Bon Voyage Sarah

Sarah Verdon, my PhD student, is leaving tomorrow to travel the world for 5 months. She will be visiting Chile, Brazil, Italy, UK, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, and US. The purpose of her travels is to collect data on best practices services for multilingual children with speech sound disorders and to attend and present papers at 3 conferences:

• International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics conference (Italy)
• Asia Pacific Society of Speech Language and Hearing conference (Taiwan)
• American Speech Language and Hearing Association convention (USA)

Yesterday, Sarah and I submitted two manuscripts to international journals to be considered for publication:

• Verdon, S., McLeod, S., & McDonald, S. (2013). A geographical analysis of speech-language pathology services to support multilingual Australian children. 
• McLeod, S. & Verdon, S. (2013). A review of speech sound assessments in 18 languages other than English. 

I wish Sarah all the best for her travels, look forward to regular updates, and to seeing her in Turin, Italy and Chicago, US on the way.

 

Page proofs

Just when you think your manuscript is finished - you receive page proofs for checking. This week I have spent over 20 hours checking page proofs for two manuscripts that are going to be published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology in August. They both contain many phonetic symbols, and there were many author queries, even though we were very careful in preparing the manuscripts. It is a long way from first submission to publication.

Statistics

Kate Crowe, Sarah Masso, Graham Daniel and I spent last week in Sydney at the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc (ACSPRI) winter school undertaking statistics courses. Attendance at the course was supported by the Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network. The knowledge we gained will be useful to ensure that our data entry, coding, and analysis is accurate, efficient, and effective.

Our simplest (but one of the most effective) syntax that we created within SPSS was:
COMPUTE Age=DATEDIFF(DateScreen,DOB,"months").
EXECUTE.

This code meant that the SPSS program could automatically create the child's age in months from the date of birth (DOB) and the date of screening (DateScreen). We also created syntax to code all of Australia's postcodes into deciles relating to advantage/disadvantage, and all of Australia's languages.

Graham Daniel, Kate Crowe, Sarah Masso, and Sharynne McLeod at ACSPRI in Sydney

Working with families

Dr Nicole Watts Pappas was my PhD student from 2004-2007. The topic of her thesis was "Parental involvement in intervention for speech impairment". She was awarded the CSU Faculty of Education Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award and co-edited a book titled Working with families in speech-language pathology published in the US by Plural Publishing. Since this time she has taken her topic to heart and has had two lovely children, Xander and Zoe. She recently has returned to work and has been appointed as an adjunct research associate at Charles Sturt University. She also has been appointed the guest editor for the 2013 Speech Pathology Australia National Conference Proceedings published in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. It is great to be working with her again.

Xander, Nicole, Sharynne, & Zoe at the
Speech Pathology Australia National conference on the Gold Coast

Resourcing speech pathologists to work with multilingual clients: From Arabic to isiZulu

Today I presented the Elizabeth Usher Memorial Address to the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference on the Gold Coast. The abstract for my presentation is below. During the presentation relevant URLs were tweeted to the audience (see below). Here is the chirpstory containing the tweets from day 2 of the conference and the media release.

 

ABSTRACT
Resourcing speech pathologists to work with multilingual clients: From Arabic to isiZulu

Almost 7000 languages are spoken throughout the world, and many people speak more than one language. Speech pathologists across the world have critical roles to play in supporting children to be competent communicators in the languages of their communities. However, there is a mismatch between the languages spoken by children and families and the languages spoken by speech pathologists. Recent population studies of Australian preschool children show that the most common languages other than English are: Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, Spanish, and Greek; whereas, Speech Pathology Australia members frequently offer services in: Auslan, French, Italian, Greek, and Cantonese. The need for accessible culturally and linguistically appropriate resources for working with multilingual children has been highlighted in international surveys. For example, Guiberson and Atkins (2012) found that only 51% of speech pathologists were  confident in assessing and providing intervention for multilingual children. Recent international collaborations have resulted in innovative and practical strategies to support speech pathologists during assessment, intervention, and collaboration with families, communities, and other professionals. The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech was assembled to prepare a position paper to address issues faced by clinicians in working with multilingual populations. The new Multilingual Children’s Speech website fulfils one of the aims of the position paper by providing resources and information for speech pathologists in over 30 languages. The recent international collaborations have been framed around the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF-CY) and have been established with the goal of supporting  multilingual children to participate in society.

Chris Stone (President of Speech Pathology Australia) presenting the Elizabeth Usher Award

Links

UNESCO Do one thing for diversity
https://www.facebook.com/DoOneThingforDiversityandInclusion   
Early Years Learning Framework
http://foi.deewr.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/belonging_being_and_becoming_the_early_years_learning_framework_for_australia.pdf    
The cultural and linguistic diversity of 3-year-old children with hearing loss
http://jdsde.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/4/421.abstract   
Factors contributing to language use for multilingual children with hearing loss
http://clt.sagepub.com/content/29/1/111.abstract    
Influence of bilingualism on speech production: A systematic review
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-6984.2012.00178.x/abstract   
Prevalence of speech and language concern for Australian children
http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/full/52/5/1213   
Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17549507.2011.636071  
Multilingual children’s speech position paper
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/position-paper   
Multilingual children’s speech acquisition
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition   
Children's acquisition of Hong Kong Cantonese consonants, vowels, and tones
http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/56/1/103   
Non-English speech assessments
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments   
English validation of Intelligibility in Context Scale
http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/55/2/648   
Intelligibility in Context Scale
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/ics   
Comparison between the speech sounds of English and other languages
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/languages  
Multilingual and multicultural considerations in speech-language pathology
http://informahealthcare.com/toc/asl/14/6   
World Report on Disability and people with communication disability
http://informahealthcare.com/toc/asl/15/1   
Working in a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Society: SPA position paper

http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/Clinical_Guidelines/Working_in_a_CALD_Society.pdf
  
References

Guiberson, M., & Atkins, J. (2012). Speech-language pathologists’ preparation, practices, and perspectives on serving culturally and linguistically diverse children. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 33(3), 169-180.

World Health Organization (2007). International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health: Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY). Geneva, Switzerland: Author.

Sharynne presenting the Elizabeth Usher Memorial lecture

 

Presentations at the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference

This week I am co-presenting the following papers with my students and colleagues at the Speech Pathology Australia National conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland:

• McLeod, S. Resourcing speech pathologists to work with multilingual clients: From Arabic to isiZulu. Invited Elizabeth Usher Memorial Address. 
• Crowe, K. & McLeod, S. Children with hearing loss who use languages other than English: A systematic review of language outcomes.
• Crowe, K., McLeod, S. & Ching, T. Y. C. 3-year-old Australian children with hearing loss: Cultural and linguistic diversity. 
• Limbrick, N., McCormack, J., McLeod, S. Speech pathologists' decision-making when creating informal measures for assessing children's speech.
• Verdon, S. & McLeod, S. A geographical perspective of services to support multilingual Australian children.

The conversations and collaborations that occur as part of the conference are always inspiring and encouraging.

My PhD students are all in one location!
Suzanne Hopf, Kate Crowe, Sharynne, Sarah Masso, Sarah Verdon

Sarah Verdon presenting her paper

First set of data for Sound Start study

This week, while I have been in Viet Nam, Kate Crowe and Sarah Masso have collected the first set of screening data for our Sound Start study. Our aim is to collect screening data on 300 children this year - so it is exciting that the screening phase has begun.

Innovations from the speech therapy profession in Viet Nam

On Thursday I was invited to give a 2.5 hour continuing professional development lecture to the graduate and student speech therapists in Viet Nam. I began the lecture outlining some of the innovations I had undertaken since I last saw them in 2011 (e.g., Multilingual Children's Speech website). Then I invited members of the audience to share their innovations. I was so thrilled to see how they had applied what they had learned during their lectures in 2011 to their professional practice. Graduates and students from Children's Hospital Number 1, Children's Hospital Number 2, the Ear Nose and Throat Hospital, and the Orthopedic and Rehabilitation Hospital all showcased their assessment and intervention resources (see photos below). Dr Ly Kha also described her normative research undertaken with teachers. We then outlined a plan to collaborate to develop one speech sampling assessment tool for Viet Nam, and collect  normative data by speech therapists using International Phonetic Alphabet transcription. The Vietnamese speech therapists are so hard working and dedicated, I look forward to seeing this important innovation come to fruition.

Vietnamese Speech Therapy Graduates and Students (Mr Dien on left)

Speech resources for children developed at Children's Hospital Number 1

Speech resources for children developed at Children's Hospital Number2

Speech resources for children developed at Ear Nose and Throat Hospital

Speech resources for children developed at Orthopedic and Rehabilitation Hospital

Typical Vietnamese preschoolers

Yesterday the speech therapy students from Phạm Ngọc Thạch University visited a preschool. We spent time looking at the preschool, participating in songs and games, and playing with the children. Next, six children visited us and we worked in small groups to practice assessing the children's speech. The children taught us all a lot. We had a lot of practice transcribing online and keeping children's attention. We also had a chance to test the stimulus items in our newly developed speech tests to see if we needed to make changes (and we did!)

 

The next day members of the class gave me extremely valuable feedback on the pilot version of the International Speech Screen for Vietnamese.

Trinh Foundation

The speech therapy program at Pham Ngoc Thach University in Ho Chi Minh City was established by the Trinh Foundation (http://www.trinhfoundation.org/), a not-for-profit organisation with the following mission:

¨ To improve the quality of life of the many Vietnamese children and adults who suffer from communication and swallowing disorders.

¨ To address this problem by continuing to raise the awareness in Vietnam of Speech-language Therapy as a profession. 

¨ To provide the knowledge, clinical skills and finance to establish formalised educational courses in Speech-language Therapy in Vietnam.  This will allow the Vietnamese people themselves, to successfully manage communication and swallowing disorders such as those arising from head injury, cleft conditions, hearing impairment, autism, developmental delay and head and neck cancer.