Collaborating with Teachers to Help English-Language Learners Succeed

The U.S. population is incredibly diverse. Our students and clients speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Amharic, Arabic, Cantonese, French, German, Hmong, Italian, Korean and Russian—to name just a few. This diversity makes our lives rich and our jobs as speech-language pathologists challenging. However, I feel the simple framework described below can help SLPs tackle these challenges by: Identifying whether a child’s errors are due to language influence or speech-language disorder. Selecting appropriate goals for speech-language treatment. Helping general education teachers address English-as–a-second-language goals. Last summer, Scott Prath—my colleague—wrote a blog post on selecting articulation goals for second-language learners. He covered items 1 and 2 above. He focused on the middle of the Venn diagram below—sounds shared between two languages. In this post, I want to focus on the right side of the Venn diagram. The right side covers sounds unique to English for those learning English as a second language (L2). By sounds unique to English, I mean the sounds we don’t worry about when evaluating an English language-learner to determine whether a speech impairment exists. If all errors occur with sounds unique to English, we won’t diagnose a speech impairment. That said, we also don’t want to ignore the fact that the child ended up in our testing room, because they were making errors. Knowing a student  makes errors only resulting from language influence prov...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Speech-Language Pathology Bilingual assessment bilingual service delivery Language Disorders Schools Speech Disorders Source Type: blogs