COVID-19 masks

Masks are being worn more frequently in Australia to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Here are some resources:

• Speech Pathology Australia: Access to surgical masks "The Australian Department of Health has provided national guidance on prioritisation. Several allied health professions have been deemed high priority. These are: Speech pathologists, Respiratory physiotherapists, Sonographers, Diagnostic radiographers"

• RCSLT recommends transparent face masks to assist with communication access.
• Hello masks (transparent masks) are being developed in Switzerland to enable people to see the face of the person wearing the mask. 
• Clearmask is recommended by the NHS and RCSLT in the UK: https://buy.theclearmask.com/

• "To mask or not to mask" - research evidence from Eikenberry et al. (2020). 

"Our results suggest use of face masks by the general public is potentially of high value in curtailing community transmission and the burden of the pandemic. The community-wide benefits are likely to be greatest when face masks are used in conjunction with other non-pharmaceutical practices (such as social-distancing), and when adoption is nearly universal (nation-wide) and compliance is high." (Eikenberry et al., 2020, p. 293)

Research outputs for Research Groups in the CSU Faculty of Arts and Education

• Early Childhood Research Group: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/organisations/early-childhood-research-group in CRO and https://plu.mx/csu-au/g/early-childhood-research-group in PlumX 
• STEM Education Research Group: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/organisations/stem-education-research-group in CRO and https://plu.mx/csu-au/g/stem-education-research-group in PlumX 
• Libraries Research Group: http://csu.edu.au/libraries-research https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/organisations/libraries-research-group in CRO and https://plu.mx/csu-au/g/libraries-research-group in PlumX

Free access to recently published articles

The following articles have been published online this week - and the first two have 50 free online copies:

1. McLeod, S., Davis, E., Rohr, K., McGill, N., Miller, K., Roberts, A., Thornton, S., Ahio, N., & Ivory, N. (2020). Waiting for speech-language pathology services: A randomised controlled trial comparing therapy, advice and device. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 22(3), 372-386. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1731600
   Free access: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/F8ASRC26JS7BT8YJHUJV/full?target=10.1080/17549507.2020.1731600 
2. McGill, N., Crowe, K., & McLeod, S. (2020). “Many wasted months”: Stakeholders’ perspectives about waiting for speech-language pathology services. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 22(3), 313-326. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1747541
   Free access: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SUPJSPDNMSZKSIG3TNZE/full?target=10.1080/17549507.2020.1747541 
3. Cronin, A., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2020, in press May). Holistic communication assessment for young children with cleft palate using the ICF-CY. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Advance online publication https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_LSHSS-19-00122

Meetings with my team

Each week I have 1-2 hour meetings with my SLM team members. This week I've had inspiring meetings with:

• Holly McAllister and Suzanne Hopf about Holly's honours data
• Dr Michelle Brown about her postdoc progress
• Dr Sarah Verdon and Maree from Speech Pathology Australia about presenting an invited online workshop
• Nicole McGill about her PhD and publications
• Dr Kate Crowe about her publications
• Dr Van Tran about her PhD
• Dr Audrey Wang about our VietSpeech data analysis
• Kate Margetson about our VietSpeech study 2
• Dr Sarah Verdon about our VietSpeech journal articles
• Dr Tamara Cumming and Dr Nicola Ivory about our Early Childhood Research Group - followed by a meeting with our Dean Prof John McDonald and SubDean Research Philip Hider.
• Emails with lots of other team members

Additionally this week I have supported researchers across the university and world with their grant and promotion planning as part of my senior research fellowship.

Holly McAlister

Dr Michelle Brown

Dr Suzanne Hopf

Congratulations Kate - 50 journal articles published!

On June 24 Kate Crowe reached an impressive milestone: she had (co)authored 50 published peer-reviewed journal articles. It has been an honour to collaborate with her on paper number 50 - and a number of other papers as well.

• Most of her publications are listed here: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/persons/kcrowecsueduau
• My favourite title is "Are French fries a vegetable? Lexical typicality judgement differences in deaf and hearing learners"

We had an international celebration (Iceland-USA-Australia) to celebrate on 22nd July.

7am Rochester / 11am Iceland / 9pm Bathurst

Page proofs and copy edits

While away on holidays, I have had page proofs arrive from 4 articles (most with a 48-72 hour turn around) and copy edits for half of the chapters from Interventions for Speech Sound Disorders in Children. It's difficult to take time off - but great that these papers will be available soon - and I've had lovely locations for these extra tasks.

1. Ireland, M., McLeod, S., Farquharson, K., & Crowe, K. (2020, in press June). Evaluating children in U.S. public schools with speech sound disorders: Considering federal and state laws, guidance, and research. Topics in Language Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1097/TLD.0000000000000226 
2. McGill, N., McLeod, S., Ivory, N., Davis, E., & Rohr, K. (2020, in press May). Randomised controlled trial evaluating active versus passive waiting for speech-language pathology. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica. 
3. Crowe, K. & McLeod, S. (2020, in press May). Children’s English consonant acquisition in the United States: A review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00168 
4. Cronin, A., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2020, in press May). Holistic communication assessment for young children with cleft palate using the ICF-CY. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 

A holiday rainbow

Children’s rights in the time of COVID-19

Tonight I attended the webinar, “Children’s rights in the time of COVID-19," hosted by Child Rights Connect, Centre for Children's Rights at Queen’s University Belfast, University of Edinburgh, the Childhood & Youth Studies Research Group and World Vision International. The webinar took place via Zoom on Tuesday July 7 at 9AM in New York, 2PM in London, 3PM in Brussels... and 11PM in Sydney! It began with an inspiring statement by Nomundari from Mongolia - representing children across the world.

Family holidays

Holidays with family is important and this location is special.

Mentoring senior staff

As part of my CSU Senior Research Fellowship I have the honour of mentoring senior staff in the university. Topics include promotion applications, PhD completions, etc. I love it! Here is a photo from my meeting with A. Prof Branka Krivokapic-Skoko today.

Meeting 2 with A. Prof Branka Krivokapic-Skoko

I also have been working with senior colleagues in the UK including Prof Julie Marshall as her external mentor (https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2020/07/external-mentor-for-good-to-great-scheme.html)and Dr Jill Titterington regarding her fellowship application.

Multilingual Children's Speech page views in June 2020

The Multilingual Children's Speech website continues to be a resource for the world.
In June 2020 there were 4,857 page views (3,781 unique page views):

• Intelligibility in Context Scale was the most popular (1,869  page views)
• Speech acquisition page the next most popular (997 page views)
• Speech assessments page was next (577 page views)
• Speech Participation  and Activity Assessment  of Children (SPAA-C) the next (364 page views)

Some interesting images from the Google analytics reports are below:

FOAE: Beyond 2021

At today's Faculty of Arts and Education Forum Dean John McDonald outlined our new strategic plan for Beyond 2021: https://staff.csu.edu.au/manage-my-employment/sustainable-futures/faculty/arts-ed
We are to be "unified, agentic, enterprising".

Planning Early Childhood Voices - A virtual flipped pop-up conference

The Early Childhood Research Group are planning a virtual flipped pop-up conference titled "Early Childhood Voices". Many great ideas were discussed today.

Planning team - Tamara Cumming, Sharynne McLeod and Nicola Ivory

extIPA acknowlegments

extIPA stands for "Extensions to the IPA for the Transcription of Disordered Speech" and the current version is dated 2015 @ICPLA

This evening I was checking the most recent extIPA chart and found that I was mentioned in the acknowledgments for my suggestions regarding the revisions to the extIPA.
Ball, M. J., Howard, S. J., & Miller, K. (2018). Revisions to the extIPA chart. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 48(2), 155-164. doi:10.1017/S0025100317000147

External mentor for "Good to Great" scheme

Dr Julie Marshall is one of 20 people from Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) to be selected for the "Good to Great" scheme aimed to develop leadership skills, research collaborations, new skills and knowledge. I have been appointed as Julie's external mentor as part of the scheme. We had our first official meeting today, where we discussed Julie's alignment with the United Nations including her important work with UNHDR in Rwanda. Here is a paper that Julie and colleagues wrote in 2018 that I presented as part of my speech at COSP12 at the United Nations in 2019:

Marshall, J., & Barrett, H. (2018). Human rights of refugee-survivors of sexual and gender-based violence with communication disability. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20(1), 44-49. doi:10.1080/17549507.2017.1392608

VietSpeech Study 2 Writing Retreat

This week the VietSpeech team are having a writing retreat to analyse and write up papers from Study 2. The VietSpeech grant was announced in 2017 (see here) and we have been working on it since 2018. We have finished Study 1 and are also working on Studies 3 and 4.

This week the following people are meeting together virtually:

• Sharynne McLeod (Bathurst)
• Sarah Verdon(Albury)
• Van Tran (Sydney)
• Audrey (Cen) Wang (Bathurst)
• Ben Pham (Ha Noi, Vietnam)
• Kate Margetson (Sydney)
• Katherine White (Sydney)
• Holly McAlister (Albury)

Some highlights:

• The diversity of our team and the richness of discussions
• Theoretical and clinical discussions about "What is correct speech?" 
• Discussions about considering both directions of cross-linguistic transfer 
• Cameo appearances from our children, pets, and others

Monday morning's meeting

Holly discussed similarities between Fiji English and Vietnamese English
(and shared Hopf, McLeod and Geraghty)

Van created venn diagrams during Tuesday's discussion about "what is correct speech

Wednesday morning's meeting

Van taught us how to cook chokos and to cut up oranges in a Vietnamese way
(and to eat them with salt and chilli)

Ben gave many insights from Vietnam - and told us of her successful national grant (congratulations!)

Kate and Katherine created a form that clinicians could use to compare cross-linguistic vs developmental mismatches

Thursday morning meeting

Writing, thinking, talking, writing...

Friday's meeting - with Sadie studying the figure very carefully

Friday's meeting

Health and Wellbeing in Childhood - Third Edition

My copy of Health and Wellbeing in Childhood - Third Edition has just arrived in the mail. It is so new it is not even on the Cambridge University Press website yet.

Here are the chapters I have co-authored with Jane McCormack:

• McCormack, J. & McLeod, S. (2020). Classifying health and wellbeing: Applying the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health to early years learners. In S. Garvis & D. Pendergast (Eds). Health and wellbeing in childhood (3rd ed.) (pp. 20-34). Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press. 
• McCormack, J. & McLeod, S. (2020). Communication development. In S. Garvis & D. Pendergast (Eds). Health and wellbeing in childhood (3rd ed.) (pp. 132-153). Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press. 

They have been substantially updated since the second edition - and the chapter on communication development includes case studies based around children's drawings.

Early Childhood Research Group planning meeting

Today Dr Tamara Cumming came over for an Early Childhood Research Group planning meeting (applying physical distancing during the COVID-19 restrictions). We had a brilliant brainstorming time inspired by our recent meeting with the Executive Dean who asked us to undertake "edgy, bolshy, noisy research that is not vanilla". We have been allocated 100 hours to work with Dr Nicola Ivory and Prof Philp Hider, our SubDean Research is supportive of our ideas. Watch this space.

Find an expert

Charles Sturt University has just added me as an expert on their website: https://news.csu.edu.au/experts/ It is an honour to be highlighed amongst my esteemed colleagues.

Highlights for the Annual Faculty of Arts and Education Research Report

I have been asked to provide some highlights from the past year for the Annual Faculty of Arts and Education Research Report. Here are my personal highlights (I haven't included working with my wonderful research students and SLM team or my publications):

Awards 

• Professor Sharynne McLeod was recognised in The Australian newspaper for being Best Researcher in the World in the field of Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology… “based on the quality, volume and impact of their work” (The Australian Research Magazine, 25 September 2019, p. 9) https://specialreports.theaustralian.com.au/1540291/top-of-the-world/ 

• CSU published a news story (25 September 2019) about the award here: https://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/charles-sturt-speech-pathology-expert-sitting-on-top-of-the-world 

• The Campus Review story (27 September 2019) is here: https://www.campusreview.com.au/2019/09/australian-researcher-named-worlds-best/ 

• Professor Sharynne McLeod and Dr Kate Crowe (CSU Adjunct) were awarded the prestigious American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Editor's Award in November 2019in Orlando Florida for the following article: McLeod, S. & Crowe, K. (2018). Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 1546-1571. doi:10.1044/2018_AJSLP-17-0100 Available: https://ajslp.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2701897 

 Presentation at the United Nations 

• Professor Sharynne McLeod presented at the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (COSP12) at the United Nations in New York (June 2019) 

o People With Communication Disabilities Speak Up For Inclusion and Participation - UN Web TV (90 minutes) Wednesday, June 12, 2019, 8:15 am – 9:30 am http://webtv.un.org/watch/people-with-communication-disability-speak-up-for-inclusion-and-participation-how-the-implementation-of-the-crpd-and-the-sdgs-can-support-this-right-cosp12-side-event/6047514452001/
o CSU media release https://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/charles-sturt-expert-advocates-at-un-for-communication-rights.
o Link to International Communication Project media release: According to the ASHA Director of Public Relations, the ICP media release was picked up by 160 outlets worldwide and had an audience reach of 73 million.
o The presentation was based on a special issue of guest edited by Professor Sharynne McLeod: Communication rights special issue of International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (IJSLP). Her introductory article "Communication rights: Fundamental human rights for all" has been viewed 14,806 times to date with an altmetric score of 169. 

 Grants

• Professor Sharynne McLeod and Dr Sarah Verdon (CSU) have been undertaking the following Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (2018-2020): Australian children's speech and language competence (DP180102848). https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/overview 
• Professor Sharynne McLeod and Nicole McGill (CSU) worked with local speech pathologists to complete the following NSW Health Translational Research Grant (2017-2019): Waiting for speech pathology: Device versus advice. The NSW Health investigators on the team were: Emily Davis, Katrina Rohr, Angela Roberts and Katherine Miller o They won the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference Best Research Poster Award, have published three journal articles, and have developed a free parent website as part of the grant: https://wnswlhd.health.nsw.gov.au/our-services/speech-pathology

Cultural and linguistic diversity in NSW Department of Education schools (2019)

Here is some interesting information from the NSW Department of Education about linguistic diversity in schools in 2019
https://www.cese.nsw.gov.au/publications-filter/schools-language-diversity-in-nsw-2019

• "In March 2019, 64.1% of students enrolled in NSW government schools came from homes where English was the only language spoken. More than a third (35.9%) of students came from homes where languages other than English were spoken" 
• "There are 240 different language backgrounds of LBOTE [language backgrounds other than English] students at NSW government schools" 
• "Government preschools enrolled 2,050 students from language backgrounds other than English in 2019, representing 51.3% of all government preschool enrolments" 
• "In March 2019 68.9% of LBOTE students were from the nine largest languages and language groups. There were at least 5,000 students in each of these languages/language groups" 
• "The largest single language of LBOTE students in March 2019 was Arabic (39,793 students), followed by Mandarin (27,396 students) and Vietnamese (16,854 students). Two European language backgrounds, Greek and Spanish, also featured in the largest language backgrounds, with 8,004 and 7,985 students enrolled respectively" 

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