Welcome Back - Fall ‘08
August 25, 2008
Hi Everyone, Bilinguistics took the summer to promote our new book, SMILE for Infants and Toddlers, present to the Early Childhood Intervention programs in The State of Texas, and most importantly catch up on vacations. We are happy to welcome Mary Bauman and Adrianne Arrieta-Morales, two incredible bilingual SLPs. We also want to wish Kara Anderson luck in the PhD. program in Dallas. She will continue to contribute to the Bilinguistics initiatives as she pursues her doctorate.We are scheduled for over 12 presentations this fall and spring and will continue to provide services and trainings throughout the Central Texas school districts and ECI programs. We have designed a great series of workshops for the bilingual SLPs in the Region 13 area and we hope for strong participation throughout the region. We are currently updating and expanding our website so staytuned for current BLOG posts, presentation listings, new CEU courses, and new products. We are looking forward to an exciting year!
A Bit About Our Team
March 6, 2008
Since we are asking you to interact and start a conversation with us on our blog, we thought it might be good to first introduce who WE are. My name is Dr. Ellen Stubbe Kester and I am the co-founder and president of Bilinguistics. I started the company during my doctoral program at The University of Texas at Austin in 2002 as I saw a need for information about bilingual language development and intervention. Six years later we’re still growing and have some great products and resources to share with all speech-language pathologists and early intervention specialists who work with bilinguals and English language learners. You can read my bio and that of other Bilinguistics team members here .
My first requirement in hiring each person on our team was that I would want to be a part of a team with that person. Our group works very closely together on everything we do, from developing workshops and intervention materials to creating new continuing education courses (CEUs) and providing services. Everyone on the Bilinguistics team is very driven, very creative, and very interested in moving the field forward. We all have different strengths and we use that to our advantage to create great products and workshops and to provide high quality services for the bilingual population. The most important thing though is that we all laugh a lot and we really love what we do.
Listen to the following audio of an interview I did relating to how Bilinguistics matches our team members with a School District or ECI client…
Please add your comments or questions below. We want to hear from you.
Bilingual Speech Therapists Can Be an Island
February 20, 2008
At Bilinguistics, we work with Spanish speaking children almost exclusively. Having said that however, bilingual speech pathologists make up only 3% of the field with the rest being monolingual English. We’re on this bilingual island but have important information that monolingual English-speaking therapists need. Many of the Spanish- speaking SLP’s in Central Texas Districts know about us, but we also need to speak as much or more to the monolingual community. They can truly benefit from our expertise and the resources we’ve created to address the needs of this fast growing segment.
We’re kind-of lulled into a sense of security here in Central Texas where we are getting good at handling the bilingual speech needs of children. However, as you move further away from Central Texas, many districts are having problems properly identifying and supporting the needs of bilingual children. Many school districts don’t have bilingual therapists on staff and deal with evaluations by bringing in a translator to work with an English-speaking therapist. While this can be successful, it can also prove very challenging for the therapist and many times the child. If it’s not done right the result can be Spanish- speaking kids who are not impaired ending up in special education classes. We’ve also seen the other extreme of a child who was profoundly deaf placed in a general education classroom because they just assumed she didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand. These are the types of complexities we deal with everyday.
There are huge issues in smaller communities that don’t have easy access to workshops or other resources that will help address bilingual populations. We realized our team could take a much more active role in helping to engage all SLP’s, whether bilingual or monolingual in the best ways to deal with the bilingual speech needs of children. At Bilinguistics we’ve built a great, experienced team and some fantastic tools to work with English Language Learners. We realized we can serve the monolingual English speech therapists through an online web community. Our online CEU’s have been focused in this area for some time but now we are creating this blog & interactive community for the monolingual and bilingual speech pathologists.
We encourage you to share your experiences and problems in these areas. We invite you to ask questions and want to hear your stories.
You can post comments on our blog below or send us an email by clicking here and submitting your questions and ideas to our team. Also, please forward this on to others that you think would benefit from being involved in the conversation.