Should we use the BVAT?
March 20, 2008
A recent question posed to us: Should the BVAT be used as the Spanish portion of a bilingual speech-language assessment? The BVAT was designed to help in developing entry and exit criteria in bilingual education, to facilitate appropriate program placement, and to assess the academic readiness of bilingual students. It was not designed to make determinations about language impairment. It does provide good information about vocabulary skills in different languages and has one section that assesses verbal reasoning. It could be used as a supplemental instrument in a speech-language assessment but should not be the sole instrument used to assess a student’s Spanish language skills. A good review of the BVAT is available at http://www.bgcenter.com/BVAT1.htm
We’re hiring
March 13, 2008
We’re looking for bright, bilingual speech-language pathologists to join our team. Check out our employment page to see some of the great benefits we offer.
Teaching the Articles El y La in Spanish
March 13, 2008
Hey everyone,
We received the following question from a therapist in Austin.
Do any of you have any ideas on how to teach the feminine and masculine
articles in Spanish (el/la)? My plan is to start by teaching that words
that end in “a” (e.g. mesa) have “la” and that words that end in “o” have
“el” (e.g. perro). Not all words end in “a” or “o,” are there rules for other word endings? Besides having the student memorize it, I’m kind of stuck.
any ideas??
thanks
Success from the field with SMILE
March 8, 2008
One of the hardest cases in early childhood intervention therapy is when you come in as the third or fourth provider to be involved in the case. The child hasn’t been seen in 4 months and the parents are frustrated because there has been no progress. The SMILE program has helped us to overcome these challenges. It is particularly rewarding to have the director of the ECI facility request that you stay on the case and see it through until the child complete the program.
Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP - Bilinguistics
Scott talks about his success in field with SMILE:
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.
Developing SMILE
March 4, 2008
The SMILE program, as with all of our materials, was initially developed out of a need for tools that didn’t exist. As an independent agency, we are fortunate in that we are not confined by the bureaucracy that tends to slow needed change in our field. Rather, the only thing that drives us is the parent’s outcome and our efficiency. This freedom gives us a unique ability in our field to dramatically increase the speed at which we can produce really good therapy methods and materials. In the development of SMILE, we were able to bring our team together and draw from our combined knowledge and experience in different environments without being confined by any existing process.
Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP - Bilinguistics
Scott discusses developing SMILE:
The result with SMILE was not only a program that was effective, but something that made us more efficient as therapists. With most therapy, you can tell over a period of time when a program is effective, but in this case we have gained immediate traction and the escalation has been extremely rapid. Our experience with it in our own field testing has been absolutely solid and the feedback from our counterparts and other service professionals has been unanimously positive.