Cognitive Linguistics & Executive Functioning
What does it mean?
A child’s cognition and executive functions set the foundation for learning, understanding, expressing language, and social skills. Deficits in the executive functions can lead to difficulties with attention, memory, self-monitoring, organizing, flexible thinking, and planning. At Kefi, we identify underlying lagging skills, and strategically treat children to maximize learning, affect communication, and boost outcomes.
Therapeutic Interventions
Alexandra has worked with special populations specifically on executive functioning and uses best principles and strategies which has resulted in significant growth and achievement.
Executive functions are a set of skills that act in a coordinated way to direct perception, emotion, thought and action. Executive functions control a person’s ability to engage in purposeful, organized, strategic, self-regulated and goal directed behavior. They enable us to engage with other mental processes that we use to perceive, feel, think and act. It is your inner dialogue, or ability to use self-talk, that is involved with many skills, including the ability to interact socially with others, manage time and get to where you need to be with the materials needed, and the ability to be able to think about your own thinking and actions.
Executive functioning skills include:
- Social awareness
- Perspective taking
- Organizing
- Time management
- Planning
- Attention
- Impulse control
- Task initiation
- Staying on task
- Self monitoring
- Shifting between tasks
- Mental flexibility
