May 6, 2016

Workshop at the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children

Yesterday Dr Kate Crowe and I presented a 4-hour workshop at the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC) Renwick Centre. The workshop was titled: Multilingual speech acquisition: Strategies for working with multilingual children with hearing loss. The enthusiastic audience included teachers of the deaf, speech pathologists and a pediatrician. One participant even flew from Brisbane to attend. Here is the abstract

The cultural and linguistic diversity of Australian children, including children with hearing loss is increasing. Educators and clinicians require knowledge of typical and atypical speech acquisition across a range of languages to meet the needs of the children and families they provide services too. In this workshop Professor McLeod and Dr Crowe will: 
  • summarize the multilingual diversity of Australia’s children, including of Australian children with hearing loss
  • outline factors families consider when selecting languages for children with hearing loss
  • provide an overview on the International Phonetic Alphabet for transcription of typical and atypical speech across a range of languages common in Australia
  •  compare and contrast the phonetic inventories of English and a range of languages common in Australia
  • describe phonological processes in a range of languages
  • provide tools and strategies for assessing speech skills in languages other than English  
Kate Crowe, Sharynne McLeod, Sally Hewett, Ali Burdon and Sharon Hurt at RIDBC
Sharynne and Kate before the workshop at RIDBC