Keynote speaker at XI Workshop on Linguistics, Language Development and Impairment, Lisbon, Portugal

I am the keynote speaker at the XI Workshop on Linguistics, Language Development and Impairment on April, 18 /18 de Abril - 2024 - held at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. https://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/en/node/2498

I co-authored the presentation with Kate Margetson. Our presentation was titled: "Assessing children's speech in unfamiliar languages: Insights from Vietnamese-English children". Here is the abstract:

There are over 7,000 languages spoken across the world. Communication professionals have the power to enhance everyone’s participation in day-to-day life. However, when working with multilingual children, professionals can focus on their own dominant language, and limit children’s full participation and communication rights to speak home language(s) within families and communities. This presentation provides a clear step-by-step process for how to assess children’s speech in unfamiliar languages using free resources found on the Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/home). The process will be explained using evidence from VietSpeech (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech), a 4-year research program working with Vietnamese-English speaking children and families in Australia. Participants will learn how to use the step-by-step process for assessing children in any language and support home language maintenance.

Presenting the Speech Assessment of Children's Home Languages (SACHL) for the first time

Ana Margarida Ramalho, Sharynne McLeod, Maria João Freitas,

Other presenters are: 

• JOSÉ FONSECA (FMUL): Micro- and Macrolinguistic Analysis of the Image "Ladrão de Biscoitos" Oral Description / Análise Micro • Macro Linguistica da Descrição Oral da Figura "Ladrão de Biscoitos" 
• ANA RITA VALENTE (IEETA, LASI - UA; ESSLEI; SPEECHCARE), CATARINA OLIVEIRA (IEETA, LASI - UA), LUCIANA ALBUQUERQUE (CINTESIS.UA) & PLÍNIO BARBOSA (UNICAMP): Vocal Aging: Longitudinal Study of Prosodic Changes in Portuguese Public Figures / Envelhecimento Vocal: Estudo Longitudinal de Mudanças Prosódicas em Figuras Públicas Portuguesas. 
• TELMA PEREIRA (ESS/IPS; ACENTUAR), VÂNIA RIBEIRO (ACENTUAR; AUDICEN); ANGELA JESUS (ESS/ IPS) & ANA PAULA MENDES (ESS/IPS; IEETA); ProNAR: Rapid Naming by Portuguese Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder / ProNAR: Nomeação rápida por crianças portuguesas com e sem Perturbação do Desenvolvimento da Linguagem 
• ANA MARGARIDA RAMALHO (ESSA; CLUL) & MARIA JOÃO FREITAS (FLUL, CLUL); On the Impact of Word Length in Phonological Assessement / Sobre o Efeito da Extensão de Palavra na Avaliação do Desenvolvimento Fonologico 
• ALEXANDRINA MARTINS (UAVEIRO; CLUL): Syntactic Complexity in Children with ASD and DLD Complexidade Sintática em Crianças com PEA e PDL CARINA PINTO (ESSLEI; CITECHCARE): Exploring the Impact of Morphological Knowledge in Reading / Explorando o Impacto do Conhecimento Morfológico na Leitura 
• ANA SUCENA, CRISTINA GARRIDO, CATIA MARQUES, MARIANA MATOS & ANA FILIPA SILVA (ESS/IPP): Early Predictors of Reading Success in Portuguese Schools /Preditores Precoces de Sucesso Leitura em Escolas Portuguesas

Announcement of the first Charles Sturt Distinguished Professors

The Vice Chancellor has announced the first Charles Sturt Distinguished Professors in her Vice-Chancellor's Message | 17 April 2024:

I am pleased to announce that Professor Sharynne McLeod, Professor Geoff Gurr, and Professor Chris Blanchard have been appointed as Charles Sturt Distinguished Professors. The development of the Distinguished Professor Scheme is an important objective within the Research Strategy to help us attract and retain the highest-calibre academic staff and produce world-class research. These long-standing, high achieving Charles Sturt academics are our first internal appointments. They join external appointments of Distinguished Professors Muhammad J A Shiddiky, Sarah O’Shea, Alan Cooper, Jing Sun, and Stan Grant who has recently returned to Charles Sturt. I have recorded a message to congratulate and thank our first internal appointments (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eBy31PEJZk). I will be profiling the achievements of each of the Distinguished Professors in my Message over future issues.

I am honoured to be in such distinguished company and look forward to continuing my work at Charles Sturt in this role.

Colourful joyful Portugal

I have flown to Portugal (on my way to the UK) to be the keynote speaker at the XI LLDI Workshop (https://workshop-on-linguistics-language-development-and-impairment.webnode.pt/). What a colourful and joyful place to get over jetlag!

 

Enjoying pastéis de Belém (
(I've also enjoyed pastéis de nata)

ECIR bi-monthly meeting

What a wonderful meeting today with the Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Sturt Scheme. We covered some of the exciting projects undertaken over the past few months and shared the vision for our new research centre and The Treehouse.

Cathie's endorsement of candidature

Today was Cathie Matthews' endorsement of candidature for her MPhil research titled: “Supporting 2-year-olds’ communication: Collaborations between rural health professionals and early childhood education services” 

• Chair - Dr James Deehan
• Supervisors – Professor Sharynne McLeod, Professor Julian Grant and Associate Professor Elizabeth Murray 
• Reviewers – Associate Professor Sarah Verdon and Dr Suzanne Hopf 

Thursday the 11th of April (12:00pm to 2:00pm)

Here is her abstract:

Early identification of communication delay is important to increase the likelihood of children communicating successfully now and, in the future, and to reduce the risk of poorer outcomes in literacy, academic success, social-emotional wellbeing, and employment. The current quantitative study sought to assess the feasibility of the Early Communication Measures (ECM) to identify communication risk in 48 2-year-old children by eight early childhood educators, eight child and family health nurses, and 48 caregivers. The Early Communication Measures comprised the Early Language Identification Measure-Shortened (ELIM-S) and the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS). The Early Communication Measures was found to be feasible and acceptable to monitor 2-year-old children’s communication development. Feasability (Bowen et al., 2009) and acceptability (Sekhon et al., 2017) frameworks were used to consider feasibility constructs such as demand, acceptability, expansion, and preliminary outcomes; and acceptability constructs such as affective attitude, burden, ethicality, intervention coherence, opportunity costs, perceived effectiveness, self-efficacy. Following the ECM almost half of the caregivers (43.5%) were recommended that their child should see a speech-language pathologist for further assessment and almost a third (30.4%) were referred to other local service and resources to support their child’s development. It promoted early and appropriate referrals for speech-language pathology assessments and provided more detail for staff compared to standard monitoring practices. This research supports interdisciplinary collaborative practices for early identification of young children’s communication development risk.

Congratulations Cathie! 

Published book chapter: Diagnosing speech sound disorder in bilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children: Are English-only assessments sufficient?

Congratulations Kate on the publication of this important book chapter from your PhD. 

Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2024). Diagnosing speech sound disorder in bilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children: Are English-only assessments sufficient? In E. Babatsouli (Ed.). Multilingual acquisition and learning: A ecosystemic view to diversity (pp. 217-245). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.08mar

Here is the website for the chapter: https://benjamins.com/catalog/sibil.67.08mar

Visiting OAMS and planning our research

Today we visited the Orange Aboriginal Medical Service as part of our Rural Health Research Institute (RHRI). Emily-Jane Woodhead and I were able to visit in person and Sarah Bartlett was prevented from driving to Orange by the significant weather event across the state.

• We spent the morning with Ebony Hay, the Child Health Navigator at OAMS and learned more about the important work she does with children across the city and district, particularly in schools. She has a number of excellent programs to screen and support children's hearing, some of which are associated with Hearing Australia. 
• We spent the afternoon with Dr Liz Pressick from RHRI sharing insights between our research projects. 
• Finally, I worked with Cathie Matthews to finalise her MPhil Endorsement presentation that she will present next week. 
• Just before we arrived, we learned that we had received ethics approval from the AH&MRC https://www.ahmrc.org.au/ethics-at-ahmrc/ so now need approval from CSU to be able to proceed.
  

It was an insightful and productive day. 

Emily-Jane Woodhead, Ebony Hay (OAMS), Sarah Bartlett, Sharynne McLeod

Emily-Jane Woodhead, Liz Pressick (RHRI), Sharynne McLeod

Cathie Matthews and Sharynne McLeod

Initial collaborations with staff from the School of Information and Communication Studies

I have enjoyed conversations with A/Prof Tina Du, Dr Deborah Wise and Rachel Walls from the School of Information and Communication Studies. There are many synergies with our shared interest in communication rights for all.

A/Prof Tina Du, Head School of Information and Communication Studies

Sharynne, Rachel Walls, Deborah Wise and Tina Du from SICS at The Treehouse

Impact case study workshop with ECIR

Today we had our second impact case study workshop with Dale Curran from the Research Office. She mentioned that people request testimonials from people as evidence of impact (previously I have only used unsolicited emails). Here are some resources she shared:

• Link to the blog with guidance on testimonials from London School of Economics https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/06/08/guidance-on-testimonials-and-statements-to-corroborate-impact/ 
• Knowledge Exchange and Impact https://info.lse.ac.uk/staff/services/knowledge-exchange-and-impact

CSU Conscia Research Staff Mentoring program

I have just been accepted into the CSU Conscia Research Staff Mentoring program and will be mentoring CSU staff members during 2024.

https://research.csu.edu.au/research-support/researcher-development/mentoring/conscia

The Conscia Research Staff Mentoring Program pairs staff with a research work-function with a more experienced academic research mentor to develop their research career, meet research goals, and strategize for future academic success. 

We attended an information session about the Conscia program that schedules and tracks goals and evidence regarding mentoring.

Learning from one another during our mentoring session

 

ECV2024 publications committee

Our ECV2024 publications committee had an exciting meeting today.

Our book from ECV2020 is in the final page proofing stage before publication:

Mahony, L., McLeod, S., Salamon, A., Dwyer, J. (Eds.) (2024, in press). Early childhood voices: Children, families, professionals. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/9783031564833

We have had conversations with commissioning editors from Multilingual Matters and Springer for two books to be published based on papers from ECV2022 and ECV2024

ECV2024 publications committee:
Dr Shukla Sikder, Prof Sharynne McLeod, Dr Sheena Elwick,
Dr Helen Blake, Arifa Rahman (Dr Suzanne C. Hopf)

Impact - Our research on speech acquisition incorporated into state guidance within the USA

Our research on children's speech acquisition(Crowe & McLeod, 2020; Ireland et al., 2020; McLeod & Crowe, 2018) has been incorporated in state guidance within the USA: 

• Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Children’s Articulation and Speech Sound Development https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/sped/pdf/sl-articulation-infographic.pdf 
• Virginia Department of Education https://www.doe.virginia.gov/programs-services/special-education/specific-disabilities/speech-language-impairment

• 
  

Crowe, K., & McLeod, S. (2020). Children's English consonant acquisition in the United States: A review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 29(4), 2155–2169. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00168 

Ireland, M., McLeod, S., Farquharson, K., & Crowe, K. (2020). Evaluating children in U.S. public schools with speech sound disorders: Considering federal and state laws, guidance, and research. Topics in Language Disorders, 40(4), 326–340. https://doi.org/10.1097/tld.0000000000000226 

McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(4), 1546–1571. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_AJSLP-17-0100

Invitation RPTF - Revista Portuguesa de Terapia da Fala [Portuguese Journal of Speech and Language Therapy]

 I have been invited to write a paper for RPTF - Revista Portuguesa de Terapia da Fala [Portuguese Journal of Speech and Language Therapy] https://www.aptf-rptf.com/.  I will work with Helen Blake and Kate Margetson and base it on my keynote presentations in Portugal in 2023 and 2024.

Using and creating children’s books to support children’s communication

This article just appeared in ASHA Leader: Books Provide Full Language Story to Bilingual Students With DLD and talks about how we can use books with multilingual children and to support communication. https://leader.pubs.asha.org/do/10.1044/leader.SCM.29032024.slp-schools-bilingual-dld.34 

The authors recommend Reading A-Z that includes books in the following languages: Spanish, Vietnamese, Polish, Ukrainian and French Children’s books in Vietnamese: https://www.readinga-z.com/worldlanguages/vietnamese/leveled-books/ Children’s books in: https://www.readinga-z.com/worldlanguages/

Culturally responsive practice in speech-language pathology

Today our team was very honoured to learn from A/Prof Sarah Verdon today about culturally responsive practice.

Cultural responsiveness was defined by Sarah as:

• An understanding of, and respect for, cultural and linguistic differences among individuals
• Knowing how to respond in a culturally sensitive and appropriate manner when working with children and families