Charles Van Riper Stuttering Theraphy

Stuttering modification therapy, also known as traditional stuttering therapy, was developed by Charles Van Riper between 1936 and 1958. It focuses on reducing the severity of stuttering by changing only the portions of speech in which a person stutters, to make them smoother, shorter, less tense and hard, and less penalizing.




This approach attempts to reduce the severity and fear of stuttering, and strives to teach stutterers to stutter with control, and not to make the stutterer fluent. Therapy using this approach tends to recognize the fear and avoidance of stuttering, and consequently spend a great deal of time helping stutterers through those emotions.




This approach generally does not eliminate stuttering events, but it helps minimize the impact and occurrence of stuttering.Since its creation, many clinicians have improvised on Charles Van Riper's basic stages and strategies. The stages of Van Riper's therapy can be summarized up in the acronym MIDVAS:




1.Motivation The person who stutters needs to assess his motivation for seeking therapy, and the speech-language pathologist (SLP) needs to help the person build and maintain the motivation necessary for successfully changing speech behaviors and attitudes.




2.Identification In this stage the client and clinician identify all of the behaviors, feelings, and attitudes that go along with the person's stuttering.




3.Desensitization Van Riper designed this stage to help drain away the negative emotions, the fears, and the anxieties associated with the act of stuttering. The most common strategy used in this phase is called voluntary stuttering, in which the person stutters on purpose.




4.Variation The individual is now able to change how he stutters and his reactions to the stuttering; he learns how to stutter differently in this phase. For example, if the person usually prolongs the initial "s" in "sister", the SLP may have him repeat the sound or stutter on a different sound in the word.




5.Approximation The individual now learns specific strategies to smooth out and minimize the moments of stuttering. The three most common strategies for altering the stuttering are cancellation, in which the person stutters all the way through a word, stops immediately.






Then repeats the word stuttering a different way; pull-out, in which the person gains control over a moment of stuttering while it is happening and smooths it out; and preparatory set, in which the person prepares for a moment of stuttering before it happens, starts it gently and glides through it smoothly.




6.Stabilization In the stabilization phase, the individual becomes his own clinician by using the new stuttering controls in more and more situations of daily life. The individual also continues to stutter voluntarily and to seek out communication situations which s/he previously avoided.




Source:Wikipedia