August 3, 2021

NSW Health Allied Health Telehealth Virtual Education - invited presentation on Multilingual children

Today I presented a 1-hour workshop at the Allied Health Telehealth Virtual Education titled "Multilingual children: Speech milestones and assessment advice". A lot of the presented work was based on research undertaken as part of our VietSpeech grant with Dr Sarah Verdon. There were 85 people registered from across 56 NSW Health sites.

 

Here is the abstract and aims: 

Over 22% of Australia’s population speak a language other than English at home; whereas, most Australian speech pathologists speak English as their first language. Recently, Australian research has been published to provide practical guidance for speech pathologists to assess multilingual children’s speech. It is recommended that children’s speech be assessed in all languages spoken by the client (International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, 2012). This presentation will demonstrate that all speech pathologists have skills and access to resources (online, interpreters, family, community) that enable them to consider the culture and the linguistic competency of multilingual children on their caseloads. 

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

  • Discuss recent evidence-based international speech acquisition data regarding consonant acquisition and intelligibility. 
  • Source free evidence-based resources regarding speech acquisition and speech assessments created by researchers from across the world in 60+ languages and consider potential applications to their SLP practice https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech 
  • Draw on four types of evidence when working with multilingual children and their families: (1) Research evidence (2) Clinical expertise of the speech pathologist (3) Client preferences, values, and circumstances (4) Practice context relating to the setting and client (Hoffman et al., 2013). 

Here are some of the resources that we shared 

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