University medallist Dr Kate Margetson and CVC at graduation

Congratulations to Dr Kate Margetson who received the Charles Sturt University Higher Degree Research Medal this week at the Bathurst graduation ceremony. There are only three medals per year awarded - only one person per Faculty per year - so this is a very significant achievement. Congratulations Kate - we are so proud of you!

Kate's PhD was titled: Moving Beyond Monolingual Practices with Multilingual Children: Learning from Vietnamese-English–Speaking Children, Families, and Professionals https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/publications/moving-beyond-monolingual-practices-with-multilingual-children-le . Her PhD supervisors were Prof Sharynne McLeod and A/Prof Sarah Verdon.

Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod, Dr Kate Margetson, Vice Chancellor Renee Leon

 

 

 

Potential university medal awardees are nominated by the SubDean (Graduate Studies) based on their examiners' reports, academic prizes and/or scholarships; research outputs from the doctoral or master by research (refereed publications, conference proceedings, journal articles, etc.); and the impact of the research both in terms of actual and potential outcomes for industry, government, professional organisations, business and community (https://www.csu.edu.au/division/vcoffice/ogca/governance/university-medals/higher-degree-by-research-university-medal).

Kate's PhD extended the work of our Australian Research Council Discovery Grant: VietSpeech (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/overview). She has published and presented many papers from her PhD. Since completing her PhD, Kate has been undertaking a postdoc funded by the Rural Health Research Institute to use implementation science to continue the development of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages (SACHL, Margetson & McLeod, 2025) (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/sachl).

The Children's Voices Centre staff had a wonderful time celebrating with our graduates, Dr Kate Margetson and Dr. Melissa Brunner during the graduation ceremony.

Children's Voices Centre: Dr Helen L. Blake, A/Prof Tamara Cumming, A/Prof Kathy Cologon, Prof Sharynne  McLeod, Dr Carolyn Gregoric

 

Staff from the Children's Voices Centre and School of Education

Children's Voices Centre staff gathering

This week was the first time that all of the Children's Voices Centre (CVC) staff were able to come together in one place to dream and plan for the future. The CVC staff are: 

• Director: Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod 
• Associate Director Workforce and Policy: A/Prof Tamara Cumming (0.7 FTE)
• Associate Director Children, Families and Communities: A/Prof Kathy Cologon (to begin July, 0.8FTE) 
• Research Manager: Dr Carolyn Gregoric (0.6FTE)
• Senior Administration Officer: Lorraine Bennett (0.5FTE)

We began on Waluu (Mt Panorama) acknowledging country and learning from one another. 

We spent two days talking and planning assisted by David McLeod and Dr Ros Cox. We developed our purpose and mission statement and discussed our communication strategy.

PURPOSE: A world where all children’s perspectives are recognised, valued, and amplified.

MISSION: The Children’s Voices Centre

• Amplifies all children’s perspectives and the right to communication. We do this through quality transformative interdisciplinary research that has global impact.
• Grows researchers’ capacity to undertake impactful innovative research with, for, and about children through genuine collaborative opportunities.
• Together with children, the Children’s Voices Centre
• advocates, informs, and influences stakeholders and organisations to improve policy and practice.
• partners with families and communities for recognition of children’s voices and rights.
• creates practical evidence-based resources to assist stakeholders to provide space, voice, audience, and influence for children’s voices.

David McLeod leading our discussion about the CVC vision and mission

Kathy, Sharynne, Tamara, Carolyn and Lorraine

A/Prof Kathy Cologon

Dr Carolyn Gregoric

Transforming The Treehouse

A/Prof Tamara Cumming and I have spent the afternoon transforming The Treehouse to be ready for our Children's Voices Centre Staff Gathering tomorrow. We are so excited about our week.

Before

After - ready for tomorrow

 

CLTT special issue

The closing date has just passed for our Child Language Teaching and Therapy special issue titled "Listening to Children with Diverse Communication Abilities". Holly McAlister and I are working with the CLTT editors Prof. Judy Clegg and Prof. Vicky Joffe and have received a lot of submissions. We are delighted with the breadth and depth of topics that have been covered in the papers and have already learned from the children and young people who participated in the research. We are now allocating reviewers - who will shape the manuscripts - and provide advice about which ones should be published. I am grateful for a few days holiday at the beach to step out of my day-to-day working tasks and think about this important project. Here is my view :)

 

Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication

The following article has been accepted for publication in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools: "Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication". It is part of Anniek Van Doornik's PhD research. Congratulations Anniek!

Here is the reference and abstract:

van Doornik, A., Franken, M. C., McLeod, S., Terband, H., & Gerrits, E. (2025). Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication. Advance online publication. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 

Purpose: To improve our knowledge of how young children with speech sound disorders (SSD) perceive their own speech and communication in comparison with typically developing children (TD), and how these perceptions relate to parental judgment of communicative participation, intelligibility in different contexts, and an expert measure of children’s speech accuracy (PCCI).
Method: Participants were 111 Dutch-speaking children (48-89 months old): 65 with SSD and 46 who were TD. Children’s self-reports on the Dutch version of the Communication Attitude Test for Preschool and Kindergarten Children Who Stutter (KiddyCAT-NL) were compared (a) between SSD and TD groups and (b) with the parents’ ratings. Parents’ ratings were obtained from two parental questionnaires: Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six-34: Dutch (FOCUS-34NL) measuring communicative participation and the Intelligibility in Context Scale: Dutch (ICS-NL). The KiddyCAT-NL, FOCUS-34NL, and ICS-NL outcomes were also compared with (c) speech accuracy measured by SLPs as the percentage of consonants correct in syllable initial position (PCCI) using the Picture Naming Task of the Computer Articulation Instrument.
Results: Statistical analysis revealed that young children in the SSD group perceived their speech and communication differently than children in the TD group. Only in the SSD group was there a moderate positive correlation between speech accuracy and intelligibility in context and only a weak correlation with the child’s perception of speech and communication. Parents’ and children’s perceptions were weakly correlated.
Conclusion: Information on children’s perception of their own speech is complementary to information obtained from the parents and SLPs’ formal assessment of speech accuracy. To fully understand the impact of SSD it is therefore important to actively elicit and include children’s perspectives on speech and communication.

OAMS Little Libraries launch

On Thursday we launched the OAMS Little Libraries. What a special day of celebrating the launch of four Little Libraries of children's books written by Indigenous authors and selected by the OAMS community:

1. OAMS Medical
2. OAMS Dental
3. OAMS Early Years
4. OAMS Marang Gunya
   

It has been an exciting research collaboration - and we were thrilled to have members of the OAMS community cutting the ribbon - being joined by local speech pathologists and colleagues from the CSU Rural Health Research Institute. Book passports have been designed for the children to record their reading. A special thanks to Christine Sweeney (OAMS) and Emily-Jane Woodhead (CSU) for all of the behind the scenes work.

CSU team: Emily-Jane Woodhead, Prof Sharynne McLeod, Sarah Bartlett

 

RHRI team: Sarah Bartlett, Dr Hazel Dalton, Prof Anna Walduck, Dr Liz Pressick, Emily-Jane Woodhead, Prof Sharynne  McLeod

The launch

An OAMS child's first entry in her book passport after reading Kick with My Left Foot with Sharynne 

OAMS team cutting the ribbon: Adam Gollan, Jess Lees (Early Years), Tegan Wood (OAMS Medical), Christine Sweeney, Melinda Paine-Lambden (Close the Gap)

Sustainable Development Goals - Speech Pathology Australia podcast

Today Julie Marshall and I received an email from Nadia Marussinszky, Professional Education Senior Officer and Speak Up Podcast producer at Speech Pathology Australia. She wrote:

"From time to time Speech Pathology Australia will re-broadcast an episode, and to add a different angle to this we ask speech pathologists to select a previous episode to re-run, and then to share a brief, introductory reflection. I wanted to let you know that one of the members of our conference planning committee for 2025 has chosen the episode you recorded about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and recorded a reflection to introduce the episode. We will rebroadcast this in June this year...Once the episode has been re-broadcast we will send over a copy of the social media image SPA are using to promote the episode and link to the episode...

I also thought you might like to know that the episode has been streamed 3,946 times since publication! The information and guidance you shared has reached a lot of people, thank you for sharing it!"

Here are some of the resources that Speech Pathology Australia will share with the podcast: 

• IJSLP Issue on Communication, Swallowing, and the Sustainable Development Goals: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/iasl20/25/1  
• SPA introduction to the special issue of the IJSLP: https://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/Members/News-and-publications/Publications/Speak-Out-Articles/Latest/Communication-swallowing-S-D-G.aspx 
• United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals 

Population data - The importance of working with key data managers

Today I was able to meet with "Data Debbie" from Catholic Education Tasmania. She is overseeing our data entry once our project is signed off and ready to officially begin with CET. We discussed the importance of demographic data, understanding missing data, and also the possibility of scanning data into Excel straight from the ICS forms! Thanks Debbie, Lisa and Udari!

 

IALP Honoured Member Award

I have just received this welcome news that I will receive the IALP Honoured Member Award from the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP https://ialp-org.com/) – the international association of professionals and scientists in communication, voice, speech language pathology, audiology and swallowing.

IALP fosters professional knowledge and exchange of science and services across 55 affiliated societies in 35 countries around the world. The affiliated societies of the IALP are in North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe and represent more than 300,000 members. IALP is a Non-State Actor in Official Relations with the World Health Organization (WHO) https://ialp-org.com/who/.

Over the past 100 years (since 1924 when IALP began) there have only been 22 honoured members and none from Australia or New Zealand (https://ialp-org.com/individual-members/)

1. Prof. Harm Schutte
2. Rev. Sr Marie Montfort de Supple
3. Prof. Dr Nasser Kotby
4. Prof. Dolores Battle
5. Prof. Ewa Sonderpalm
6. Prof. Tanya Gallagher
7. Prof. Gary Weismer
8. Prof. Frantisek Sram
9. Prof. Kyoko Iitaka
10. Prof. Helen Grech
11. Prof. Dr Katherine G. Butler
12. Prof. Bjorn Fritzell
13. Prof. P. Helbert Damste
14. Dr. Andre Muller
15. Prof. Ikuichiro Hiroto
16. Dr. Walter Eltsner
17. Prof. Dr. Herman F.M Peters
18. Dr. Henry C. Jr Jason
19. Dr. Britta Hammarberg
20. Prof. Lilly Cheng
21. Prof. Pamela Enderby
22. Dr. Fernanda Dreux

The Award will be presented in Malta in August.

Congratulations Dr Jenny Dwyer

Sharynne  and Jenny

Shukla, Alam, Arifa and Jenny

Congratulations to my colleague who has just learned that her PhD has been accepted and that she will graduate as Dr Jenny Dwyer soon. Jenny was a co-editor on our book Early Childhood Voices: Children, Families, Professionals - and I have enjoyed learning about the progress of her PhD over the past few years.

Oceania and Global Indigenous Research Hub Info Session

This morning I attended the first information session for the Oceania and Global Indigenous Research Hub at Charles Sturt University. What a fabulous initiative lead by A/Prof Holly Randall-Moon and Dr Nick Ruddell from the School of Indigenous Australian Studies (SIAS). They are bringing together researchers across CSU focusing on profile raising, HDR global exchange, grant capture/research, and consultancy (policy advice/sector influence). The Hub will be using FOR code 4519 for research. 

• Upcoming conference: Nation-building in the Global South - September 11-12th 2025
• Email address: oceania@csu.edu.au
• Here is our webpage listing Indigenous children's books: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/first-nations-resources

Nord University presentation - Children Draw Talking

This afternoon I presented a paper to Nord University colleagues about our Children Draw Talking Global Online Gallery. Here are the resources I shared: • Early Childhood Voices Global Online Gallery: https://earlychildhoodresearch.csu.domains/early-childhood-voices-conference-2022/children-draw-talking-gallery-1-the-world/ • Sound Effects Study Drawing Protocol (McCormack et al., 2022). Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 53(3), 713-731. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_LSHSS-21-00140 • Children’s voices communication rights advocacy with the United Nations https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/youth/hr75/submissions/subm-views-youth-led-cso-early-childhood-interdisciplinary-resear.pdf Books • Mahony, L., McLeod, S., Salamon, A., & Dwyer, J. (Eds.). (2024). Early childhood voices: Children, families, professionals. Springer. • Roulstone, S., & McLeod, S. (Eds.). (2011). Listening to children and young people with speech, language and communication needs. J&R Press.

Children's Voices Centre - welcome to new members

We had a wonderful meeting welcoming new affiliates to the Children's Voices Centre (CVC). We now have over 60 people from Charles Sturt University who have joined the CVC and we are adding their names to our website and CRO pages:

• https://www.csu.edu.au/research/childrens-voices-centre/our-team
• https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/organisations/children-voices-centre/persons/

What a fabulous interdisciplinary team of researchers have joined the centre. The insights from so many different people, disciplines, cultures, and perspectives will ensure that our research is

Impact - ContinuEd is offering textbook training using our book

We just received the following email from our publishers - Paul H. Brookes.

"ContinuEd, an online continuing education unit (CEU) platform, is planning to offer a Textbook training for Interventions for Speech Sound Disorders in Children, Second Edition on speechpathology.com. Speech-langauge pathology (SLP) subscribers will take a 10-question test on the book and earn American Speech-Lanuage-Hearing Association (ASHA) CEUs if they pass."

Visitor to CVC - Lucy Rodgers - Wellcome funded clinical PhD fellowship

This week we have welcomed Lucy Rodgers to the Children's Voices Centre. Lucy's visit is supported by her Wellcome funded clinical PhD fellowship. She is studying her PhD at City St Georges, University of London, UK. Here is her bio

Lucy is a Speech and Language Therapist who has been working in the UK National Health Service for 18 years. In 2021, she was awarded a National Institute of Health Research pre-doctoral clinical academic fellowship. In 2022, she commenced her Wellcome funded ‘health advances in under-represented populations and diseases’ (HARP) clinical PhD fellowship at City St Georges, University of London. In her PhD work, Lucy is developing a novel intervention for pre-school children with co-occurring features of a SSD and DLD. As well as her subject-specific interests in SSD and DLD, Lucy is passionate about co-design, patient and public involvement (PPI), and supporting healthcare access in under-served groups.

Sharynne  and Lucy standing on Waluu (Mt Panorama) looking over Bathurst

 

Lucy's seminar for the CVC team was titled: Developing a novel, complex intervention for pre-school children with co-occurring features of speech sound disorder (SSD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). 

A/Prof Tamara Cumming, Prof Sharynne  McLeod, Lucy Rodgers

Here is the abstract

Approximately 40% of 4 year olds with a speech sound disorder (SSD) also have features of a developmental language disorder (DLD) (Eadie et al., 2015). This co-occurring profile is associated with later negative outcomes relating to communication, literacy and quality of life (Lewis et al., 2015; Wren et al., 2016; Hayiou-Thomas et al., 2017). Yet, there are few interventions to date which have been developed to meet the specific needs of this clinical group. The aim is to develop a novel, complex intervention for pre-school children with co-occurring features of SSD and DLD.
Methods: Methods were informed by the Medical Research Council (MRC) guidance for developing  and evaluating complex interventions (Skivington et al., 2021).
•    Phase 1- systematic review to explore similarities and differences between intervention techniques for SSD/DLD and relate to underlying theory.
•    Phase 2- online survey of current clinical practice (108 UK SLTs).
•    Phase 3- two round e-Delphi with 35 UK based expert SLTs to gain consensus on core intervention elements, based on the findings from phases 1 and 2.
•    Phase 4a- refinements to the intervention in response to feedback from 6 parents from low SES and/or non English speaking backgrounds.
•    Phase 4b (current)- six NHS SLTs reviewing the intervention protocol to optimise operationalisation within clinical services.
A mixed steering group of people with lived experience (an adult with DLD, a parent of a child with SSD/DLD) and professionals (3 speech and language therapists, a bilingual education support worker, a specialist teacher) have overseen all project phases.
Results and conclusions: Following the 4 study phases, we now have a draft intervention protocol which has been mapped on to the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) framework (Hoffmann et al., 2014). We also have a corresponding ‘Theory of Change’, which outlines how different intervention components (relating to linguistic and behaviour change theory, and implementation science) are anticipated to interact with each other. The face validity of the intervention has been strengthened by the involvement of a diverse range of relevant professionals and people with lived experience within the intervention development process. However, further refinements may be made to the intervention in response to initial trialling.
Conclusions & Implications: The results suggest that ECE teachers are moderately accurate in judging children’s language skills, while also showing tendencies for judgment inaccuracies. Furthermore, their assessments alone may not suffice for identifying language delays. Combining multiple sources of information is essential. Future research should report detailed teacher and child characteristics to enhance meta-analytic synthesis.

 

Here is Lucy's acknowledgment of country at the beginning of her presentation

As a British citizen I acknowledge the legacy of UK’s colonial history. I acknowledge that I am a visitor to the land of the Wiradjuri people. We acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet today. We also pay respect to past, present and emerging elders and extend that respect to other Indigenous people who are present.  I would like to encourage everyone to please share the Nation you are joining from today in the chat.

 

Breakfast Club and books!

We received this email from our research partners

"We posted the following text on our socials with the attached photos."

Breakfast Club and books!  

Our young mob were given the opportunity to read, choose and take books home to read for keeps as a thank you from our CSU Research Project team (who visited Breakfast Club and exchanged opinions on books late last year). Marang Gunya will soon have it's own Little Library for the kids to access every week.

Speech pathology screening clinic at OAMS

Today, as part of our RHRI research, Sarah Bartlett, Emily-Jane Woodhead and I (3 speech pathologists) worked alongside Katrina and Tegan from OAMS to run a speech pathology screening clinic for Indigenous families to drop in and yarn about their children's speech, language and communication. We learned a lot and enjoyed yarning with the families and children.

Research productivity

What a joy it is to work closely with Dr Helen Blake. We are so productive on so many different aspects of our research. Thank you Helen.

SACHL focus group

Thank you so much to the informative and knowledgeable members of our focus group who have provided helpful advice about the development of the SACHL - phase 2 of our implementation science research. They agreed to have their photo take after tonight's session (session 3).