Interprofessional Leadership in Health and Higher Education

Today our visiting scholar, Professor A. Lynn Williams. presented a seminar titled "Interprofessional Leadership in Health and Higher Education": An interactive seminar for academic leaders and staff highlighting collaborative and distributed leadership approaches in health and higher education. The seminar was both online and face-to-face and we had attendees in Bathurst, across the CSU footprint, and in Fiji and Vietnam! 

Here is Prof Williams' bio:

Professor A. Lynn Williams, PhD, CCC-SLP is Professor in the Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), USA. She was founding Dean of ETSU’s College of Health Sciences, and 2021 President of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). An internationally recognized expert in speech sound disorders, she has led innovative interprofessional education initiatives and currently serves as Vice President of the National Academies of Practice, advancing collaboration to improve education, research, and patient care.

SACHL 2025

Dr Kate Margetson and I have a grant through the Rural Health Research Institute to develop the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages (SACHL, Margetson & McLeod, 2025) https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/sachl and to ensure it is relevant to all speech pathologists including in rural and remote settings.

This morning we

• reflected on our presentation at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (Nov 2024)
• prepared our presentation for the (rural) Central West Speech Pathologists (7 Feb 2025)
• worked on our chapter for a book to be published in Italian
• looked at speech assessments in languages other than English (including the HKCAT that just arrived by mail from Prof Carol To in Hong Kong).

We have already been productive in our first week back from holidays!

 

Hong Kong workshop - Children's speech assessment and intervention: What works? What's new? What's the evidence?

Dr Kate Margetson and I presented a workshop (19-20 October 2024) in Hong Kong titled: Children's speech assessment and intervention: What works? What's new? What's the evidence? https://speechearing.org/en/products/speech-sound-disorder

We were invited by Prof Thomas Law, Prof Valerie Pereira, and Prof Kathy Lee from Chinese University of Hong Kong Speech and Hearing Social Enterprise.

This 2-day workshop will combine the latest evidence with clinical examples and opportunities to apply knowledge to your clinical practice based on the following topics

• Understanding children with speech sound disorders
• Children’s speech development: Latest evidence from 50 languages
• Children’s speech assessment, analysis, and differential diagnosis
• Speech assessment of children’s home language(s) (SACHL)*
• Twenty interventions: Selecting the right intervention approach for each child
• Listening to children to make a difference in their day-to-day lives.

Dr Kate Margetson presenting the SACHL

Chinese University of Hong Kong graduates attending our seminar

HongKong Speech Therapy Association executive committee at the end of our seminar

*The SACHL research is supported by the CSU Rural Health Research Institute.

Assessing Multilingual Children's Speech in their Home Languages - Professional Development Events online at CSU

This week Kate Margetson is running three free professional development events titled "Assessing Multilingual Children's Speech in their Home Languages" as part of our Rural Health Research Institute Grant. We have asked participants to complete a 10 minute questionnaire as part of the free event to provide us with information about current work with multilingual children and to give us feedback on the clinical feasibility and applicability of our new evidence-based approach to support multilingual children's speech titled Speech Assessment in Children's Home Languages (SACHL). 502 people registered - and 348 enthusiastic people attended the sessions. 

• Monday 1st July at 8am Sydney timezone - 90 attendees 
• Tuesday 2nd July at 12pm Sydney timezone - 137 attendees
  
• Friday 5th July at 12pm Sydney timezone - 121 attendees
  

Kate Margetson presenting online - introducing the SACHL

The presentation included lots of published evidence from the VietSpeech Study

ALS Workshop: Home language maintenance: Connecting children, families, and classrooms

We presented the following workshop at the Australian Linguistic Society on 29 November: 

https://als.asn.au/Conference/2023/Workshops2023

Home language maintenance: Connecting children, families, and classrooms 

Paola Escudero, Western Sydney University

Sharynne McLeod, Charles Sturt University

Presenters: Chloé Diskin-Holdaway3, Kate Margetson2, Gloria Pino Escobar1, Van H. Tran2, Sarah Verdon2, Paola Escudero1, Sharynne McLeod2 1 Little Multilingual Minds, The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia 2 VietSpeech, Charles Sturt University, Australia 3Little Multilingual Minds, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Australia 

During this practical workshop, participants will have the opportunity to learn from two innovative teams of researchers who have developed fun, evidence-based programs for supporting children’s home language maintenance at home and school. 

•  VietSpeech (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech). The VietSpeech SuperSpeech program was developed to support families (preschool children, parents, grandparents, etc.) at home. The 8-week online bilingual Vietnamese-English program included: (a) Word Superpower activities addressing target words and sentences; (b) Speech Superpower activities addressing consonants, tones, and syllable structures; and (c) Home Language Maintenance Information for parents. The VietSpeech SuperSpeech program was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. 
• Little Multilingual Minds (LMM, https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/impact/case_studies/little_multilingual_minds) LMM is a research-based multilingual education program for children that supports and extends home language (HL) maintenance and foreign language (L2) learning during the early, formative years, using evidence-based principles, structure and guidelines. LMM, within research-partnership collaborations with education providers, delivers education in any Language Other than English by harnessing recent world-wide research and r findings from our own research on early childhood education and primary education. LMM currently delivers in Spanish ,Vietnamese, Mandarin and French. 

The workshop will commence with an overview of home language maintenance throughout life and factors impacting home language maintenance. Next each team (VietSpeech and LMM) will outline their vision, target group, challenges, and solutions, as well as principles and theoretical frameworks. The practical component of the workshop will be preceded by presentation of the structure and weekly session delivery, themes, session plans and example activities to inspire attendants. Then each team will demonstrate an example of how they have targeted the theme of healthy lifestyles/food and how they have used The Very Hungry Caterpillar to support children’s home language maintenance at home and at school. The workshop will conclude with time for participants to work together to consider how these programs can relate to their own experiences and to develop activities for their own situations. The aim is to show that HL maintenance takes a village and that the community of academics within the language and linguistics discipline should feel part of the village. 

Presenters’ biographies: 

• VietSpeech - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/team 

• Little Multilingual Minds – https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/impact/case_studies/little_multilingual_minds/team 

Materials available prior to the workshop: 

• VietSpeech - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/info 

• Multilingual Children’s Speech - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/home 

• https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/impact/case_studies/little_multilingual_minds/news_and_faqs 

References: 

• Diskin-Holdaway, C., & Escudero, P. (2021). Don’t be afraid to pass your first language, and accent, to your kids. It could be their superpower. The Conversation. Retrieved 19 March 2023, from https://theconversation.com/dont-be-afraid-to-pass-your-first- language-and-accent-to-your-kids-it-could-be-their-superpower-143093 

• Escudero, P., Jones Diaz, C., Hajek, J., Wigglesworth, G., & Smit, E. A. (2020). Probability of heritage language use at a supportive early childhood setting in Australia. Frontiers in Education, 5, 93. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00093 

• Escudero, P., Diskin-Holdaway, C., Pino Escobar, G., & Hajek, J. (2023) Needs and demands for heritage language support in Australia: results from a nationwide survey. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2023.2189261 

• Escudero, P., Pino Escobar G, Diskin-Holdaway, C. & Hajek, J. (Forthcoming) Nurturing Australia’s Little Multilingual Minds: Program description and evaluation. 

• McLeod, S., Verdon, S., Tran, V. H., Margetson, K., & Wang, C. (2022). SuperSpeech: Multilingual speech and language maintenance intervention for Vietnamese-Australian children and families via telepractice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 53(3), 675-697. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_LSHSS-21-00146 

Here is my pre-recorded presentation:

 https://charlessturt.zoom.us/rec/share/cVjixPvY-J_jPVdWdWAAknHX4lbu13NTa34t6HrpQl6sxRrBd-55xaMF8rjMf8CC.tLFhmS13ofSW80Rz?startTime=1699891251000

ECIR Workshop: Internal Grant Writing

 Today, Dr Emmaline Lear, Manager Research Development, Office of Research Services and Graduate Studies presented a workshop titled "ECIR Internal grant writing" to our Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Sturt Scheme team. This complemented the presentations from the ECIR Research Retreat where we also had presentations from the CSU Research Office about External Grant Writing and Research Impact. Thanks Emmaline for your informative session.

Workshop on community language corpora in Australia

Workshop on community language corpora in Australia 

• https://www.ldaca.edu.au/events/events/
• When: 9-10 November 2023 
• Where: Engma Room (3.165 HC Coombs Building, ANU) 
• Organisers: Li Nguyen & Catherine Travis 

Our team is presenting the following paper: 

• Vietnamese language use and maintenance in Australia 
• Authors: Van Tran, Sharynne McLeod, Sarah Verdon, Kate Margetson 
• Time: 12:35-1pm 

Here is a description of the event: 

Australia is a highly multilingual and multicultural society, with more than 490 languages coming from around 300 ancestries and cultural traditions (ABS, 2021, 2022). For decades, the language and cultural maintenance of various immigrant groups have been under investigation by many scholars, not only in linguistics but also in history, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines. This work has amassed a large body of data reflecting the languages of these communities, providing information about how Australia’s immigration history has contributed to the country today. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scholars working with language corpora from across different disciplines. The workshop is being run as part of the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), which is working to build national research infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, facilitating sustainable access to and controlled use of digital language corpora for linguists, scholars across the Humanities and Social Sciences, and non-academics. The workshop will consist of presentations on language data collected from Australian immigrant communities for different research purposes, and will close with a panel discussion on needs and challenges around managing and archiving community language data in a way that is ethical, legal and culturally sensitive, and how LDaCA can help support that.

Unconscious bias workshop

This morning I participated in an unconscious bias workshop held by CSU for members of this year’s Academic Promotions committees. Here are some papers that I shared with people at the workshop: 

HEARING - USING MICROPHONES AT UNIVERSITY 

• Van Den Heuij, K. M. L., Neijenhuis, K., & Coene, M. (2018). Acoustic environments that support equally accessible oral higher education as a human right. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20(1), 108-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2017.1413136 

 IMPACT OF COVID LOCKDOWNS (esp. on women) 

• Pebdani, R. N., Zeidan, A., Low, L.-F., & Baillie, A. (2023). Pandemic productivity in academia: using ecological momentary assessment to explore the impact of COVID-19 on research productivity. Higher Education Research & Development, 42(4), 937-953. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2128075 

"The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on academic mothers has many long-term implications on career progression and alleviating this gendered impact should be a priority for adminstrators worldwide." (Pebdani et al., 2023, p. 937)

• Squazzoni, F., Bravo, G., Grimaldo, F., García-Costa, D., Farjam, M., & Mehmani, B. (2021). Gender gap in journal submissions and peer review during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A study on 2329 Elsevier journals. PLOS ONE, 16(10), e0257919. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257919

Workshop: Qualitative Data Analysis in Communication Disorders Research

Today I attended the workshop titled "Qualitative Data Analysis in Communication Disorders Research" with members of our SLM and CSU team. The workshop was organised by Rena Lyons (Ireland) and Lindy McAllister (Australia) and covered the following topics:

• Overview - Rena Lyons and Lindy McAllister 
• Thematic analysis and content analysis - Deborah Hersh, Anne Hill, Karen Wylie 
• Narrative analysis overview - Rena Lyons, Philippa Friary, Stacie Attrill and Deborah Hersh 
• First Nations research - Karen Brewer and Deborah Hersh 
• Grounded theory - Clare Carroll 
• Rigour - Lindy McAllister 

Workshop presenters

The workshop drew on the expertise of the authors of these books:

• Lyons, R., & McAllister, L. (Eds.). (2019). Qualitative research in communication disorders: An introduction for students and clinicians. J&R Press. https://www.jr-press.co.uk/diving-deep.html.
• Lyons, R., McAllister, L., Carroll, C., Hersh, D., & Skeat, J. (Eds.). (2022). Diving deep into qualitative data analysis in communication disorders research. J&R Press. https://www.jr-press.co.uk/diving-deep.html. 

Workshop attendees

 

The workshop was held on the Epsom campus of the University of Auckland that includes the Faculty of Education and Social Work.

 

Keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB)

I was honoured to be invited to be a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) 26-30 June 2023, hosted by Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia (https://www.isb14.com/home). Over 550 people attended in person and online.

My presentation was titled "Cross-linguistic perspectives on children’s speech development" and is available here: https://youtu.be/mbMRPo73ERE

An artist in the audience painted me during my keynote!

International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) is a biennial conference on a wide range of issues concerning bi/multilingualism. Since its inaugural conference in 1997 at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, ISB has become the most significant conference in the field of bi/multilingualism. ISB has a strong focus on showcasing multidisciplinary research with a representation from a range of disciplines at every conference, including education, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology and sociology. The aim of ISB is to bring together bi/multilingualism researchers from all around the globe to advance the theoretical and applied research in bi/multilingualism, and to support bi/multilingualism practices in the community.

The conference theme of ISB14 is Diversity Now. The United Nations General Assembly has declared the period between 2022 and 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to draw attention to the critical status of many Indigenous languages across the world and encourage action for their preservation, revitalisation, and promotion. As we move into this decade, ISB14 encourages work especially involving lesser studied bilingual communities and interdisciplinary work to tackle bilingualism across the life-span, cultures and societies. 

ISB14 Psycholinguistics Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism Neuroscience Interpreting & Translation Speech-Language Pathology Infant and Child Development Sociolinguistics Indigenous Languages Sociology Health Communication Education Phonetics and Phonology  

Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone - conference chair with Sharynne and Holly

Co-design of a new applied policy entity at CSU

Deputy Vice Chancellor - Research Mark Evans and I co-hosted a 2-day workshop in Bathurst to co-design a new applied policy research initiative at CSU. It was a fantastic time to meet with social science colleagues from across the university to plan for this exciting new venture.

CSU SPAN workshop: Planning Surveys and Designing Questionnaires

Today I attended Part 1 of the 3-part presentation titled "Planning Surveys and Designing Questionnaires. It was presented by Gail Fuller who works with the CSU Spatial Analysis Network (SPAN). Gail has been a fantastic support for our own research and research students.

This three part integrated workshop is designed to introduce the processes and steps involved in planning a survey and creating a questionnaire that effectively gathers the data you need to satisfy your research questions. It will cover question and questionnaire design and type, population size, choice and how to connect, testing and redesign, data collection and storage, what works and what doesn't over the entire process, what support is available.

Census = entire population

Target population = scope

Survey population = coverage

Ethical Research Involving Children

This evening I attended an excellent seminar presented by Prof Anne Graham and Julia Truscott from the University of Southern Queensland via the Queens University Belfast Centre for Children's Rights.

There were some excellent resources shared during the presentation via ERIC: https://childethics.com/

https://childethics.com/ethical-guidance/

Hugh Kerns' workshop for CSU students

Hugh Kerns presented a workshop for CSU students on How to Plan your Part-time PhD. I have encouraged my PhD students to attend his workshop for some time now - and I finally had a chance to attend since this one was after work hours. Hugh has so many good tips and I love his turn of phrase (e.g., Tim Tam approach). No wonder so many of my PhD students love learning from him.

Postponed events

There are a number of events in late April/May that I am no longer speaking at.

• Last week I was meant to be a keynote speaker in Cardiff, Wales at the Craniofacial Society of Great Britain and Ireland 
• Today, I was meant to be the speaker at a 1-day workshop on the Gold Coast in Queensland  with 65 speech pathologists from the South East Region of Queensland.
• Later in May our team had a number of papers accepted to be presented at the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference in Darwin.

I look forward to when these are rescheduled. Meanwhile, I am working hard with my team to write up more research so that when these are rescheduled I'll have even more to share.

Telepractice webinar from UTS

This afternoon I attended a very informative webinar by University of Technology (UTS) Speech Pathology titled "Rapid Transition to Telepractice". The free seminar was presented to 182 allied health professionals from across the world by Prof Bronwyn Hemsley, Dr Lucy Bryant, and Harmony Turnbull. Thanks for your generosity and collegiality during the COVID-19 changes to service delivery for allied health professionals.

Impact seminar

This morning I attended a very interesting online seminar titled "Preparing your impact track record for NHMRC Synergy Grants" by Tamika Heiden and Cathie Withyman. Although I don't intend to apply for this particular grant at the moment, the advice was extremely useful.
We were encouraged to think about how our research has been adopted/adapted/used and to choose older work to talk about as there has been more time for impact.

Impromptu professional development in Balranald

Today while I was in Balranald (which is over a 7 hour drive from my home) I happened to meet Emelia Bett (the local speech pathologist) and Kellie Hodgson (her aide). We had an enjoyable time discussing some of the children that they are working with and brainstorming ideas for their speech intervention. It is so great to see speech pathology in rural schools in NSW - something that is not common in my state.

Emelia Bett, Kellie Hodgson and Sharynne

Animations and Graphics for Researchers

Today members of the SLM team attended an online workshop provided by Charles Sturt University titled "Animations and Graphics for Researchers" presented by Dr. Tullio Rossi from Adelaide. He described that "visible or vanish" now sits alongside "publish or perish". He addressed:

• Video abstracts = the "movie trailer" for your journal article
  (e.g., an abstract created with VideoScribe: https://youtu.be/g3cIr9RomPM)
• Graphical abstracts using Powerpoint or Canva
• Posters and how to make them more engaging.

Curriculum vitae workshop #2

Today I ran another curriculum vitae writing workshop for academic staff in the School of Teacher Education at Charles Sturt University. It follows on from the one I ran for my SLM team a few weeks ago: https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2019/02/curriculum-vitae-workshop.html

I enjoy enabling academics to use their CVs to envision future possibilities and goals.