Web of Science impact factors released for 2013

Overnight the Web of Science 2013  impact factors have been released.
Here are the the impact factors for speech pathology journals listed under the Rehabilitation and Linguistics categories

Rehabilitation Rank /64	Linguistics Rank /166	Journal	Impact Factor
8	8	J SPEECH LANG HEAR R	1.926
18	14	AM J SPEECH-LANG PAT	1.644
21	19	J COMMUN DISORD	1.520
24	24	INT J SPEECH-LANG PA	1.412
25	25	INT J LANG COMM DIS	1.392
29	28	LANG SPEECH HEAR SER	1.247
34	36	J FLUENCY DISORD	1.082
49	63	CLIN LINGUIST PHONET	0.780
54	70	TOP LANG DISORD	0.683
-	79	CHILD LANG TEACH THE	0.571
59	-	FOLIA PHONIATR LOGO	0.550
61	-	COMMUN DISORD Q	0.367

The impact factor for IJSLP has continued to rise: 1.412 (2013), 1.176 (2012), 1.000 (2011), 1.120 (2010)

Every child is important

This week is Education Week in New South Wales. St Ives Uniting Church celebrated the beginning of education week with a special service. The theme was Every Child is Important and the invited speakers at the service were my husband, David and myself.
David is the Coordinator, Rural and Distance Education Programs at NSW Department of Education and Communities and spoke on providing quality educational opportunities to families in isolated communities. I used the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) for Australia and discussed how we can use the concepts of "Belonging, Being and Becoming" when we think about our interactions with children. I ended with the following questions:

• Belonging: How can you ensure that children truly belong to your school, church, community?
• Being: How can you ensure that children are accepted to be who they are and as they are now? (not as future adults, but the children of now)
• Becoming: How can you support children to become active and informed citizens of the future?

David McLeod, Rev Dr Rob McFarlane, Sharynne McLeod

Documenting research impact

Today I worked with Greg Fry, a librarian at Charles Sturt University to create profiles to document my research impact. Greg plans to use my profiles as examples in an upcoming research presentation he is giving Impact story is one of the newest tools to document research impact. It takes data from ISI Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, blogs, Twitter, and other social media to document impact. Here are the profiles we edited or created today:

• Google Scholar
• ORCID
• Impact story
• Researcher ID (ISI Web of Science)
• SCOPUS ID

Communication as a Human Right for Children with Communication Disorders

On Wednesday 27th August, Dr Elise Baker will co-present the following public lecture:
Communication as a Human Right for Children with Communication Disorders
She will include work from our Sound Start Study and other research we have undertaken.
Here are the details:
http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2014/communication_as_human_right_forum.shtml
Here is the abstract:

The ability to communicate is a basic human right. We rely on our communication skills to relate to one another, to learn and to work. It is what underpins our human existence. For an estimated 1.1 million Australians living with a communication disorder, communication is a daily source of frustration. For many people with a communication disorder, their frustration is further exacerbated when effective and efficient treatment is needlessly out of reach. With the right help at the right time these people’s lives can be transformed. What can we do to ensure that people with speech disorders have access to the help they need, so their basic human right to communicate is upheld? Two speech pathologists discuss this important issue.

Cultural and linguistic diverse deaf learners: Overcoming the hidden curriculum

Kate Crowe has been invited as a keynote speaker at the Itinerant Teacher of the Deaf Conference to be held Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children in September. The topic of the presentation is Cultural and linguistic diverse deaf learners: Overcoming the hidden curriculum. She is co-presenting with Professor Greg Leigh, Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children/The University of Newcastle.

There are high levels of cultural and linguistic diversity among learners with hearing loss in Australia and around the world. Such diversity requires educational agendas, services, and professionals who are inclusive, socially just, and skilled in working with culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Such an approach requires all aspects of education to acknowledge and accommodate many different possible cultural identities of learners and to foster their acquisition and use of languages concordant with those identities. The cultural competency of professionals who work with learners with hearing loss must encompass (a) knowledge about, and sensitivity to, the issues that may arise in teaching and learning contexts; and (b) undertake rigorous and continuous examination of their own attitudes, values, and beliefs in regard to people from other cultures and linguistic backgrounds. If left unexamined or taken for granted, values and attitudes across any or all of these areas may create a hidden curriculum — unplanned and unrecognized teaching and learning of beliefs, norms, and cultural mores that reflect the cultural or ideological perspective of teachers or other professionals. This presentation deals briefly with these issues and considers their importance in educational settings and strategies and resources for approaching the education of culturally and linguistically diverse learners with hearing loss.

How old is a child in Vietnam?

I have been learning a lot about Vietnam from Ben Pham, my new PhD student. It was her son's birthday on Sunday, and we have been discussing how to think about the age of children in Vietnam.
When Vietnamese parents say "my child is 4-years-old" they are using the Lunar calendar, where they begin counting on the date of conception (i.e., 9 months before the child is born).
When Vietnamese parents say "my child is 39-months-old" they are using the Western calendar, where they begin counting on the date of birth.
Therefore:

• 39-months-old = 4-years-old in Vietnam
• 48-months-old = 4-years-old in Australia

When working with Vietnamese children, it is important for Western people  to ask the age of the child in months!

Services for people with communication disability in Fiji

Suzanne Hopf's first PhD journal article has been published. 
Here is the reference:
Hopf, S. (2014). Services for people with communication disability in Fiji: Clinical insights. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology, 16(2), 81-86.
Here is the abstract:

In Fiji, the government has recognised the importance of services for people with communication disability (PWCD); however, the need for services still exceeds supply, and it is unclear who is providing services to this population. It has been suggested  that agents of delivery of intervention can comprise seven groups: qualified speech-language pathologists (SLPs), mid-tier workers, already qualified professionals trained for an additional, new role, disability care workers, traditional healers and other professionals or family members guided by SLPs (Wylie et al, 2013). In this paper, the role of each of these groups in the provision of services to PWCD in Fiji was reviewed. Results revealed that qualified SLP services in Fiji are restricted to those provided by international volunteer programs. Numerous other agents of delivery of intervention are available; however, their skill base and intervention methods remain largely unknown. There is a need to identify the skills and practices of non-SLP agents and to consider the potential for future direct SLP input, to ensure timely and adequate services are available to people with communication disability in Fiji.

Welcome to our newest PhD student

This week Ben Pham began her PhD at Charles Sturt University. Ben received a prestigious Australian Awards scholarship from the Australian government to undertake her studies. She has moved from Hanoi, Vietnam to Bathurst and joins Sarah Verdon who is in the final year of her PhD studies. Ben has spent the past few weeks at CSU in Wagga Wagga undertaking an induction program to learn about living and studying in Australia. It has been such a pleasure to meet Ben this week and to learn about the work she has been doing prior to coming to CSU. She has been a lecturer in the Faculty of Special Education at the Hanoi National University of Education and head of the Division of Speech and Hearing Impairment. During her PhD she will undertake research into Vietnamese children's speech acquisition and will be co-supervised by Jane McCormack. We are pleased she has joined our research student family and are looking forward to working with Ben over the next 4 years.

Sarah Verdon and Ben Pham at CSU

Ben in her new PhD office

Where to write a book

Writing a book takes a long time. As a result of my busy travel schedule, the places where book-writing occurs is extremely varied. Here are a few of the places I have written sections of our forthcoming book.

Writing by the lake (notice the snow capped mountain and
the height of the double sided manuscript)

Writing at the airport

Writing on the plane

Principles of motor learning

I have been on leave the last two weeks. During this time, I have had a lovely time skiing with my family and have been revising the draft manuscript of the text book Elise Baker and I are writing. Yesterday morning I was reading the chapter outlining the principles of motor learning - then went to the ski slopes. While watching children learn to ski the principles of motor learning were evident (e.g., principles relating to the conditions and structure of learning, attentional focus, and feedback). For example, the ski school instructors began with part-practice of relevant skills (e.g., learning to make a pizza wedge with their skis in order to stop), then moved to whole-task practice on the slopes. Children are fast learners!

A child putting the principles of motor learning into practice