It is important to recognize and understand some common characteristics associated with CAPD in order to help treat, compensate, and/or remediate
- Reduced sound recognition, blending, reading, and writing skills
- Difficulty with multi-tasking (e.g., moving the body and listening to directions)
- Reduced organizational skills and organizing responses
- Reversals of sequenced events and letters
- Reduced motor skills (holding a pencil, use of body in space)
- Reduced receptive language skills (understanding of language presented)
- Improve acoustic clarity of signal - use of a FM system that includes speaker set up around the room has been proven to benefit children with CAPD and children with typical processing by focusing on the teacher and reducing the accentuation on other environmental distracters.
- Providing student with visual and written cues - For example, if a child is reversing /b/ and /d/, I would suggest placing a written cue card showing the letters and each used a word showing the difference in direction and sound (d=dog, b=boy). Another example may include a written list of rules on what to do to increase focus and listening to the teacher (During class I will: (1) keep eyes on the teacher when I hear her voice, (2) pick out the important words in what is being said, (3) sit forward and still in my chair to have good attention, etc.
- Repeating directions – If a student is having difficulty with following multiple step directions, I would have the teacher repeat directions as necessary, and then have the child repeat directions back to the teacher. This ensures the auditory message has been kept in memory and has reached the student in tact. Rephrase information when needed.
- Evaluate the classroom environment – Determine what the educational environment is like, what sounds are evident. Reduce background information.
- Provide a note taker or allow the child to tape-record lectures
- Use preferential seating
- Check frequently for comprehension of stories, directions, lessons
- Make appropriate use of multimodality cues and hands-on demonstrations for students
- Pre-teach new information and vocabulary
A student with CAPD is typically seen by a speech-language pathologist (phonetic work, receptive language, etc), occupational therapist (to work with fine motor and writing skills), and/or physical therapist (limb and motor movement). These specialized interventions can greatly help students with CAPD, especially if the clinician is working in collaboration with the teacher on finding strategies and what works for a specific student. The following are some therapy ideas for helping a student with CAPD:
- Auditory closure activities – to assist the child in learning, help student to fill in missing components of a message in order to arrive at a meaningful whole
- Phoneme Training – help the student develop accurate phonemic representation and speech-to-print skills. Activities like minimal contrast pair discrimination, identifying sounds in all positions of words, etc.
- Temporal Patterning Training – Train the student to discriminate differences in, analyze, and imitate rhythmic patterns of auditory stimuli
- Receptive language – building vocabulary, reading comprehension skills, etc.