Expanding and recasting

Also called Expansion, Recast, Extension, Reformulation

They say 'dog run'. You say 'Yes, the dog is running'. You've confirmed the message, fixed the grammar and added a word, and you've corrected nothing.

What it is

Expanding is repeating back what the person communicated with a little more added: one extra word, or the grammar filled in. Recasting is the same move when the person's version had an error in it: you say the correct form, in a natural reply, without pointing out that there was an error.

"Car go" gets "The car's going". "Him runned" gets "He ran fast, didn't he?". "MORE" on a device gets "You want MORE juice" with both symbols touched. The person hears the fuller form attached to their own meaning, at the moment they care about it, and nobody has said "No, say it properly".

Who it can help

Children at the two-word stage and beyond, children with developmental language disorder, AAC users moving from single symbols to sentence building, and adults with aphasia relearning sentence structure. It's the single most researched partner technique for grammar and it's cheap.

It has little to offer a person who isn't yet producing anything to expand; for them, modelling and following the lead come first. And it isn't a way of teaching someone to speak who doesn't; it works on the language, in whatever mode the person uses.

How it works

The rule is plus one. Whatever the person produced, you return it with one more element. One symbol becomes two. Two words become a short sentence. A short sentence gets a describing word. Going further than that, from "dog" to "The big brown dog is running across the park", loses the connection to what they said.

Recasts work because the correction is carried inside a reply, not in a lesson. The person's message was accepted, the conversation moved on, and the better form happened to be in it. Studies of parents' recasts show children pick up the corrected form without being asked to repeat it, and asking them to repeat it tends to make things worse.

On a device, do the expansion on the device. If they hit GO, you touch GO and then OUT, and say "Go out". They see the two-symbol version built in front of them.

Getting started

Reply to everything the person produces, and add one thing. Don't ask them to say it again. Keep the tone of a reply, not a teacher.

Keep the expansion on topic. If they said "juice", they want to hear about juice, not a general sentence about drinks.

For an AAC user, expand on the Talk board with your own finger: their card plus one of yours. The board speaks the pair, and the person hears their sentence get longer without anyone touching their hand.

Where to get help

Your speech and language therapist can show you the expansions that fit where the person is now. Speech and Language UK and Afasic both explain expansion for parents. RADLD is the campaign for awareness of developmental language disorder and links to further resources. For adults, Say Aphasia runs peer groups where this style of conversation is the norm.