CET consultation about children who speak languages other than English at home

This afternoon, as part of our research grant with Catholic Education Tasmania, I spent 3.5 hours having 15 minute appointments with Tasmanian speech pathologists about kindergarten students attending CET schools who have learned English as another language. Felicity Laurence and I were impressed at how the speech pathologists had taken on board the information provided last year at the CET workshop and also our free online materials from the Multilingual Children's Speech website. This year, they had more evidence of incorporating knowledge about specific language's phonology into their reports and decision making. Congratulations colleagues.

SACHL implementation research - Cantonese and Mandarin/Putonghua

Tonight (7:30-9:00) I was online with Dr Kate Margetson and a group of speech pathologists who speak Cantonese and/or Mandarin/Putonghua. They were advising us about how to adapt the SACHL for children who speak Cantonese and/or Mandarin/Putonghua. What a useful conversation - great insights were shared.

One participant mentioned https://www.evalubox.com/language-sample for language sampling - but none were aware of a similar tool for speech sampling. 

 

CVC Community Research - Thursday presentation

Today I was the CVC Community Research presenter at our weekly Thursday lunch session.

Multilingual Minds are Unlocking Global Knowledge, γνώση, 认识, إدراك, דַעַת, ज्ञान …
Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University
There are over 7,000 languages in the world. Literature about children’s communication development focusses on English, northern hemisphere Indo-European languages (Draper et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022), and “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (Henrich et al., 2010). This presentation will commend the work of multilingual minds (researchers, professionals, and translators) who provide English-language access to global knowledge about speech, language, and communication. It will outline the decade of work of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and knowledge contained within two global initiatives
The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-speech-development-in-languages-of-the-world-9780192868862) 
Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/speech-acq-studies)
The presentation will conclude by challenging our reliance on English as the medium for knowledge dissemination and acknowledging the future potential of our connected multilingual world for greater understandings of speech, language, and communication.

Sharynne McLeod, PhD is a Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia specialising in multilingual children’s speech and language acquisition. She has a legacy of leading interdisciplinary teams, building world-class research capacity to undertake impactful international research. Her transformative research has reframed the speech-language pathology profession by foregrounding communication rights and social justice. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has awarded her Honors and the Certificate of Recognition for Outstanding Contributions in International Achievement. She is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia, Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. The Australian Newspaper describes her as Australia’s Research Field Leader and Best in the World in Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology based on the “quality, volume and impact” of her research. 

19 people attended online and in person. Thanks for your encouragement and great discussion about the importance of home language maintenance and looking beyond English-language research.

Italian book chapter has been published - Speech sound disorders: Evidenze scientifiche e buone prassi riabilitative

 I am very pleased to see that our invited chapter has been published (in Italian) in the following book:

Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Blake, H. L. (2025). Gli Speech Sound Disorders nei bambini plurilingue [Speech sound disorders in multilingual children]. In S. Piazzalunga, R. Salvadorini, N. Pizzorni, F. Todaro, & A. Schindler (Eds.). Speech sound disorders: Evidenze scientifiche e buone prassi riabilitative [Scientific evidence and best rehabilitative practices] (pp. 415-432). Erickson University & Research. https://www.erickson.it/it/speech-sound-disorders

It is exciting to see that this book will be used across Italy. Congratulations to the editors on the compilation of this important book.

 Here is the email we received from the editors:

Dear Colleagues,

First of all, we would like to wish you all a very happy New Year.

We are pleased to let you know that the Italian book on Speech Sound Disorders has finally been published: https://www.erickson.it/it/speech-sound-disorders

... Thank you for this wonderful achievement. We hope that this volume will become a reference textbook for Italian undergraduate and postgraduate Speech and Language Therapy programmes. The book will also be officially presented at the Italian Congress of Phoniatrics and Speech and Language Therapy in the coming months.

Thank you once again, and best wishes from all of us.

Silvia, Renata, Francesca, Nicole and Antonio

Silvia Piazzalunga, PhD
Speech-Language Pathologist, Adjunct Professor
Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences "L. Sacco"
"L. Sacco" Hospital
University of Milano, Italy

 

Multilingual Aspects of Children's Speech Sounds (2nd edition) has been submitted

SUBMITTED 

Today we submitted Multilingual Aspects of Children's Speech Sounds (2nd edition) to Multilingual Matters (it was due 31st December - so we are early!). 

 In the final book there are:

• 95,379 words across 34 chapters
• written by 59 authors from 17 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, England, Fiji, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong SAR, China, Iceland, Iran, Ireland, Singapore, USA, Vietnam, and Wales
• mentioning 151 languages: !Xũ, Afrikaans, Akan, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic (6 varieties: Algerian, Classical, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Modern Standard, Palestinian), Asanti Twi, Assyrian, Azeri Turkish, Bahasa Indonesia, Balochi, Bengali, Brahvi, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan, Chichewa, Croatian, Dagbani, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English (10 varieties: Australian Aboriginal, British Standard, Fiji, Irish, Jamaican, Singapore Colloquial, Singaporean, Singapore Standard, Standard Australian, Welsh), Ewe, Fanti, Faroese, Farsi, Fe’efe’e, Fijian, Finnish, Flemish, French and French Canadian, Ga, German, Greek (Cypriot, Standard Modern Greek), Gujarati, Haida, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi and Fiji Hindi, Hindko, Hmong, Hokkien, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Inuit, Irish, Italian, Jalapa Mazatec, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, Karen, Khmer, Kikamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kisii, Kiswahili, Korean, Kriol, Kurdish, Laki, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luganda, Luhya, Luxembourgian, Madagascan, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin/Putonghua, Melpa, Mirpuri, Ndebele, Nepali, Norwegian, Pacific Island languages and dialects, Pakistani heritage languages, Pawaian, Pitjantjatjara, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian, European), Potohari, Punjabi, Pushto, Romanian, Rotokas, Russian, Samoan, Sataiki, Scottish Gaelic, Sepedi, Serbian, Serbocroatian, Sesotho, Setswana, Shona, sign languages (5 varieties: American, Australian, British, Danish, Icelandic), Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish and Granada Spanish, Swazi, Swedish, Sylheti, Tagalog, Tagalog, Tamil, Teke, Telugu, Thai, Tlingit, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tshivenda, Tsonga, Turkish, Twi, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Warlpiri, Welsh, Xhosa, Yolngu Matha, Yoruba, Yumplatok, and Zulu. 
• There is also discussion about the following 34 multilingual pairs: Albanian and Greek, Bengali and English, Cantonese and Greek, English and French and Spanish (trilingual), German and Russian, German and Spanish, German and Turkish, Greek and English, Gujarati and English, Hindi and Gujarati and English (trilingual), Irish and French, isiXhosa and English, Italian and English, Japanese and English, Lingala and English, Mandarin and English, Mandarin and Swedish, Polish and English, Portuguese and English, Spanish and English, Turkish and English, Turkish and German, Twi and English, Urdu and Balochi, Urdu and Brahvi, Urdu and English, Urdu and Hindko, Urdu and Potohari, Urdu and Punjabi, Urdu and Pushto, Urdu and Sataiki, Urdu and Sindhi, Vietnamese and English, and Yoruba and English. 

Thank you to the authors who have undertaken important research that enables us to support multilingual children and their families across the world.

 

We had an Australian editors' meeting yesterday.

Helen Blake, Sharynne  McLeod, Kate Margetson

Helen and I met with Brian Goldstein a few weeks ago when we were in the Washington DC at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) convention. 

Sharynne  McLeod, Brian Goldstein, Christina Gildersleeve-Neumann, Helen Blake

 

Mark Filmer from Charles Sturt University has supported the copyediting of the chapters and we were able to thank him yesterday.

Sharynne  McLeod, Mark Filmer, Helen Blake

Speech Pathology Australia National Conference submission outcomes for 2026

We have just learned the outcome of our Speech Pathology Australia National Conference submissions for 2026. In the letter they wrote

"This year we received 326 submissions, reflecting a 22% increase on last year. With limited presentation space available, only around one-third could be included in the final program"

While some of our papers were not accepted for presentation - the following papers were accepted:

• Assessing children’s speech in unfamiliar languages: Acceptability of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL)
• Resources in 131 languages and dialects: Multilingual minds have unlocked global knowledge about children’s speech
•  Implications of caregiver-implemented intervention for three underserved communities
•  School speech pathologists’ navigation of nine tensions regarding evaluation and eligibility in USA

I am glad that two of my PhD students' papers were accepted.  

Emeritus Professor Jo Reid

Coffee with Emeritus Professor Jo Reid was an unexpected pleasure this morning. Jo was at CSU to provide mentoring to a colleague. 

She also mentioned a new book:

Turner, M. & Green, B. (Eds.). (2026). Multilingualism as opportunity: An integrated perspective on English and languages education in Australia. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Multilingualism-as-Opportunity-An-Integrated-Perspective-on-English-and-Languages-Education-in-Australia/Turner-Green/p/book/9781032767079

Invited presentation to the Canadian Speech and Stuttering Institute

 This morning Dr Kate Margetson, Dr Helen L. Blake and I were invited to present a 3-hour live session to the Canadian Speech and Stuttering Institute (SSI) (https://ssitraininghub.ca/) and speech-language pathologists across Canada and the USA (n = 25). Our presentation was titled "Multilingual Children's Speech Acquisition and Therapy".

Here is the summary

 Children learn to communicate in one or more of the world’s 7000 languages. Assessment and intervention for multilingual children’s speech can be challenging, especially if children do not speak languages that are familiar to speech-language pathologists (S-LPs). This workshop will provide a cross-linguistic account of monolingual and multilingual and children’s speech development.
Part 1 of the workshop, will begin with an overview of (mostly free) resources that are available to support children’s speech acquisition, assessment, and intervention in over 130 of the world’s languages and dialects on the Multilingual Children’s Speech website https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/home 
Part 2 of the workshop will present the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL), a practical evidence-based protocol for assessing children’s speech in unfamiliar languages. The step-by-step protocol includes: comparing languages with English; identifying and using SLPs’ existing skills; identifying areas requiring support from families/interpreters; locating and using assessments in a range of languages; taking a collaborative approach to transcribing and analyzing multilingual speech; considering reasons children’s speech may not match standard targets; and implications for diagnosis of speech sound disorder.

SSI organisers and presenters

Kate presenting part 2

One attendee sharing her "favourite book"

We reported on the VietSpeech research in part 2

Padlet answers

 

Bright Ideas Media - Live and online presentations

We were invited to present a Speech Sound Disorders Series for Bright Ideas Media in the US. 

 

https://www.bethebrightest.com/en/events/speech-sound-disorders-series

This morning Dr. Kelly Farquharson and I presented a live 90 minute session to over 100 speech-language pathologists across the United States. Our presentation was titled: "Clinical Use of Speech Sound Acquisition Data"

Ω

"Don't ask when should a child say /s/ - instead ask what sound is the child making instead of /s/"

Dr Helen L. Blake and Dr Kate Margetson and I were invited to present a 2-hour online session titled "Multilingual Children’s Speech Assessment: A Contemporary Global Update"

 Here is a description of the while series from the website https://www.bethebrightest.com/en/events/speech-sound-disorders-series:

Welcome to the Speech Sound Disorders Series for 2025—a fresh look at how we treat speech sound disorders, grounded in what we know now. This year, we’re placing a strong focus on updated, evidence-based practices that reflect the evolving landscape of our field.

Joining the series are international experts Drs. Kelly Farquharson and Sharynne McLeod, bringing global insights and current research to deepen our understanding. From the nuances of treating R to conducting effective multilingual assessments, they’ll guide us through practical strategies that are informed, inclusive, and responsive to today’s clinical challenges.

The series includes:
* The 90-min live session, and the replay, co-presented by Drs. Sharynne McLeod and Kelly Farquharson: "Clinical Use of Speech Sound Acquisition Data"
* A 60-min on-demand course by Dr. Farquharson: "/ɹ/ you frustrated by working on /ɹ/? Try facilitative contexts!"
* An 120-min on-demand course by Drs. McLeod, Kate Margetson, and Helen Blake: "Multilingual Children’s Speech Assessment: A Contemporary Global Update"

This year's series is designed to challenge outdated assumptions and provide clear answers to common questions.

Our presenters are passionate about helping clinicians grow in confidence and competence. With their support—and expertise —you’ll walk away with sharper tools, broader perspective, and renewed clarity in how you treat speech sound disorders today.

Both on-demand courses will be available after the live event on Oct. 8 at 8:30 p.m. ET. 

 

Bright Ideas Media presentation

We have been working on our presentations for speech-language pathologists in the USA as part of the Speech Sound Disorders Series https://www.bethebrightest.com/en/events/speech-sound-disorders-series 

The series includes a 90-minute live offering, along with pre-recorded, on-demand content. This year's series is designed to challenge outdated assumptions and provide clear answers to common questions.

Here is information from the website: 

Welcome to the Speech Sound Disorders Series for 2025—a fresh look at how we treat speech sound disorders, grounded in what we know now. This year, we’re placing a strong focus on updated, evidence-based practices that reflect the evolving landscape of our field. Joining the series are international experts Drs. Kelly Farquharson and Sharynne McLeod, bringing global insights and current research to deepen our understanding. From the nuances of treating R to conducting effective multilingual assessments, they’ll guide us through practical strategies that are informed, inclusive, and responsive to today’s clinical challenges. 

The series includes: * The 90-min live session, and the replay, co-presented by Drs. Sharynne McLeod and Kelly Farquharson: "Clinical Use of Speech Sound Acquisition Data" * A 60-min on-demand course by Dr. Farquharson: "/ɹ/ you frustrated by working on /ɹ/? Try facilitative contexts!" * An 120-min on-demand course by Drs. McLeod, Kate Margetson, and Helen Blake: "Multilingual Children’s Speech Assessment: A Contemporary Global Update" 

This year's series is designed to challenge outdated assumptions and provide clear answers to common questions. Our presenters are passionate about helping clinicians grow in confidence and competence. With their support—and expertise —you’ll walk away with sharper tools, broader perspective, and renewed clarity in how you treat speech sound disorders today.  

 Here is some more information about our pre-recorded presentation

Multilingual Children’s Speech Assessment: A Contemporary Global Update Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod, Ph.D. Dr Helen L. Blake, Ph.D., Dr. Kate Margetson, Ph.D. Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia Learn how to identify multilingual children with speech sound disorders using the latest evidence from 130 languages. This course covers children’s speech development, assessment, analysis, and differential diagnosis, including practical application of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL). https://www.bethebrightest.com/en/courses/multilingual-children-s-speech-assessment-a-contemporary-global-update

 

Tutorial article with International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech

The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech has been working on a tutorial article addressing multilingual speech intervention for about a decade. There have been many papers published providing evidence for speech interventions for monolingual children in many languages; however, very few papers providing evidence for speech interventions for multilingual children.

We have been working on the tutorial paper at

• ICPLA in Greece
• IALP in Malta

and today have been creating checklists, tables, and content at the Children's Voices Centre with Prof Lynn Williams (visiting scholar), Helen L. Blake, and Sarah Verdon. We are getting close to having it ready to submit.

Helen, Sharynne  and Lynn creating the checklist

Sarah, Sharynne, Helen and Lynn

 

 

Invited presentations about multilingual children's speech

Dr Helen Blake, Dr Kate Margetson and I have had a number of invitations to present to audiences about supporting multilingual children's speech. We are working on the presentations, handout, and short videos this week.

Sharynne and Helen recording a video about their invited presentation

Kate Margetson concludes her postdoc (in Greece)

Kate Margetson has worked with me 2 days a week for 18 months on her postdoc - which concludes now. Her postdoc was funded by a Commonwealth grant to the Rural Health Research Institute.

It has been a VERY productive time focusing on supporting speech-language pathologists to work with multilingual children in unfamiliar languages.

The end of Kate's postdoc coincided with the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) conference in Patras, Greece. Kate presented two papers from her PhD and postdoc and had so many opportunities to network and plan the next steps of her research journey. 

It has been such a privilege to work with Kate and learn from her. I am glad she has a continuing position as a lecturer in the speech pathology course at Charles Sturt University so that we can continue to collaborate as colleagues.

Kate presenting work from her postdoc at ICPLA

Kate and Sharynne in Corinth on the way home from ICPLA

Helen Blake, Sharynne  and Kate Margetson at the ICPLA conference dinner

Kate Margetson discussed the SACHL with the President of the International Phonetics Association (IPA)

Keynote at International Society of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (ISMBS) conference, Chania Greece

I am keynote speaker at the International Society of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (ISMBS) conference in Chania, Greece (16-19 June 2025). Details of my keynote address are below. Dr Helen Blake and I are also presenting a paper titled: "Audio and video recordings supporting multilingual children's speech" and Helen is co-presenting a poster with her PhD student.

There are 52 oral presentations and 21 posters with attendees from 26 countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR China, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Moldovia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Taiwan, The Netherlands, UAE, UK, USA). 

Prof Elena Babastouli ended her opening address with the following quote: "Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises" (Demosthenes).

It is always great to share knowledge with colleagues from across the world - and this conference in Chania is special. 

The ISMBS conference venue on the Chania harbour

Sharynne and Helen Blake at the Arsenal 

Sharynne's keynote

Colleagues who have written chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World from Wales, Poland, Cyprus and Greece

Prof Elena Babatsouli (ISMBS chair), Sharynne and Prof Kakia Petinou Κάκια Πετεινού (ISMBS committee)

Helen presenting her paper with Sharynne  cheering in the background

Multilingual Minds are Unlocking Global Knowledge, γνώση, 认识, إدراك, דַעַת, ज्ञान …
Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod
Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia

Global understandings of speech, language, and communication encompass knowledge from 7,000+ languages. Communication professionals who read English have access to research and evidence-based resources, assessments, and interventions in approximately 100 languages. Critiques of psychology and linguistics report that research has focussed on English, northern hemisphere Indo-European languages (Draper et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022), and “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (Henrich et al., 2010). This presentation will commend the work of multilingual minds (researchers, professionals, and translators) who provide English-language access to global knowledge about speech, language, and communication. It will outline the decade of work of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and knowledge contained within global initiatives including:

• The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World
• Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/speech-acq-studies)
• Crosslinguistic Phonology Project (https://phonodevelopment.sites.olt.ubc.ca/), 
• Multilingual Families Lab Familles Multilingues (https://bilingualacquisition.wordpress.com/)
• CHILDES (https://childes.talkbank.org/) and PhonBank (https://phon.talkbank.org/)

The presentation will conclude by challenging our reliance on English as the medium for knowledge dissemination and acknowledging the future potential of our connected multilingual world for greater understandings of speech, language, and communication.

 

Kate Margetson's postdoc is coming to an end

Dr Kate Margetson has been working with me as a postdoc for 2-days per week for the past 1.5 years. It has been an amazing time of developing the SACHL using the implementation science processes. We will end her postdoc in Greece at the ICPLA conference. Congratulations Kate on all you have achieved so far - I know that your work will continue to inspire SLPs' practice and change multilingual children's communication capacity.

Grant: Australian Commonwealth Grant Activity 4-DGEJZ1O/4-CW7UT14 - Project 8: Improving access to speech pathology services for rural children with speech, language and communication needs

Aim: To equip rural speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to work cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, especially in languages they do not speak

Outcomes against objectives:

• Developed workshop on a clinical protocol for assessing speech in other languages: the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL)
• Provided 7 workshops in person and online to speech pathologists and speech pathology students training them in the SACHL
• 459 speech pathologists and speech pathology students responded to a questionnaire about the SACHL to provide feedback on the acceptability of the SACHL, recommendations for change and barriers and facilitators to using the SACHL in clinical practice
• Collaborated with 15 multilingual speech pathologists and speech pathology students to gather more SACHL feedback via focus groups and develop language-specific resources for the SACHL

Outputs (Grants, Publications, etc.):

Journal articles

1. Margetson, K., & McLeod, S. (2025). Multilingual speech assessment: Using implementation science to explore acceptability of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL). [Manuscript submitted for publication]. 
2. Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2025). Collaborative design of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL) through implementation science. [Manuscript in preparation]

Invited Presentations

1. McLeod, S. & Margetson, K. (2025, Feb 7). Help! How can I support multilingual children? Speech assessment of children’s home language(s) (SACHL) [Invited workshop]. Central West Speech Pathologists’ Professional Development/Networking Day. Orange, NSW.
2. McLeod, S. & Margetson, K. (2024, Oct 19-20). Multilingual speech development, assessment, analysis and intervention [Invited workshop]. Hong Kong, SAR China. 
3. McLeod, S., Blake, H. L. & Margetson, K. (2024, June 27-29). Multilingual speech development and disorders: A contemporary perspective of children’s speech development in languages of the world [Invited presentation]. 100th Anniversary Celebration of the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP), Vienna, Austria (online). https://ialp-org.com/event/9853/ 
4. McLeod, S. & Margetson, K. (2024, April 18). Assessing children’s speech in unfamiliar languages: Insights from Vietnamese-English children [Invited keynote]. XI LLDI Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

Presentations

1. Margetson, K. & McLeod, S. (2025, June). Developing a clinical protocol for assessing speech in languages that you do not speak: The Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL). Paper presented at the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association Conference, Patras, Greece. 
2. McLeod, S., Blake, H., & Margetson, K. (2024, December). Culturally Appropriate Assessment in International Contexts: Assessing Children’s Speech in  their Home Language(s). Paper presented at the American Speech-Language Hearing Association Convention, Seattle, WA, USA.
3. Margetson, K. & McLeod, S. (2024, November). Using an implementation science framework to co-design and test the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL). Paper presented at the Early Childhood Voices Conference, Charles Sturt University, Australia.
4. Margetson, K. & McLeod, S. (2024, May). How can I assess children’s speech in a language I do not speak? Insights from VietSpeech research. Paper presented at the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference, Perth, Australia.

CONGRATULATIONS KATE! What an amazing legacy! 

Advising colleagues on the speech of children who speak languages other than English

Today I had a fascinating day advising colleagues on how to consider the speech of children who speak languages other than English. The children's parents were concerned about their speech - and the current processes only allow for assessment in English. 

We talked about the usefulness of the following websites:

• Multilingual Children's Speech - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech
  
• Speech Accent Archive - https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php

and the processes that are recommended using the SACHL - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/sachl

Book chapter accepted

 This morning we learned that the following book chapter has been accepted for publication

Margetson, K., Tran, V. H., Blake, H. L., Verdon, S., Phạm, B., & McLeod, S., (2025, in press March). Speech and language of Vietnamese-English-speaking children and their families. In Y. Holt, K. N. Washington, & E. Babatsouli (Eds.) Linguistic varieties in North America: A primer for speech and language practitioners. Multilingual Matters.

Congratulations team!

Accepted journal article - Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children

Our manuscript titled "Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children" has just been accepted for publication in the "Changemaker" Special Forum for the Q1 journal Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. It came about because our session at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in 2024 was one of the few that was awarded "changemaker" status - so we were invited to write up our submission. Thanks to Karla and Kate for leading this important paper. Here is the reference and abstract:

Washington, K. N., Crowe, K., McLeod, S., Margetson, K., Bazzocchi, N. B. M., Kokotek, L. E., van der Straten Waillet, P., Másdóttir, T., & Volhardt M. D. S., (2025, in press). Methods of diagnosing speech sound disorders in multilingual children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.

Purpose: Identification of speech sound disorder (SSD) in children who are multilingual is challenging for many speech-language pathologists (SLPs). This may be due to a lack of clinical resources to accurately identify SSD in multilingual children as easily as for monolingual children. The purpose of this paper is to describe features of multilingual speech acquisition, identify evidence-based resources for the differential diagnosis of SSD in speakers of under-studied language paradigms, and to demonstrate how culturally responsive practices can be achieved in different linguistic contexts.
Method: Examples of different approaches used to inform accurate diagnosis of SSD in 2- to 8-year-old multilingual children are described. The approaches used included: (a) considering adult speech models, (b) completing validation studies, and (c) streamlining evidence-informed techniques. These methods were applied across four different language paradigms in countries within the Global North and Global South (e.g., Jamaican Creole-English, Jamaica; Vietnamese-English, Australia; French and additional languages, Belgium; Icelandic-Polish, Iceland). The culturally responsive nature of approaches in each cultural/linguistic setting is highlighted as well as the broader applicability of these approaches.
Results: Findings related to dialect specific features, successful validation of tools to describe functional speech intelligibility and production accuracy, and the utility of different techniques applied in the diagnosis of SSD are outlined.
Conclusions: Culturally responsive methods offer a useful framework for guiding SLPs’ diagnostic practices. However, successful application of these practices is best operationalized at a local level in response to the linguistic, cultural, and geographic context.

SACHL micro-credential/short course

Today Dr Kate Margetson and I met with the CSU  team led by Nik Ichalkaranje to start the process of the development of a micro-credential and short course for the SACHL

https://www.csu.edu.au/division/learning-teaching/microcredentials-and-short-courses

https://www.csu.edu.au/division/learning-teaching/microcredentials-and-short-courses/design-process

Other members of the team who were present were Amanda Marks, Amber Marks, Jessica Wilkinson, and Diarmuid Kelly.

We are excited about this opportunity

University medalist!

Huge congratulations to Dr Kate Margetson who just received this email from the Charles Sturt University Office of Governance and Corporate Administration:

It is my pleasure to advise that you have been awarded the Higher Degree by Research University Medal as recognition of your outstanding academic achievement.
 
Only one graduate per Faculty, per year, may be awarded the Higher Degree by Research University Medal. The University Research Committee determines the eligibility and assessment criteria to award a Higher Degree by Research University Medal. Criteria may include details of publications or presentations given during your candidature, prizes or scholarships won during your candidature or attestations of excellence by your examiners.
 
Congratulations on this momentous achievement.

Kate's PhD was titled: Moving Beyond Monolingual Practices with Multilingual Children: Learning from Vietnamese-English–Speaking Children, Families, and Professionals

She was supervised by A/Prof Sarah Verdon and myself. Congratulations Kate! We are so proud of you!