Financial Disclosure: Ellen Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP. Dr. Ellen Kester is the owner of Bilinguistics and receives a salary. Bilinguistics receives royalty payments for online courses. Non-Financial Disclosure: Ellen Kester does not have any non-financial relationships to disclose.

Financial Disclosure: Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP is a salaried employee of Bilinguistics. Bilinguistics receives royalty payments for online courses. Non-Financial Disclosure: Scott Prath does not have any non-financial relationships to disclose.

Your professional success and happiness are dependent on your ability to identify how to help children communicate better and then move them through their goals.

But what if they speak a second-language at home? Are they hard to understand or having difficulty in the classroom because of the second language? What sounds are difficult to produce because of the second language? Cultural and linguistic competency will make your therapy soar and will put the right children on your caseload.

What does it mean to be culturally and linguistically competent?

Does it mean that you speak two languages? No. Does it mean that you share the culture of the children you work with? No. Cultural competence means that you take into account cultural and linguistic diversity when diagnosing and treating communication disorders.

The diversity of cultures and languages that we encounter in our profession is great. Our confidence in serving this population can be dramatically increased by targeting culture, evaluation, and intervention in a very specific way. Through these modules on cultural and linguistic competence, Bilinguistics offers the breadth of bilingual knowledge that has allowed us to serve multicultural communities, train graduate students, conduct research, and provide professional support for our colleagues since 2002.

How Does this Course Meet ASHA’s Competencies?

The courses in this series have been produced in concert with the American Speech-Language Hearing Association’s cultural competencies.

“Only by providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services can we provide the quality of services our clients/patients deserve. Regardless of our personal culture, practice setting, or caseload demographics, we must strive for culturally and linguistically appropriate service delivery.” ASHA’s Multicultural Issues Board

Bilingualism 101 Components

Difference vs. Disorder – Speech Development
1.5 hours
Have you ever wondered whether certain articulation errors that a bilingual child produces should be counted as incorrect? The sound systems of a bilingual child’s two languages interact in predictable ways. Using Spanish and English as an example, this course provides a framework for identifying “errors” that are typical and those that are atypical.

Difference vs. Disorder – Language Development
2 hours
You want to take this course? Did you know that in Spanish you don’t need to add a word at the beginning of the sentence to make it a question? When Spanish speakers are learning English, they often use Spanish rules for making sentences in English. This course helps SLPs differentiate typical and atypical language patterns.

Working with Interpreters to Conduct Speech Language Evaluations
1.5 hours
Working with interpreters is becoming more common and is often a necessity when providing services to culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Gain important skills needed to train qualified interpreters. Skills include appropriate vocabulary and cultural considerations necessary for effective communication with parents regarding disabilities, services, and rights.

Ethical Considerations in Evaluations for Diverse Students
2 hours
Successfully navigate contentious situations when confronted with an ethical dilemma. Learn about the origin of ethics, how professions address ethical issues, and dissect intriguing case studies supplied by speech pathologists. Have you ever had an ethical question or dilemma arise? Or, do you work with clients who speak a language other than English and have concerns about how ethical the services are that they receive? This presentation shares the ASHA Code of Ethics and how it relates to working with multicultural populations. The presentation concludes with numerous case studies from SLPs in the field.

Evaluation Components

Interactive Bilingual Dynamic Assessment Case Studies
1.5 hours
We know your caseloads are high and evaluations already take a loooooong time. It may seem painful to think about adding one more thing to the evaluation process. But we’re talking about 5-7-minute sessions that give you a huge bang for your buck in these assessment process.
In this course, we dive into dynamic assessment with bilingual students. We’ll show you how you can design and implement quick dynamic assessment lessons during your evaluation.

Re-Envisioning Re-Evaluations: Strategic Use of Resources to Reduce Caseloads
1.5 hours
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.

Intervention Components

Success with Speech Sound Disorders
1.5 hours
Why don’t my speech tricks work equally with all of my speech students? This course provides a framework for better classification of speech disorders. Research has shown a benefit to using different therapy techniques for different speech disorders. We’ll arm you with ways to better define your students and give you intervention strategies to best match their specific deficit.

Literacy-based Intervention: Step-by-Step
3.5 hours
Successfully Use Storybooks to Reduce Planning Time, Easily Work in Groups, and Target Multiple Communication and Academic Goals
Since the publication of Literacy-Based Speech and Language Therapy Activities we are routinely asked: “Can you show us how to do this?” This course is the answer! It is a 9-Part Course walking you through Why and How to make you highly successful at reducing your planning time and dismissing children from any cultural or language background.

Align Therapy to the Curriculum to Reduce Planning Time and Increase Outcomes
1.0 hour
New academic skills are more easily acquired with increased exposure to a topic and when the skill has relevance in the student’s life. This course highlights research and shares results of a multi-year effort that improved therapeutic outcomes and reduced planning by tailoring Preschool and General Education curriculum to meet communication objectives. New skills were more easily acquired because of increased exposure to academic topics and from choosing topics relevant to student needs.

Professional Components

Increasing Parent Involvement When Working with Birth-to-3 Populations
1.5 hours
What’s the best way to make quick progress in therapy? Get parents on board. Practice makes perfect, right? If we are going to be successful at helping children achieve their speech and language goals quickly, we need to make sure that they are practicing a lot. In this course we talk about research on parent involvement, including the benefits of it, the barriers to strong involvement, and ways to improve it.

Mastering the Referral Process – Better Referrals, Data, and Collaboration
2.0 hours
Evaluations are a major chunk of our week in the schools and evaluating students who do not qualify for services exacerbates the situation. Yes, Response to Intervention has minimized some unnecessary referrals but teachers continue to struggle with classroom interventions and the referral process. The simple and useful tools provided in this presentation can help reduce your workload, decrease unnecessary referrals, and increase the support for your campus.

Effectively treating and evaluating multicultural populations has a dramatic impact on solving some of the greatest current needs of our field: caseload size, over-identification, and budget and staff shortfalls. This series of 12 online presentations included therapy materials, goal banks, charts of developmental norms and parent/teacher resources.

Difference vs. Disorder – Speech Development
Participants will:
-Understand typical speech development for bilinguals
-Identify typical speech processes of bilinguals
-List similarities in typical monolingual and bilingual speech development
-Identify speech intervention goals for bilingual children

Difference vs. Disorder – Language Development
Participants will:
-Understand the need for all SLPs to have CLD training
-Describe a framework for categorizing difference and disorder
-List three types of errors that children learning two languages can make
-Identify similarities and differences in typical monolingual and bilingual language development
-Understand developmental errors, cross-linguistic errors, and atypical errors
-Describe language structures that are subject to second language influence in second language learners

Interactive Bilingual Dynamic Assessment Case Studies
Participants will:
-List the components of a dynamic assessment and mediated learning experience.
-Select dynamic assessment targets based on test protocol forms and language samples.
-Make diagnostic decisions based on dynamic assessment results.
-Design a treatment plan for a student from a bilingual environment using dynamic assessment results.

Re-Envisioning Re-Evaluations: Strategic Use of Resources to Reduce Caseloads
Participants will:
-Contrast the difference between the reevaluation process and the evaluation process
-Identify four influences on disproportionate identification of diverse students
-Describe five non-traditional uses for data produced from a language sample
-Summarize how interventions sessions can be used to lay the groundwork for effective reevaluations

Success with Speech Sound Disorders
Participants will:
-List subgroups of speech sound disorders
-Describe differences in articulatory and phonological development and error patterns in Spanish and English
-Discuss existing therapy approaches and programs for addressing speech sound disorders
-Understand which strategies are most appropriate for a child, depending on his/her types of errors

Literacy-based Intervention: Step-by-Step
Participants will:
-Describe basic theory and research related to storybook intervention
-Discuss differences in narrative styles between English and Spanish speakers
-Identify book qualities important for speech and language intervention
-Design intervention activities that use storybooks

Align Therapy to the Curriculum to Reduce Planning Time and Increase Outcomes
Participants will:
-Describe basic theory and research explaining why curriculum-based intervention improves
therapeutic outcomes
-Implement strategies to reduce therapy planning but relying on classroom resources and
topics
-Discuss ways to collaborate with general education professionals to share academic agendas
-Design speech language therapy sessions based on curriculum topics and initiatives

Increasing Parent Involvement When Working with Birth-to-3 Populations
Participants will:
-Understand the importance of family involvement
-List the factors affecting parent involvement
-Discuss theoretical models of social systems
-Use strategies to increase family involvement in intervention

Mastering the Referral Process – Better Referrals, Data, and Collaboration
Participants will:
-Understand the research supporting the RTI process and how it benefits students, SLPs, teachers, and administrators.
-Identify the components of an efficient and accurate referral packet.
-Discuss case studies demonstrating how to collect informal data.
-Implement an effective speech and language referral process on their campus.

Ethical Considerations in Evaluations for Diverse Students
Participants will:
-List laws and codes of ethics pertaining to speech language pathologists
-Describe legal issues that relate to serving a bilingual population
-Discuss ethical issues related to working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations through use of case studies
-Identify sections of the Codes of Ethics that assist in decision-making for case studies

Working with Interpreters to Conduct Speech Language Evaluations
Participants will:
-Describe procedures for working and collaborating with interpreters during speech and language assessment, treatment and speaking with parents in ARD/IEP meetings.
-Describe cultural issues when working with students and families from other cultures, with emphasis on the bilingual Spanish-English population
-Use or inform interpreters of appropriate vocabulary and scripts in Spanish that are culturally sensitive to explain the ARD/IEP paperwork and processes to parents

Time-Ordered Agenda
15 minutes – Introduction
1.5 hours – Course: Difference vs. Disorder: Speech Development
2.0 hours – Course: Difference vs. Disorder: Language Development
1.5 hours – Course: Interactive Bilingual Dynamic Assessment Case Studies
1.5 hours – Course: Re-Envisioning Re-Evaluations: Strategic Use of Resources to Reduce Caseloads
1.5 hours – Course: Success with Speech Sound Disorders
3.5 hours – Course: Literacy-based Intervention: Step-by-Step
1.0 hour – Course: Align Therapy to the Curriculum to Reduce Planning Time and Increase Outcomes
1.5 hours – Course: Increasing Parent Involvement When Working with Birth-to-3 Populations
2.0 hours – Course: Mastering the Referral Process – Better Referrals, Data, and Collaboration
2.0 hours – Course: Ethical Considerations in Evaluations for Diverse Students
1.5 hours – Course: Working with Interpreters to Conduct Speech Language Evaluations
15 minutes – Course quiz and evaluation