Olebeng's visit to Bathurst

It was my pleasure to host Dr Olebeng Mahura in Bathurst this weekend. I first met Olebeng at the ICPLA conference in 2016 in Halifax, Canada. We have kept in touch - and Olebeng co-authored four chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World that I edited. 

• Setswana speech development
• Xhosa/isiXhosa speech development
• Zulu/isiZulu speech development
• English (South African) speech development.

It was great to show her around Charles Sturt University and Bathurst.

Olebeng saw 144 kangaroos at CSU and Mt Panorama
including the rare albino and a wallaby

Olebeng visiting the TRex in the Fossil and Mineral Museum

Sharynne and Olebeng next to the replica of the
largest gold nugget ever found in the world (near Bathurst)

Olebeng in my office at CSU

Olebeng visited The Treehouse

Olebeng is working on a website - SpeechOn - to provide resources in indigenous African languages (Setswana, isiZulu, isiXhosa).

SpeechOn: https://www.speechon.co/about

New Adjunct Research Fellow at CSU

Today I had a wonderful conversation with Dr Olebeng Mahura from South Africa who has agreed to become an Adjunct Research Fellow at CSU. I was an examiner of Dr Mahura's Masters' thesis a long time ago and have admired and quoted her work over the years. It will be wonderful to work more closely with her in this new role.  

Here are some of Olebeng's publications:

Mahura, O. O., & Pascoe, M. (2016). The acquisition of Setswana segmental phonology in children aged 3.0–6.0 years: A cross-sectional study. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18(6), 533–549. https://doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1126639 

Pascoe, M., Mahura, O., & Le Roux, J. (2018). South African English speech development: Preliminary data from typically developing preschool children in Cape Town. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 32(12), 1145-1161. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2018.1510985 

Pascoe, M., Mahura, O., & Rossouw, K. (2019). Transcribing and transforming: Towards inclusive, multilingual child speech training for South African speech-language therapy students. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica. https://doi.org/10.1159/000499427 

Pascoe, M., Rossouw, K., & Mahura, O. (2018). Core vocabulary intervention for an isiXhosa-English speaking child with speech sound difficulties. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 36(4), 313-328. https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2018.1548292

Impact of our work in South Africa

Our work has been used to inform the development of human rights-driven guidelines for South African speech-language pathologists. The following manuscript has just been published online, and uses

• the position paper written by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech as well as 
• the position paper we wrote for Speech Pathology Australia about working in a culturally and linguistically diverse society 

 This is an exciting impact of our work.

Pascoe, M., Klop, D., Mdlalo T., & Ndhambi, M. (2017). Beyond lip service: Towards human rights-driven guidelines for South African speech-language pathologists. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Advance online publication.

Cross-cultural adaptation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for South Africa

The following article has just been accepted for publication.

Pascoe, M. & McLeod, S. (2016, in press February). Cross-cultural adaptation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for South Africa. Child Language Teaching and Therapy.

Here is the abstract

The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) (McLeod, Harrison, & McCormack, 2012a) is a screening questionnaire that focuses on parents’ perceptions of children’s speech in different contexts. Originally developed in English, it has been translated into 60 languages and the validity and clinical utility of the scale has been documented in a range of countries. In South Africa, there are eleven official languages yet few assessment materials available in languages other than English. In this paper we describe the cross-cultural adaptation of the ICS into a screening tool encompassing all South Africa’s official languages in addition to English. Objectives were: (1) To describe the linguistic and conceptual equivalence of the ten translated versions compared to the original ICS.  (2) To evaluate speech-language therapists’ (SLT) perceptions of the usability and value of the ICS translations in the languages of South Africa. Twenty-five participants translated the ICS into ten official languages of South Africa using forward and back translation and community checking. Next, a survey of 23 SLTs practicing in South Africa, and semi-structured interviews with five SLTs working in Cape Town, took place. The conceptual and linguistic equivalence of the adapted materials for each language was considered. Concepts that were challenging to translate from English into many of the Bantu languages included those relating to immediate/extended family, acquaintances, strangers and hearing/understanding. Linguistic challenges in translation related to dialectal differences and the use of pronouns. The SLTs in the sample found the ICS easy to use and saw it as a useful component of assessment especially when working with families who do not share a language with the SLT. Overall the study contributes to the development agenda of SLTs working in South Africa by creating and trialing the ICS in all the countries’ official languages to improve access and quality of services offered to all the families they serve.