Planning multilingual assessments in Bristol

While visiting the Speech and Language Therapy Research Unit in Bristol I had the opportunity to speak with staff, students and visitors to the department about a wide range of research projects (current and future).
I enjoyed meeting all of the postgraduate students and research assistants. I found out about the Parent Research Panel that has been formed to inform the Child Talk - What Works research project.

SLTRU staff and students

I also enjoyed discussing ideas for computerised assessments with Dr Yvonne Wren and Dave Rush from Alfiesoft and Mandarin/Putonghua assessments with Dr Zeng Biao. Yvonne, Prof Sue Roulstone and I had many other projects to discuss including ways to use the ALSPAC longitudinal study data to further inform us about children's speech and language skills.

Dave Rush and Dr Yvonne Wren

Dr Zeng Biao, Sharynne and Dr Yvonne Wren

Computer design students' ISA prototype development

Masters students from East Tennessee State University (ETSU), USA who are studying Computer Science-Information Technology have been working with Dr. Marty Barrett to design a prototype computer program to support the International Speech Assessment (ISA). The ISA is being developed as one of the outputs of my Future Fellowship, with the aim to assess the speech of multilingual children. The computer prototype project was initiated during my visit to ETSU last year.

On Monday evening (their time)/Tuesday morning (my time), Dr Barrett, the students and I met via Skype to discuss their progress, and to move the project to the next stage. We are working on a research version at the moment, that will later be transformed into a clinical version for use by speech-language pathologists around the world.

L-R: (back) Aaron Stokes; Heather Haley; Eric Barclay; Kris Cunigan; Dr. Marty Barrett;
(front) Chandan Biswas; Howard Morris; Jim Johnson