blends at the end two, like gold and sold. And those are the hardest.
Denise: I was going to ask you about the LD. Yeah, yeah. Super tricky.
Angie: Yeah. So if a word blends at the ends, I, you know, they have your LF, LT, and LD sounds. And I find I don’t necessarily have to work on the L F those seem to come all on their own, but the LT is probably the next easiest one for them to do, like for melt or built, things like that. But the O L D are the hardest ones for kids to do, or O LT. So, you know, you’re bolt or your gold or your hold, mold. There’s a lot of those words that are particularly hard because you’ve got that O the L and then that consonant blend with that D.
Denise: It’s the mess of co-articulation, it’s just a hot mess of co-articulation.
Angie: Yes. But I find if they really focus, make sure you get the O sound first, bold, then they can get the ull right. That sound that we were working on that UL sound and then gold. And then just, I tell ’em to add just a little D at the end and that helps them to focus more on the O L sound than the final D cause I think they wanna just jump to the ending letter, go-d, and so the L disappears, I tell, oh, your L disappeared, you know, where’d it go? It turned into an O or it turned into a w or something and like, oh, go-d. Oh, it disappeared. I need to hold that L that tension there. Right, hold it, and not releasing it gold. And then add that tiny D at the end.
Denise: Well, and that totally makes sense because L is a semi-vowel. Vowels take longer to produce, so that makes total sense. Yeah. Don’t let the L disappear. The emphasis is on the L because our plosives happen so fast. The D the Ts.
Angie: Yeah. Yeah. It helps him just say, oh, that’s just a little sound at the end. We wanna, I emphasize the little and then emphasize that the L and the O will be longer. And that’s the same with the A L sounds like call, but then we get to like called, so they’ll wanna skip co-d right to the end. Right. They just wanna get to that D sound. Oh, we gotta hold the L called and then, you know, there’s a lot of final ed endings that we don’t think about as a blend on those words.
Denise: So Angie, what about words that have their own syllable ending, like bubble trouble?
Angie: Yeah. So those are your syllabic Ls, right? They’re their own syllable, and so I do have a separate page that I work on with all those. So yeah, you have those consonant L E words. And you have different things at the end, so you have your S SLE like castle, you know, trouble bubble turtle, you have your TLE. So they don’t necessarily take as long because once they’ve mastered that ull sound, that UL sound at the end, they’re able to pick up on that really easy.
I just sometimes I’ll do clapping, you know, tru-bul, and so they can not try to do it as one word or something. They emphasize that, oh, there’s two parts and the L is all by itself. And we have that ull sound at the end. And once yeah, working on that UL sound, they can get so many other final L sounds because it really is part of every final L sound out there.
Denise: So that’s the foundation. I talk in this podcast so much about when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself. So the simple thing for right now would just be the ull. Yes. Just get that ull, speech therapist, get that final ull…
Angie: And think of not OL, UL, ull, that sick feeling, right? Ull…
Denise: And holding it, yes. Not letting it drop, holding it through till you get the full, complete sound. And then all these other complex things that we are pulling our hair out over are going to sort of resolve themselves with a little bit of attention.
Angie: There’s a speech pathologist who has a daughter with apraxia and her website is called Testy Yet Trying dot blogspot.com. And she just, all of her articulation pages, which are free to download, , are focused on just constant vowel, vowel constant or CVC words. I love her pages to start out with, cuz they’re simple, they’re clean, they’re nice. Um, and they really help kids get that L down first.
I also love the, the No Glamor Articulation book, cuz they’re also just black and white pages. There’s 20 words on a page and get lots of practice. So I’ll do their medial words. I also sometimes will use their beginning. L sounds, their initial blends and final blends, but sometimes they’re just a mixture of a lot of different ones. And so sometimes they’ll need a target, a specific final blend.
So when kids are ready to move on to a little bit higher things, besides that, you know, in single words or vowels or syllables, I will also use, there’s another speech pathologist Lane Selgado, she has a blog called SLP materials dot blogspot.com. The things I love from her, she has a bunch of silly sentences, right? So she has these, some of ’em are free and some of them are for paying, but they’ll be, they have some dice you can roll, and then there’s like three parts to the sentence, right. And each, they make silly sentences. So you can roll a one in this column and then roll like a five in the next column and like an eight for the last column. So then you put sentences one, four, and eight together and make a sentence and it, it mixes up and it can be really silly and fun. The kids really like that and love the dice. She also has a few little stories that are good. We’re at that story level. Also, I use, Articulation Station or Articulation Station Hive. I love those, where kids love to do the matching, but then I have them make up their own sentences. as they make matches and of course there’s all the other levels on there. They carry your phrases, things like that. and then I also like there’s another website called Home Speech Home that I get all of their paragraph stories from.
So they also have an app I think, called the Word Vault that there’s some free things on there also that I just, that’s where I get my paragraph reading. So when we’re ready to work on L and paragraphs, I use those sites.
Denise: Those are some great resources. I will link to all of those in my show notes. I do remember that you were big on timings when we used to work together, do you still do timings?
Angie: I still do timings, when they get enough, you know, they can do all 20 right on the page correct by themselves without any help. Then for some kids it’s motivating to like, okay, let’s see how many you can do right in one minute. And I’ll time them for one minute. and they can just read all the words on the page and keep going until the timer goes off and that’s motivating for some kids to do that.
Denise: And I do it for R and I find it extremely helpful. They do need to be in the right spot. Yeah. They need to be able to be correct. Yeah. But it really, really makes a difference, when they can get to whatever their age is, if they’re nine, 90 words a minute, if they’re 10, a hundred words a minute, I don’t try more than a hundred words a minute, but right, yeah, that just integrates it into their speech so well.
Angie: Yeah, it gets it more automatic and fluent for them where they don’t have to think about it anymore.
Denise: Well, the pages that you use L plus all the vowels, I just wanted to put a plug in for my L workbook because I have got all of those. I’ve got beginning L followed by all the vowels, all the luh words, all the Y words, I think I have, um, 15 pictures per page. So I love that L workbook, which is a companion to the Impossible R Made Possible because L and R, hand in hand. We know as you work on one, the other can kind of improve. But sometimes L just needs its own really special attention paid to it.
Angie: Yeah. And if I have students that have difficulty with R and just are, are having a really hard time, especially the vocalic R, sometimes they can get the beginning R just fine, but when they’re really struggling with vocalic R it’s because they don’t have their final L. And so, I’ll work on that final L piece first and just go back to that. And then when I really can strengthen that and improve that, then they can get their vocalic Rs better.
Denise: Because it is kind of the same concept, as we just talked about kind of the same concept, kind of the same movement.
Angie: Yeah. And it might be easier to grasp for them cuz R is kind of ambiguous a little bit for them, but the L is a little more clear with that tongue movement and pulling it back and holding it. It just kind of gets them ready and preps them for that vocalic R.
Denise: So that is a great, great therapy strategy. So if they’re really struggling with that vocalic R, which so many kids can, even if we’ve got prevocalic R dead on, look at their final L and get that resolved, and maybe that vocalic R will just come like that.
Angie: I think people just miss that, I think for a while, you know, before I really had a lot of students that had L you know, you think L is an L right. It’s the same at the beginning, at the end. And so a lot of times, I don’t think that final L is screened. It’s not looked at because I think, oh, they’ve got the beginning of it, they can say lion or look, or they can say pillow and, oh, their L’s fine. But no, sometimes they’ll, those will come first and it takes another year or two to get that final L sound really strong.
Denise: And yet the odd thing is we have tons of materials for vocalic R. We have tons of materials. We recognize it’s its own little beast. Yeah, they’re the same, but they’re not the same. Yeah.
Angie: So we should be recognizing that final L sound is the same as we do those vocalic R sounds.
Denise: While we’re talking about L and R materials. I want to put a plug in for my L workbook. It is based on the same premise as my R workbook. And I have exercises to achieve the tongue and jaw independence. A lot of it is the same things you would do for someone who’s struggling to learn R.
All of the L words are organized by vowel in vowel specific context. My vowel specific context. I mean, I have 10 contexts for initial L so I have a low words, law words. lau words, and on and on. And I have a whole bunch of final L context also, including those tricky O. L D words and the, all the words that Angie and I were talking about, and I also have syllabic L words to practice. So take a look at my L workbook. Book and see if that’s something you’d like to get right now in the month of September, 2022, you get 10% off of all my L and R If you put in the code word elementary in the coupon area.
This has been really, really helpful. I really, really love your tip. The main thing is get that ull.
Angie: Yes, the UL sound not O L cause it can sound different on our, the podcast here.
Denise: Watch their lips. Yes.
Thank you so much, Angie, for teaching us about L especially final L. I love your tip about just getting that schwa L the ull, and holding it, not letting it go, making the full sound happen and the whole concept that it’s really like vocalic R. I think we can really understand. Now, if any listeners out there have questions for Angie, if there’s something about L that she didn’t answer, then you can just email me at [email protected]. I’ll funnel those questions to Angie and she’ll give me the answer and I’ll get it to you. Thanks so much for coming, Angie.
Angie: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I love talking about L and helping people really understand that final L sound and really focusing on that to make their therapy better and to help kids improve and really get that precise sound that they’re looking for.
Denise: It’s really what we do with final L kind of helps them put the icing on the cake. Final R, final L. Now you’re graduated. Right? Because parents are going, ah, I’m hearing some, I’m gonna hearing something. And if we’re not real confident with final L we’re like, yeah, you’re hearing it, but I don’t know what’s do about it.
So what if they can’t say those 10 words that have O L D at the end? I don’t know. Yeah. What if they can’t say sold gold fold perfectly? Um, I just wanna graduate them. Yeah. Well, now we know how to fix that. Yep.
Thanks for listening to The Speech umbrella podcast. Remember to visit thespeechumbrella.com and check out the L and R products, which are 10% off through August and September of 2020. Put in the code word elementary at checkout to get that discount, and remember when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself. And that’s what we’ve learned, how to do today with L we’ve learned how to master that simple ull and those complex final Ls are gonna be taken care of.
Thank you so much for listening to The Speech Umbrella podcast this week and join me next time as I talk about cluttering.
I am a therapist and entrepreneur, clinic owner, published author, and creator of speech therapy materials.
The Speech Umbrella is run by Denise Stratton, Reach out with any questions.