I was reading an article on critical thinking skills and the author kept circling back to Venn diagrams and the power of comparisons to correctly communicate. He wasn’t taking about speech therapy. A few weeks later, in a talk about vocabulary acquisition of older students, the presenter explained that vocabulary strengthens by knowing what something is NOT. Again, not a speech pathologist. Looking into it, it struck me that while I had been guilty of relegating my speech therapy compare and contrast activities to only the youngest groups, it’s a big deal for most educators at every grade leve ..read more

We are excited to announce our newest creation and in this essay we are going to dive headfirst into the intriguing world of chronological age calculators. I know, I know, just the words “chronological age calculator” sound about as exciting as watching paint dry, but stick with me – I promise we’ll have a laugh or two along the way! So picture this: you’re knee-deep in evaluations, trying to decipher the mysteries of a child’s speech and language development, when suddenly, you need to calculate their chronological age so you know what developmental norms to use. Cue the dramatic music! It’s ..read more

For far too long, speech language pathologists have not had the information they need to diagnose and treat children speaking the many beautiful and amazing languages we see throughout the world. For most of us, a bilingual child shows up on our caseload or needs to be tested, and we have to roll up our sleeves and start researching the linguistic differences and sound differences of the home language. We are announcing an end to the repeated, effort-filled research that graduate students and SLPs have to do each year to get the information they need to correctly diagnose and work with childre ..read more

We often talk about the increasing diversity of our caseloads. It is a reality that we have caseloads with individuals from many different countries who speak many different languages. That’s why we worked with speech-language pathologists all over the country to create bilingual parent questionnaires for speech-language evaluations in 16 different languages.  Parent Input is Critical, Especially for Bilingual Speech-Language Evaluations Caregiver input is always important when conducting a speech-language evaluation but it is even more critical when we are working with children from dive ..read more

Few evaluations can feel more daunting than assessing a child who is not speaking and may be in need of Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) or Assistive Technology (AT) such as an iPad or a picture-symbol system.  An assessment tool that I rely on consistently for assessing individuals who are non-verbal is the Communication Matrix. For those of you that don’t know: The Communication Matrix is an online tool that helps professionals understand the communication needs of anyone functioning at the early stages of communication who is not speaking or writing. The first few admin ..read more

The field of stuttering has changed a lot over the past couple of decades. The problem is that many of the previous “truths” are still thought of as truths, like the idea that we should not bring attention to stuttering in young children because it might exacerbate the problem. “Not true,” says Dr. Scott Yaruss, Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State University and President of Stuttering Therapy Resources. In a recent presentation, Dr. Yaruss walked us through 16 persistent myths about stuttering. We want to help spread the word so that these practices a ..read more

Have you ever been stuck in a sticky situation where you are advocating for what you believe to be right for a child (and all children) but the opinion of the campus or the district might not be caught up to what best practices would indicate? Without knowing what recent trends, policy, and legislation have actually evolved to date, we can be left in an awkward tug-o-war of opinions, and if we are not in a position of power, we may not get much say. We invited Dr. Leah Fabiano in for a conversation on how to best navigate these murky situations and come up with our relationships intact AND do ..read more

When I do workshops for school districts that focus on conducting speech-language evaluations for bilingual students, one of the questions I get a lot is, “Is it okay to target cross-linguistic influence patterns (also called native language influence patterns) in intervention?” First and foremost, I’ll say that targeting native language influence patterns should not be a goal for your student. Nor should native language influence patterns be the reason the child is in speech therapy. That said, if you are working with a child whose native language is Spanish on one of their appropriate goals ..read more

Structured Literacy Intervention for ALL Students Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan’s gave a workshop on how SLPs can incorporate structured literacy components into their intervention to support all students—especially those from diverse backgrounds who speak English as an additional language. Below, we highlight some of the elements that she shares about a structured literacy approach.  Structured Literacy is a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to literacy instruction that encompasses key components for teaching literacy, including phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and com ..read more

I recently sat down with fellow speech-language pathologist, Kari Lavelle, to talk about her experiences as an author who places a high importance on books on diversity. Kari has written three non-fiction children’s books about diversity that incorporate experiences and achievements from individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, as well as communicative diversity.  Kari’s first book, We Move the World, links the skills children learn in school to accomplishments made using those basic skills. She shares how Supreme Court justices, astronauts, ballerinas, musicians, actors, and h ..read more