Sharynne McLeod is Distinguished Professor of Speech and Language Acquisition at Charles Sturt University, Australia. This blog records the work of her team to support multilingual children's speech acquisition throughout the world. The associated Multilingual Children's Speech website contains resources for over 100 languages: http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech
CVC2026 starts tomorrow. Many of our CVC affiliates travelled to Bathurst to participate in the conference face-to-face (one travelled over 1200 kms!).
Today (Monday 31st August) we met for afternoon tea, a celebration of CVC books, a tour of the campus, then dinner together in The Treehouse.
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| Carolyn, Kate F, and Helen in The Beehive |
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| Dr Carolyn Gregoric at The Treehouse |
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| Afternoon tea at The Treehouse |
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| CVC book celebration |
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| Dinner at The Treehouse |
Today Dr Carolyn Gregoric and I met with Prof Julian Grant and Wahid from the Rural Health Research Institute (RHRI) to discuss collaborations, membership and affiliate structures across the Children's Voices Centre (CVC) and RHRI. We have a long history of working together so it was a productive meeting.
Congratulations to A/Prof Brendon Hyndman whose TEDx talk Reimagining Schools for Belonging has now gone live. His message connects strongly with children’s voices, agency, belonging and their experiences in school environments. He stated that students want a place for: doing, thinking, feeling, and being. When these places are created he has seen teamwork, belonging, wellbeing, when those needs are ignored he has seen bullying and disconnection. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcgnwa25xr0
At lunchtime today we had an update session with the Children's Voices Centre affiliates. We currently have 60+ affiliates. Twenty-five were in attendance and others will listen to the recording later. We were able to introduce Lorraine Bennett to the affiliates and she provided an update about The Treehouse. The CVC affiliates have enthusiastically embraced our new centre. For example, one of our projects, Children Draw Play, has 20 affiliates who have volunteered to collaborate to analyse the 181 drawings using a 60-question data-analysis instrument. What an exciting 3 years of collaboration (2025-2027).
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| CVC affiliates at our online meeting 3 June 2025 |
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:
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
Sharynne McLeod is Professor of Speech and Language Acquisition at Charles Sturt University. She was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2010-2014) titled Speaking my Languages: International Speech Acquisition in Australia. This blog was designed to archive what she learned and accomplished during the Fellowship. For details about the Fellowship see the original post. The Multilingual Children's Speech website was created as part of this Fellowship. It contains resources for over 60 languages.
The blog has continued beyond 2014 to record our continuing work to make a difference in children's lives throughout the world. Since this blog commenced Professor McLeod's Speech-Language-Multilingualism team has included:
Postdoctoral scholars: Dr Kate Crowe, Dr Sarah Verdon, Dr Sarah Masso, Dr Cen (Audrey) Wang, Dr Michelle Brown
PhD students: Nicole Watts Pappas, Jane McCormack, Jacqui Barr, Kate Crowe, Sarah Verdon, Sarah Masso, Suzanne Hopf, Ben Pham, Helen Blake, Anna Cronin, Natalie Hegarty, Anniek van Doornik, Nicole McGill, Van Tran, Belinda Downey, Marie Ireland, Kate Margetson
Masters students: Rebekah Lockart, Hang Nguyen, Vấn Phạm
Honours students: Bethany Toohill, Hannah Wilkin, Erin Holliday, Nicole Limbrick, Charlotte Howland and Holly McAlister.
Summaries:
2010, Feb-July: here
2010, Feb-Dec: here
2011, Feb-June: here
2011, July-Sept: here
2011, Oct-Dec: here
2012, Jan-Feb: here
2012, March-May: here
2012, June-July: here
2012, Aug-Sept: here
2012, Oct-2013-Feb: here
2013, March-May: here
2013, June-August: here
2013, Sept-2014, Feb: here
2014, March-June: here