SLP and ESL Teacher Raise Awareness About Multilingual Needs and Benefits—Part 2

Editor’s note: This is part two of a series on SLP-ESL educator collaboration. Read the first part, “Partnering With ESL Teachers to Better Serve Multilingual Children,” which appeared in December 2015. I’ve enjoyed a wonderful and busy school year since I wrote part one of this series in December 2015. In January, Lauren Harrison, my ESL colleague, and I continued raising awareness of bilingualism’s benefits through our “BiG” (Bilingualism is a Gift) campaign.  Over the next few months, we presented on our collaborative efforts at three statewide education conferences and will present at the National Conference of WIDA—an organization devoted to those educating English-language learners—this October. Each event elicited positive feedback and propelled the need for our work to continue. Our presentations also sparked passionate debates on what to do about misinformation being presented to families, especially those families who have children with special needs. Meanwhile, in addition to presenting on our successful collaboration, we put our talk into practice: This past January, our school team—psychologist, special education teacher, ESL teacher and I—met for an hour with a family who’d been told by a well-respected center for autism to discontinue using their native language at home—just for a little while. The family received no research or clear reasoning to support this recommendation. Fortunately, the family came to us w...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tags: Speech-Language Pathology Bilingual assessment bilingual service delivery Cultural Diversity Language Disorders Schools Source Type: blogs