About this activity
Eight carryover tasks where the student does the catching: talk for sixty seconds about your weekend and tally every /s/ you catch yourself on; order food out loud as if at a drive-through and rate your own clarity; leave a twenty-second voicemail, play it back and count the errors; describe a highlight from a game and stop the moment you hear a slushy /s/; hold a two-minute conversation and rate how often you monitored without a cue.
How to use it in a session
Never supply the count. The whole design is that the student notices, and a clinician calling out errors replaces the skill being built. Start with the sixty-second monologue, which is long enough for monitoring to lapse and short enough to review. The voicemail task is the most convincing — students routinely believe a production was clear until they hear it played back. Twenty minutes covers two or three tasks with review.
What to listen for
Watch the gap between the student's count and yours. That number is the actual measure at this stage: a student who catches most of their own errors can self-correct outside the room, and one who catches none cannot, regardless of how accurate they are under direct attention. Notice whether monitoring survives the two-minute conversation, which is the longest task here for a reason.
Carrying it home
A phone is all that is needed. Recording a minute of talking and listening back, with nobody else involved, is the highest-value home practice at this stage and takes two minutes.
Questions
- What ages is this for?
- Sixth through twelfth grade, for residual /s/ at the carryover stage.
- Do I need an account?
- No, all eight tasks are free to use here.
- Why not just correct the errors?
- Because nobody corrects them outside the room. At the carryover stage the sound is usually available and simply not monitored, and correction from a listener does not build the noticing that has to happen alone.