Here are some top tips from previous City Lit students who stammer:
'The course was a life-changing thing for me and if you get a fraction of what I got out of the course then that's a very good thing!'
'Definitely go ahead and do it! And practise everything you’re taught and that way you’ll make really good progress.’
'You can expect to learn helpful things and to have the tools and the principles of change and the more you put in, the more you will get out.'
'Come to the course with an open mind and put your heart and soul into it. Don't be afraid to speak, because you're in a supportive environment, so if you are experiencing challenges, difficulties, the people around the room will have experienced something similar.'
'After the course keep in touch with others who did the course with you, so you can practise what you learnt on your course.'
'Make sure you're ready for the course. You need to be mentally ready to change. You need to be able to be ready to remove the barriers which you already have or which you are starting to have. And you need to be want to change. You just need to be positive about your situation and allow yourself to try new techniques, maybe fail a couple of times and try and pick yourself up and see what you can do different to change and improve.'
‘You'd be a fool not to attend a City Lit course. You really need to understand why and how you stammer, which is what you will get, and you will develop mechanisms and strategies on how to improve stammering and how to improve your life. And the most important thing is having that private space in the group where you can talk about things that are very private and are embarrassing, and can hurt. Yes, there were a few tears amongst us and there were hugs but I think it's really about being able to get that release. And to learn how to offload. Because what you actually find is if you wrap yourself up in filler words, bad habits, it’s no wonder you can't get a bloody word out. What you need to do instead is learn how to unravel everything. And for that you need to be with people who totally understand stammering and can guide you.'
'Be honest, be honest with yourself, because if you're not honest with yourself and others, you won't get the full effectiveness and the full benefit of the course.'
Speech therapy at City Lit
Here at City Lit we’ve been running courses for adults who stammer for over 50 years and what’s most important to us is to see the progress our students make and to learn from them. That’s why we recently carried out some research to look into the effectiveness of our therapy approach. An essential part of the research was asking our students directly what they liked about the course and what they didn’t like about it, how it could be improved and what advice they would give to others thinking about getting some help for their speech. We’ve included some of the advice above. We also asked them to complete some assessments before and after the course they attended, and then six months after that, to see what difference the course had made to their lives.
This is some of what we found out:
- All the students reported they felt more confident communicating in a range of different situations, and this was backed up by the quantitative data
- They said that they had made important changes in relation to their speech which included increased fluency and easier speech.
- They said that their quality of life had improved in relation to education, work and their personal lives, and again this was backed up by the quantitative data. For example, they reported they were speaking up more in meetings, going into more social situations and getting to know more people and opening up to more people about their stammering, which was making things a lot easier for them all round.
- They reported that they were avoiding less and speaking more.
If you’d like to read about the research in detail, we’ve included the reference below. And if you’d like to come and meet one of the speech therapy team to discuss how we can be of help to you, please drop us an e-mail or give us a ring (speechtherapy@citylit.ac.uk; 020 7492 2578). We’d love to hear from you!
Reference:
Everard, R., & Howell, P. (2018). We have a voice: exploring participants’ experiences of stuttering modification therapy. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 1273-1286.
