Services
Drawing on the expertise of Northwestern faculty and researchers, the LLC is able to offer specialized services that can help enable your child to become a better reader and listener.
As a first-time LLC client, your child undergoes an assessment of a broad range of perceptual, language, and reasoning abilities. We target the following key areas:
- oral language
- word-finding skills
- hearing sensitivity and auditory processing
- middle-ear health
- speech understanding under noisy conditions
- BioMARK evaluation of neurophysiologic (brain-based) responses to sound
- inner-ear function (otoacoustic emissions)
- oral reading of words and passages
- phonological awareness and processing (recognizing speech sounds)
- spelling skills
- cognitive abilities
Based on the assessment results, your child then participates in a combination of reading and auditory training. One-on-one sessions, planned under the guidance of LLC clinicians, are held three times per week at the clinic.
The LLC’s training program has two components:
Training the brain to listen
Using the Phonomena auditory training system on a computer in the LLC lab, your child practices the phonological awareness skills that are strong predictors of reading and spelling abilities. As your child grows more adept at perceiving the diverse sounds of language, the computer program raises the level of difficulty, ensuring continued progress.
Training the brain to read
Your child receives individualized training designed to provide multisensory, systematic instruction in several key components of reading:
- phonological awareness
- phonics
- fluency
- vocabulary and comprehension
The design of the Specialized Program Individualizing Reading Experience (SPIRE) [pdf] literacy training program allows your child to progress through successively more challenging learning levels and provides opportunities to practice new skills at each stage.
Completion of training is followed by an assessment of your child’s progress.
