Writing for public audiences

Today I attended an online seminar run by Charles Sturt University titled "Writing for Public Audiences". Here is the list of some recommended (mostly) Australian Internet media sites to submit articles:

• https://theconversation.com/au 
• http://www.openforum.com.au/ 
• https://impakter.com/ 
• https://www.theguardian.com/au 
• http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/ 
• https://www.thepolicyspace.com.au/ 
• https://overland.org.au/

Curriculum vitae workshop

Today I ran a workshop for the early career researchers in the SLM team to support them to compile/write a curriculum vitae. We discussed how it is good to have a master file that you constantly update, then select items when you are required to submit a CV for different purposes.
Each participant also considered example CVs from the SLM team in order to look for gaps/opportunities to add to their own CVs. It was a very productive and collaborative session.

Van's productive visit to Bathurst

Over the past two days Dr Van Tran  visited CSU in Bathurst to work with Dr Cen (Audrey) Wang and myself on her PhD research, which is part of our VietSpeech grant. During her visit we worked on four different journal articles: two for her PhD and two for the VietSpeech study. We submitted the first article based on Study 1 of our VietSpeech ARC Discovery Grant titled "Language proficiency, use, and maintenance among people with Vietnamese heritage living in Australia". We look forward to hearing from the editors and reviewers about whether it is suitable, and any changes we need to make. We also visited a peach orchard, and enjoyed the blooms in the Begonia House in Machattie Park. It was a productive and fun visit.

Dr Van Tran, Prof Sharynne McLeod, Dr Audrey Wang at CSU
(it is quiet because it is the week before the students return)

Van in the Begonia House in Machattie Park

Exploring multilingual speakers’ perspectives on their intelligibility in English

The following manuscript has been accepted for publication. It forms part of Helen Blake's PhD research:
Blake, H. L., Verdon, S. & McLeod, S. (2019, in press February). Exploring multilingual speakers’ perspectives on their intelligibility in English. Speech, Language and Hearing.
50 free copies are available from this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/eJF8jisEZg7UkRtFFBIM/full?target=10.1080/2050571X.2019.1585681
Here is the abstract:

Multilingual speakers’ ability to communicate effectively and intelligibly in the language of their country of residence is crucial to their participation. This study explored multilingual speakers’ motivations for improving their intelligibility in English and their perceptions of potential barriers and facilitators to enhancing intelligibility. Participants were multilingual students and staff at 14 Australian universities. Extended response data from 137 survey responses were combined with seven semi-structured interviews, thematically analysed using the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health as a conceptual framework, and coded using NVivo software. Three overarching themes were: motivations, barriers, and facilitators. Themes that emerged under motivations were meeting their own and others’ expectations and career aspirations. Themes that emerged under barriers to intelligibility were lack of self-awareness of reduced English intelligibility, use of ineffective strategies (e.g., fast speech rate to disguise pronunciation difficulties), language differences, lack of opportunity to practise English, participants’ perceptions of others’ negative attitudes to their English skills, and challenging conversational partners. Facilitators to intelligibility were emotional support from others, beneficial strategies (e.g., confirming listener understanding), and opportunities to practice. The results highlight the importance of supporting multilingual speakers’ efforts to improve their English intelligibility. An environment with barriers such as lack of opportunity to practise English may restrict an individuals’ performance and participation, while facilitators such as support from others may increase participation. This study will inform the understanding of speech-language pathologists engaged in Intelligibility Enhancement, as well as SLPs working with multilingual speakers in any context.

ASHA's most shared articles in 2018

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has published a blog today titled: In case you missed it: Our most shared articles of 2018.
https://academy.pubs.asha.org/2019/02/in-case-you-missed-it-our-most-shared-posts-of-2018/

The first article in the blog was ours!
Children’s Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review by Sharynne McLeod and Kathryn Crowe

Here is the altmetric score (275): https://asha.altmetric.com/details/47435915#score
It states:

"Altmetric has tracked 12,465,602 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric."

Maintaining Vietnamese

Dr Van Tran has written two excellent articles (in Vietnamese) for the BBC

• The benefits of maintaining Vietnamese as a home language (https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/forum-47028662) 
• How to maintain Vietnamese when living overseas (https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/forum-47147158). 

2019 students and postdocs

I am very fortunate to be working with some amazing women in 2019:

PhD students

• Helen Blake (CSU)
• Anna Cronin (CSU)
• Nicole McGill (CSU)
• Dr Van Tran (CSU)
• Natalie Hegarty (Ulster University, Northern Ireland)
• Anniek van Doornik (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) 

Postdoctoral scholar

• Dr Michelle Brown

Research fellows

• Dr Audrey Wang 
• Dr Ben Pham
• Dr Kate Crowe

as well as other members of the Speech-Language-Multilingualism team including:

• Dr Sarah Verdon
• Dr Suzanne Hopf
• Dr Sarah Masso
• Dr Jane McCormack 
• Kate Margetson

Happy lunar new year

Today is the day many people around the world celebrate lunar new year.

• Chúc Mừng Năm Mới (Happy New Year - Vietnamese) 
• 恭贺新禧 (gōng hè xīn xǐ) (Happy New Year - Chinese) 

It was a very special day for our VietSpeech project, since Kate Margetson began working as our Project Officer for 2 days/week.
Other members of the team are:

• Dr Sarah Verdon (Chief investigator) 
• Dr Audrey Wang (Project Officer 1 day/week) 
• Dr Van Tran (PhD student) 
• Dr Ben Pham (Consultant, based in Viet Nam). 

An additional reason for celebration is that today was my first day back at work on campus for approximately 6 months.

Kate Margetson (with Dr Audrey Wang and Prof Sharynne McLeod)