Today Sarah Verdon and I were invited to present a workshop to the 30+ speech pathologists at the Liverpool Health Service in Sydney. The workshop was titled: "Best practice versus possible practice with multilingual children: Closing the gap". Later in the afternoon, Katina Varelis, the Director of Health Language Services presented a session titled "Interpreters and speech pathologists working together" and we discussed ways to enhance our collaborations. Tia Croft, the head speech pathologist and her team had received a
HETI grant to support this initiative.
Liverpool is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in Australia. According to the 2011 census, the main languages spoken in the area are: Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese, Italian and Spanish. The main languages spoken by the children who are seen by the speech pathology department are: Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin (Putonghua), Hindi, Khmer, and Assyrian. This is a great place to make use of the resources our team has developed for supporting multilingual children's speech.
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| Some of the Liverpool Health Services speech pathologists and interpreters who attended the |
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| Sharynne, Tia Croft (head speech pathologist), and Sarah Verdon |
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Kate Jones, Tia Croft, Sharynne and Sarah Verdon
discussing the workshop the night before the presentation |
