Hello Prof Bronwyn Hemsley

 It was wonderful to catch up with Prof Bronwyn Hemsley yesterday while she was visiting Bathurst. I was able to show her The Treehouse, talk about the Children's Voices Centre, and her new job as Head of the School of Health Sciences, University of Newcastle - starting in March.

Lorraine Bennett, Sharynne  McLeod, Bronwyn Hemsley at the Children's Voices Centre

 

 

Helen's contributions to a collection of universities

This week Helen Blake has finished working as a clinical educator in the Speech Intelligibility Clinic at The University of Newcastle and is about to commence working as a lecturer in the Graduate School of Health in the new Master of Speech Pathology program at University of Technology, Sydney. She is finalising her PhD this month at Charles Sturt University. Best wishes Helen!

Helen at The University of Newcastle

Helen at the University of Technology

Speech Intelligibility Clinic at The University of Newcastle

This week I visited Helen Blake who leads the Speech Intelligibility Clinic at the University of Newcastle. Helen is my PhD student and some of her PhD is based around her work in the clinic. She also works in the clinic one day per week supervising speech pathology students providing intelligibility enhancement to staff and students. They also support the students at ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students).

Helen brings a wide range of specialist skills to her role and studies. As well as being a speech pathologist, she has been an air traffic control standarization officer, and has learned  nine languages (Latin, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Mandarin, Hebrew). As part of her PhD Helen has already published two journal articles and has written an encyclopedia entry:

• Blake, H. L. & McLeod, S. (2017, accepted for publication). Intelligibility enhancement. In M. J. Ball & J. S. Damico (Eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of human communication sciences and disorders. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 
• Blake, H. L., Bennetts Kneebone, L. & McLeod, S. (2017, in press). The effect of oral English proficiency on humanitarian migrants’ experiences of settling in Australia. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2017.1294557 
• Blake, H. L., McLeod, S., Verdon, S. & Fuller, G. (2016, in press). The relationship between spoken English proficiency and participation in higher education, employment, and income from two Australian censuses. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. doi: 10.1080/17549507.2016.1229031

While I was visiting the University of Newcastle, I also gave a lecture to staff and students who were on campus and via video conference to clinical sites around Newcastle (and beyond). The attendees were enthusiastic about the free resources available on the Multilingual Children's Speech website.

Helen (at the far end of the table) with speech pathology students at the Speech Intelligibility Clinic

Some of the audience who attended my presentation at the University of Newcastle

Vietnamese collaborations

This weekend Ben Phạm and I had a visit from two researchers from the University of Newcastle:

• Dr Sally Hewat, who is a senior lecturer in speech pathology and a director of Trinh Foundation Australia
• Le Khanh Dien, who recently left Vietnam to undertake his masters by research with Dr Hewat. Mr Dien was the president of my speech sound disorders speech therapy class in Ho Chi Minh City in 2011, and visited Bathurst in 2012. 

Additionally, Ben Pham has just returned from teaching the 2016/7 speech sound disorders class in Ho Chi Minh City.
It was a pleasure to meet together and to share ideas and insights about our research. We look forward to future visits from Sally and Dien.

Dr Sally Hewat, Ben Phạm, Le Khanh Dien, and Sharynne

University of Newcastle Speech Pathology Showcase

Helen Blake has presented two papers at the University of Newcastle (UON) Speech Pathology Showcase today. The topics she presented were:

• Speech Intelligibility Clinic 
• Multilingual speakers' participation in Australia 

Her papers showcased work from her PhD and her work as the clinical educator overseeing the Speech Intelligibility Clinic for multilingual staff, students and community members.

There were 29 presentations and nearly 70 attendees across the day including UON speech pathology staff, colleagues (local speech pathologists working in public and private systems), higher degree by research students, undergraduate UON speech pathology students, undergraduate UON students from different faculties, UON staff from different faculties and services (e.g., UON Global), UON Alumni and members of the community.