Perhaps you recently got assigned to a new school or site that consists of a large bilingual and/or multilingual caseload, and perhaps you're not bilingual. Not speaking the student's language can be quite overwhelming and stressful (trust me, I've been there!). I know the feeling of not quite knowing where to start in intervention, or not knowing how to support your students. Well luckily, bilingual SLP, Ingrid Owens-Gonzalez has some important tips to share with all SLPs. Here are 3 things Monolingual SLPs can do to support bilingual populations today.
The trilled R is a very common phoneme in a variety of languages and probably one of the hardest sounds to produce and teach. In Spanish, trilled R is a high occurrence phoneme and a simple misarticulation can easily change the meaning of a word (Example: Carro vs. Caro / Car & Expensive). For that reason, I am here to help you! I am going to break down the steps that I take when teaching my students how to trill the R sound.
As the new school year starts, I cannot help but think about my bilingual students and how their language proficiency might have shifted over the summer vacation. You may be wondering, what do you mean shifted? Well, before I can explain how my students’ language proficiency might have shifted, we need to talk about the complexity of bilingualism and the bilingual continuum.
It can be super challenging to evaluate a student that speaks a completely different language other than the one you speak. With so many languages that exist in our world, (over 6,500 languages to be exact) as a SLP, you are bound to encounter a student that speaks another language other than English. According to the American Speech Hearing Association (ASHA) only about 6.4% of SLPs speak another language other than English, this may also mean that finding a bilingual SLP that speaks the language you need to assess may not always be accessible. So what do you do?
I love my job and I love the reward it brings every day knowing that I was able to help someone. I frequently get asked by prospective students why I chose to become an SLP and here is what I often say.
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