Get ready for an amazing tool to help assess a learner’s echoic skills in terms of syllable complexity and then moreover help guide users to create a speech program!
From the author, Dr Barbara Esch, who created the EESA for the VB-MAPP comes a revised EESA Assessment and a Program Planner. As our SLPs have large caseloads wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to assist in some way with designing a speech program? Instead of creating a program from scratch, now SLPs can check and tweak a speech program that non-trained SLPs can create independently using this EESAPP.
EESAPP stands for Early Echoic Skills Assessment and Program Planner. The revised EESA assessment is a test comprising 5 groups that assess the learner’s ability to echo different words based on their syllable complexity (the number of syllables, the number of different vowel and consonant sounds) as well as the learner’s ability to say a certain number of syllables on one breath.
From this assessment the program planner guides users, especially non-SLPs (Speech Language Pathologists) to create speech programs, and word shells to increase the learner’s echoic repertoire. The EESAPP is not an articulation test. Instead, it looks at increasing the learner’s ability to say words fluently, even with understandable misarticulations (exactly the way we all learn to speak).
The EESAPP comes with a pre-test to assess whether your learner is ready to be assessed using this revised assessment in order to create a teaching program. If your learner is not making any sound in response to some sound that you say a few times in a row, it may not be time for this tool. Keep encouraging sounds and revisit the pre-test. The EESAPP is for any learner who needs to develop spoken words. Being able to echo opens up communication for our learners, and all learners deserve that! The better our learners become at saying words, and words that are important to them, the better their lives will be. It’s never too late to practice!
Check out the EESAPP App here and the EESA guide here.
