Multilingual Children’s Speech
Many children and families are multilingual; whereas, many speech and language therapists in the UK (and other countries around the world) are monolingual English speakers. An evidence-based protocol has been developed for monolingual speech and language therapists to assess and analyse the speech of children who speak different languages. This protocol has been tested with Vietnamese-English children and adults during the VietSpeech Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Free resources have been developed for working with Vietnamese children and families (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/info) as well as for speakers in over 100 languages on the Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech). Multilingualism has been described as a superpower (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBrXmRW7lwg) and this presentation will encourage attendees to support young superheros during their speech and language therapy.
Sharynne McLeod, PhD is a Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She is a speech and language therapist and her research focuses on children’s speech, multilingualism, and enhancing participation. She has advocated for communication rights at the United Nations and the World Health Organization. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.
If you wish to attend please email cach-centre@bristol.ac.uk