Shape Coding Lite

Shape Coding by Susan Ebbels® is a flexible app designed for teachers and speech and language therapists / pathologists to use with children and young people who are having difficulties producing and understanding English sentence structure and grammar. It uses the Shape Coding by Susan Ebbels® system which has been show in several research projects to help children and young people with language disorders increase the length and complexity of sentences they can understand and use and improve the accuracy of their sentence production. The Shape Coding system and this app is designed primarily for children and young people with language disorders aged 7-20, but the system has also been successfully used with younger children, children with hearing impairment, children with Down syndrome and adults with acquired aphasia.

The Shape Coding system uses a visual coding system to show the rules for how words are put together in sentences, to develop the child’s understanding of spoken and written grammar and to develop their ability to use grammar successfully to express themselves. The system includes use of colours (parts of speech), arrows (tense and aspect) and shapes (syntactic structure). These are all included in the app, but the professional controlling the app can choose which features display for individual students. In future versions of the app we also aim to include the double lines which the system uses to distinguish plural nouns and verbs from their singular forms.

Multiple “teachers” can use the app and each “teacher” can have multiple students. The app is personalised for each student. The app is designed to be flexible so that professionals can adapt the levels and information displayed to suit the current levels and targets of individual students. There is no prescribed order of levels to work through, but the default first setting for each new student includes only basic sentence structures. Further complexity can be turned on (and off) by the “teacher” and individual settings are preserved for each student between uses.

The app is equipped with a basic set of words which can be inserted into the shapes to make sentences. However, additional words can be added for individual students, or indeed for all students working with a particular “teacher” (this can be useful for names and topics which are common across a class of students for example). These can either be added before a session with a student, or during a session and can be saved for future uses.

The app uses text-to-speech, so that students who struggle to read can also use the app.

For a demonstration of some of the features of the full version of the app (some of which are also enabled in the Lite version), see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmduVCQKGWA&feature=youtu.be

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This app assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the Shape Coding system. For more information see our webpage: http://www.moorhouseschool.co.uk/shape-coding , our short introductory video on how the system works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot-uekkC560 and accompanying slides: http://www.moorhouseschool.co.uk/uploads/Shapecoding%20/vodcast%20slides.pdf . Courses and a discussion group are also available for those who wish to find out more information.