While waiting to meet a speech-language pathologist, here are some recommendations and advice:
1. Ask your child's pediatrician or your family doctor for a consultation request in audiology for a hearing test. Such a test is generally recommended from the outset for children who have language or speech sounds difficulties to make sure they hear well.
2. Read to your child as often as possible. It's one of the best language stimulation activities. Choose books following your child's interests and make sure that they are adapted for his or her age or developmental level.
3. To stimulate your child's language, put yourself at his or her height and make eye contact, follow his or her interests, ask open questions (for which the answer is more than one word), reformulate your child's sentences correctly, accentuating the word or sound that needs to be corrected, lengthen his or her sentences by adding one or a few words and congratulate him or her on small successes.
4. Contact your CLSC to find out if there are programs (such as the Agir Tôt Program for children younger than 5) which could answer your child's needs. Make sure you clearly convey to them your concerns, the difficulties observed and the impacts on your child's daily functioning, your child's and family's strengths, the support deemed necessary and any document (educational file, assessment reports) if you have any. You can ask the childcare worker, the kindergarden teacher or another educational or health specialist who knows your child to support you in your efforts.
5. Ask your questions to a speech-language pathologist from the Quebec Association of Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists by writing at the following address: questionsorthophonie@aqoa.qc.ca
6. Consult the websites on our Useful Links page.