What is the LIPS Program and How is it Used During Speech Therapy?
The LiPS program, also known as the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program, is an intervention approach designed to promote phonemic awareness and support the development of literacy skills. While the term phonological awareness refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken elements of words, phonemic awareness refers to the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (known as phonemes) in spoken words. Both are essential skills for effective speech and supporting the process of learning to read.
Some individuals struggle to produce or sound out certain phonemes when speaking or reading, often causing them to guess or rely on pictures to inform them. While this can sometimes be caused by cognitive challenges or other conditions, such as dyslexia, it can often be attributed to what is referred to as weak phonemic awareness. Speech therapy can strengthen phonemic awareness and support the development of literacy skills, making it one of the most valuable therapeutic services available. If you or a loved one could use communication support, connect with one of our qualified speech and language pathologists by scheduling your free introductory call today!
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is a foundational literacy skill that involves understanding and processing individual speech sounds, producing these sounds in isolation, and then being able to blend and manipulate them. This skill is a building block for reading and writing skill development as it involves the ability to read and understand words, which informs how a word is spelled and spoken. Speech therapy can include activities that target the development of phonemic awareness, such as:
Recognizing Words that Begin with the Same Sound (such as sock, sale, and supper)
Identifying and Producing the First or Last Sound in a Word (supper starts with ‘s’ and ends with ‘r’)
Segmenting Words into Individual Sounds (understanding that “cat” is three sounds combined /c/ /a/ /t/ )
Combining Distinct Sounds to Produce a Word (taking /d/ /o/ /g/ to produce the word “dog”)
Individuals who haven’t mastered this basic skill commonly find learning to read, write, and spell quite difficult. Speech therapy can help to develop phonemic awareness and encourage vocabulary growth and reading and listening comprehension abilities. All of these skills are essential for the achievement of strong literacy skills and academic success. Get yourself or your child literacy support by scheduling your free introductory call today!
What is the Goal of the LiPS Program?
The LiPS program was created to provide a clear process for developing phonemic awareness and literacy. The ultimate goal of the LiPS program is to promote the development of the skills required to become strong learners, clear speakers, fluent readers, competent spellers, and confident students.
Is LiPS Evidence-Based?
The LiPS program has been found to positively impact phonemic awareness, reading fluency, spelling, overall learning abilities, and speech. The LiPS program uses a multi-sensory approach including visual and tactile objects as well as auditory feedback to produce and verify the correct word sounds and sound articulation. This means becoming familiar with how speech sound production looks and feels and empowering children to self-monitor their own skills when speaking, spelling, or tackling reading or writing tasks.
This familiarity and understanding of speech sound production informs literacy and learning skills, making the path to fluent reading, writing, and spelling more accessible. The foundation of the LiPS program is the idea that phonemic awareness is an essential skill for the development of literacy and general learning.
What Can Benefit from the LiPS Approach?
While this program is typically aimed at school-aged or younger children, some adults who struggle with phonemic awareness can also benefit from this approach. LiPS is typically used to benefit individuals who:
- Struggle with Speech Fluency
- Present Phonemic Difficulties
- Have Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
- Have Central Auditory Processing Disorders (CAPD)
- Are Diagnosed with Other Learning Disabilities
- Are Hearing Impaired
This program can also be used in a supplementary fashion for typically developing children who are working on their early literacy skills.
Where is LiPS used?
The LiPS program is frequently implemented in school settings, literacy clinics, private tutoring environments, and speech therapy. When used in speech therapy to promote phonemic awareness and speech sound production, it may involve the use of mouth pictures that model the correct positioning of the tongue, lips, and jaw to produce certain speech sounds and alphabet flashcards or letter magnets to focus on mastering individual sounds first. From there, two-sound sequences are worked on, progressing in complexity and difficulty as each sound or sound combination is mastered.
Depending on the age of the individual, the approach can vary somewhat.
Horizontal Approach: This approach involves learning all consonant and vowel sounds together. Once all the sounds have been learned, the focus shifts to mastering, blending, and manipulating specific sounds and sound combinations.
Vertical Approach: A vertical approach refers to learning specific groups of consonants and vowels and then working on blending and manipulating those specific sounds and sound combinations before continuing on to another group.
The goal is to build phonemic awareness, allowing the individual to rely on phonology and move away from depending on sight words and pictures to inform them.
Why is the LiPS Approach Effective?
This technique is widely used and considered to be effective because of its focus on developing fundamental skills that promote literacy and support speech and language skills. With the benefit of daily practice and regular speech therapy appointments, individuals can gradually progress to more complex and difficult sound combinations, eventually moving onto syllables, words, and full sentences when reading, writing, and speaking.
It also allows the individual opportunities to build on self-monitoring, self-correcting, and general independent learning skills. The ability to recognize errors when they occur provides chances to learn at the moment and improve immediately, ensuring that those errors aren’t reinforced by repetition or muscle memory.
Mirrors are also common in LiPS, and they provide visual information about the optimal placement of the articulators (lips, tongue, and jaw) for the production of certain speech sounds. This, in combination with mouth photos, letter cards, or alphabet magnets, promotes fluent speech and phonemic awareness, leading to stronger literacy skills and enhanced learning abilities.
The LiPS program is highly customizable, and can easily fit into other speech therapy treatment approaches, often being used alongside other techniques. If you’d like to learn more about how speech therapy can promote literacy skills or are ready to get started, connect with us by scheduling your free introductory call today!