Dr. Cecilia Perez is a bilingual speech-language therapist and faculty at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She was raised in Santa Ana California, where she grew up amidst rich language diversity reflected in the local community (Spanish, English, Vietnamese). Having once been a Latinx adolescent herself and later as a clinician who worked closely with them, her research interests include highlighting the language practices of racialized adolescents in ways that defy the deficit rhetoric often attached to this demographic. 

Translanguaging refers to how multilinguals access different linguistic features to maximize communicative potential. Explore how clinicians are pairing a translanguaging framework and cultural narratives to assess how bilingual adolescents use critical thinking, language complexity, and productivity.

Join Dr. Cecilia Perez from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles as she expands our idea of multilingualism so that we can properly represent the dynamic languaging skills that diverse students use to create meaning. 

Scott has been working as a bilingual speech pathologist in Austin, Texas since 2004 and is the Vice President of Bilinguistics. He has worked in Early-Childhood Intervention and currently serves bilingual children in the schools and clinic setting. His research focuses on developing protocols, materials, and professional development to better serve special population such as Autism, VPI, and second-language learners.

Scott is the author of Literacy-Based Speech and Language Therapy Activities and is a lead developer of literacy and language-based tools including the Language Sampling Tool and The Gigantic Turnip (El nabo gigante) English-Spanish Bilingual Literacy Kit.  His conversations and presentations are fun, circuitous rides that weave quotes, history, and humor into any discussion. Scott is masterful and methodical at turning the passions and interests of the staff into the books, presentations, and courses that you see throughout this website.

Speech-language re-evaluations help assess students’ current needs and determine dismissal. However, they’re often underutilized. By maximizing time, integrating progress notes, and leveraging IEP meetings, the reevaluation process can be transformed from a mandatory but not enjoyable task into one of the most important tools SLPs have in their arsenal to identify the perfect goals or set a student on the path to being dismissed.  

Join Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP as he shares how SLPs can streamline the reevaluation process to collect accurate data, ensure appropriate treatment decisions, and facilitate timely dismissals for students no longer requiring services.

Raúl Rojas, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a Professor at University of Kansas where he directs the Bilingual Language Lab. He completed his BA at Grinnell College in Psychology and Latin American Studies, and his MA and PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple University. He then completed a Callier Center Postdoctoral Fellowship at UT Dallas.

His research focuses primarily on child language from a longitudinal and processing perspective, specifically dual language development in typically developing children and in children with language impairments. He is particularly interested in dual language growth, language sample analysis, and in validating paradigms to index linguistic processing and early language learning in bilingual children.

How do I know what typical communication is?  That is a question a lot of SLPs ask when they are analyzing language sample of dual language learners. And the good news is that we have data to help us make these decisions as well as efficient ways to undertake elicitation of language samples, transcription, analysis, interpretation, and clinical documentation

Join Dr. Raul Rojas from the University of Kansas as he shares a great and quick way to compare students’ language samples to those of their peers. Are you ready to increase the precision of your assessments and progress monitoring?