When you teach your clients conjunctions, a little knowledge can become a dangerous thing. Sometimes clients start throwing conjunctions around like they’re going out of style, and their stories become one big mess. This episode describes ways to help clients get conjunctions under control. Be sure to check out the Simple Tools video, Conjunction Function, showing a fun idea to make conjunctions visual.

 — Useful Links —

Grammarly

Dr. Karen

Simon’s Cat

Episode 36: When Every Word Counts

Simple Tools with Denise: Conjunction Function 

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

 Denise: Welcome to The Speech Umbrella, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 plus years. I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and along the way, I’ve worked long and hard to become a better therapist. Join me as we explore the many topics that fall under our umbrella as SLPs. I want to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness.

Hello, and welcome to episode 60 of The Speech Umbrella podcast. I’m so glad you’re tuning in today because we are talking about a topic near and dear to me, conjunctions, where would we be without conjunctions? To quote from Grammarly, conjunctions are words that link other words, phrases or clauses together. Without conjunctions, you’d be forced to express every complex idea in a series of short, simplistic sentences. I like cooking. I like eating. I don’t like washing dishes afterward. But after we worked so hard to get our clients using conjunctions and more than short, simplistic sentences, do your clients sometimes end up sounding like this? “Then she went to the store and then she got some cookies and then she went home and then she didn’t want the cookies, so she put them away.” That’s not quite what we’re after. It’s a case of what I call runaway conjunctions. The sentence just gets away from them and it’s often with using then and so. So our problem is how do we teach the art of using well chosen conjunctions along with sentences of realistic length?

And by the way, I call them connecting words with clients. It’s just easier for them to grasp the meaning and connecting is a familiar word to them. Well, today I’m going to share some ideas for helping clients thoughtfully choose conjunctions and control sentence length. Here’s a breakdown of what I’ll cover today: some research about conjunctions, the kinds of conjunctions and ways to categorize them, teaching tips, specifically ways to avoid the runaway conjunctions. A lot of our clients are visual learners and I have a fun way to make it visual I’ll be telling you about. Karen Dudek-Brannan, who was called Dr. Karen on social media has some good information on conjunctions, and she’s written about some research that has been compiled on conjunctions. Researchers were studying which language skills would have the biggest impact, the most positive effect on kids’ language and on their ability to read and succeed academically. And they found out that conjunctions specifically subordinating conjunctions had a really big effect.

So it stands to reason we should spend some time working on conjunctions. Conjunctions are categorized into three different types. There are the coordinating conjunctions, and these are the ones we commonly call the fanboys to help us remember for and nor but or yet so. Then we’ve got correlative conjunctions, and those are the ones where you have to both and, either or, neither nor, and so forth. Then here’s a list of some subordinating conjunctions because this list can get really long. Some subordinating, conjunctions are after all the, as if, as long as, as much as because before and the list goes on and on. If grammar is not your thing, if you’re not a grammar nerd, then thinking about all these different kinds of conjunctions could make your head spin and explaining the rules of use would be as confusing to our students as trying to explain every single spelling rule.

And we learned grammar rules by exposure and by practice rather than by memorizing rules. So I categorize some of these conjunctions differently for teaching purposes. And I just choose a few to begin teaching conjunctions. Most often, I use these connecting words, then, when, after while, because so, but although, and I explained that we can divide these connecting words into three kinds, words that talk about time and sequence, words that explain why, and words that mean something unexpected happened. I’ve got a chart dividing these words up, and by the way, you can get that chart on my free resource library at thespeechumbrella.com. The words that talk about time and sequence are then, while, after, and when, and words that we use to explain why are so, and because. And words, that means something unexpected happened are but and although.

Now I realize that that is not a complete definition and explanation of all the ways that we use the word but, but it does suffice for the kids were working at, at this level. Now that I’ve covered how I like to categorize these connecting words, let’s go into teaching tips. One thing I really recommend that you do, is you practice using these connecting words in individual sentences before you let them loose on a whole summary, they’ll just go off in the weeds if they’re not prepared to use that many sentences together and try and put conjunctions in. So then I’ll take this connecting word chart. I’ll explain in what situations we use each kind of word, and then we will choose a favorite movie, a favorite book, or we’ll watch a little video like Simon’s Cat video, and we’ll choose something to talk about.

So let’s just take Star Wars for an example. I have a lot of teenagers who love Star Wars. So I’ll say, okay, let’s think of something unexpected that happened in Star Wars or let’s think of something that you need to explain why it happened, or let’s think of something that happened after something or something that happened at the same time.

An example of something unexpected will be Kylo Ren killed his father. Let’s use the word but, and figure out how we would talk about that. So we might say Han Solo was Kylo Ren’s father, but he killed him anyway. Now let’s figure out how we would use that with although, although Han Solo was Kylo Ren’s father, he killed him. Now, what needs explaining in Star Wars? Maybe we need to explain why Luke wouldn’t fight Darth Vader. So let’s use the word because. Luke wouldn’t fight Darth Vader because he knew there was good in him. Now let’s use the word so, we can explain the same thing with using the word so. Luke knew there was good and Darth Vader, so he refused to fight him.

And they have to figure out how to switch the order of the clauses when you change from so to because, and then I say, well how could you use one of the time or sequence words? What’s something that happened at the same time. Well we know that wall Han Solo was frozen in carbonite, his friends were planning to rescue him.

Now word order is challenging here. And this is where my visual activity comes in. I use tinker toys to help them visualize how to put these clauses together and how to get the word order correct. So, this is how I do it. For each sentence. You will only need three or four tinker toys. You have two sticks and each stick represents one of the clauses that you’re going to link.

You have a circular piece that represents the connecting word, and you will need a short connecting tube to connect two sticks together. If the sentence begins with a connecting word, rather than being in the middle of the sentence. Let’s take, for example, the sentence “Luke wouldn’t fight Darth Vader because he knew there was good in him.”

You start with a stick and that represents “Luke wouldn’t fight Darth Vader.” Then you use a circle that stands for the word, because, and then you put in another stick, “he knew there was good in him.” Now let’s take a sentence that begins with a connecting word. Let’s take the sentence “although Han solo was Kyla Ron’s father, he killed him anyway.” So you’re going to start with the circle for the word although. Then you need a stick Han solo was Kyla run’s father, and then you need that little short connecting tube that will connect two sticks. And it kind of acts as a comma here, and you put that in, he killed him anyway. Although I really like using sagas, like Star Wars and Harry Potter, because there is so much to talk about and so many opportunities to use conjunctions, sometimes kids just get lost with these. They get really muddled about what happened in what Star Wars movie, and what happened in what Harry Potter book. So I also really love to use short videos and the Simon’s Cat videos are the best. There are so many opportunities to use connecting words with the Simon’s Cat videos, and the kids love them, they just giggle while they watch them. So you don’t need to have someone who’s versed in the movies, or they have a favorite book because lots of our kids don’t have a favorite book. You can just pull up these Simon’s Cat videos, watch one that’s two or three minutes, and then go about creating sentences.

If you want to see a visual of how this tinker toy activity works, watch my simple tools video, or maybe you’d like to show it to parents so that they can see how they could do this with their child at home. My next teaching tip is clients need to stick to just two clauses when they’re starting this.

So many of them just want to add and add and add and they don’t know when to end their sentence. So I tell them they need to walk before they run. They need to run before they can fly. And you’ve really got to be firm about this because they don’t know when to stop. Run-on sentences are part of what they do.

Here’s a story about a client who really got lost with the run-on sentences. And she had been doing really, really well and using lots of different conjunctions. And I kind of let her loose, do a bigger summary than what she had done and oh, it just all went haywire and she just was going and then, and so, and then, and so, and her summary went on and on and on, and I thought, oh my goodness, what happened? She was doing so well. And I looked at it afterwards because I was writing down what she said. She was dictating to me and I thought there’s like eight different things going on here that she needs to correct. And I can’t tell her she needs to fix all these eight different things at once, you know, cause her brain will explode.

In fact, mine’s kind of exploding thinking about all this. And so this kind of runs in the vein of the simplest solution is sometimes the best. And so I thought, what if I just told her she couldn’t use the word then. She can use any other connecting words she wants, but just no thens. Well, having her not use then fixed everything.

She was writing such beautiful, such concise summaries. She even snuck a relative clause in there, and I had never even taught her about relative clauses yet. It just turned out that then was her kryptonite after three or four weeks of telling her that she couldn’t use then, I relaxed that rule. And ever since then she’s kept it in proportion, she doesn’t overuse it, her sentences aren’t run-on, they’re informative and they’re concise. It’s a beautiful thing. My next teaching tip is, teach them how we use so to explain cause and effect, because kids are just throwing the word so in everywhere, they’re almost using it like the word and, and like, they throw the word like in, in order to teach them the real use of so, you’ve got to practice using it to explain cause and effect.

That’s not to say they’re not going to use the word so in other ways, I’ve done often myself, even on this podcast, I am sure. But just make sure they know how to use it, to explain why. I also really love to use recording themselves and listening back and then evaluating so they can hear what they said and they can go back and they can fix it.

Now you can also have them write sentences using all the above techniques. I recommend you start with them writing just one sentence at a time, and you could use post-it notes and write one word per post-it note, so you can easily rearrange them and put words in the right order. If they’re not in the right order.

I have a podcast about that actually, it’s episode 36, called When Every Word Counts about how to use post-it notes when you’re putting sentences together. So you might want to catch that. Finally, my last teaching tip has to do with clients who stutter and clutter, because they frequently have run on sentences and the longer the sentences are the less control they seem to have and things start to fall apart. So if you haven’t explored that with your clients who stutter and clutter, if you haven’t explored how well put together their sentences are, how well they understand using connecting words. And if they’re using run on sentences, I would take a look at that. Run on sentences and difficulty using connecting words are often big contributing factors to their disfluency.

Well, let’s wrap things up. I know we only talked about using eight connecting words, but seriously, that’s all you need to get started because when you master the simple conjunctions, the complex ones take care of themselves.

So they start to figure out how to use words like if, and the harder ones. Now, If you’re interested in a connecting word, bingo game I have, you’ll find that on my free resource library, that’s got the eight connecting words on it, and you can also find that connecting words categorization chart I talked about where I categorize words into time and sequence and to explaining why and into words that mean something unexpected happened. So go to thespeechumbrella.com and go into the free resource library. And you can get those two items. Thanks for listening and talk to you next time.

Dan: Thanks for listening to The Speech Umbrella. We invite you to sign up for the free resource library at thespeechumbrella.com. You’ll get access to some of Denise’s best tracking tools, mindfulness activities, and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for free at thespeechumbrella.com. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, subscribe, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts and other podcast directories.