Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups serves as a bridge between research and practice, giving readers the latest tools and ideas—across 20 unique topic areas—that they can use in their work. The June issue contains articles for clinicians of all levels in a variety of job settings. Check out the highlights below!
Culturally Responsive Practices
Clinical Bilingual Evaluations: Exploring Ways to Overcome Barriers in the Direct Assessment of Both Languages When There Is a Suspicion of Language Disorder: Some speech-language pathologists (SLPs) report that they feel unprepared to conduct language evaluations for bilingual individuals who speak in a language they (as the SLP) don’t understand fluently. This article showcases a number of tasks that SLPs can use to extract language data, even when they don’t speak the language.
Act It Out! Using Simulations for Professional Development to Build Cultural Responsivity: Simulation training can help educators and SLPs better prepare to work with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds. The authors provide evidence-based research and sample scripts, goals, and excerpts in this tutorial.
Tools for Audiologists
Acoustic Properties of Anger in Clear and Conversational Speech: Audiologists recommend that communication partners use clear speech when talking to people with hearing difficulties, but clear speech can sound angrier than conversational speech and can negatively impact interactions. Audiologists can help by advising communication partners on ways to speak clearly without sounding angry to better communicate with their loved ones.
From the Rocky Coast and Across the Mountaintops: Maine’s Collaborative Early Intervention Program for Children Who Are D/deaf or Hard of Hearing: In Maine, a streamlined referral process implemented in 2016 has allowed families of deaf and hard of hearing children to streamline services and find unified support. Find out more about this system and the confusion that occurred prior to its implementation as families were referred to multiple agencies with conflicting messages.
More for Educators and Clinicians
Dynamic Systems Theory: A Primer for Pediatric Feeding Clinicians: Dynamic systems theory (DST) is increasingly being used as a framework for pediatric feeding research, but clinical translation isn’t available for SLPs. This tutorial gives can help clinicians use DST principles for assessment and treatment of patients with pediatric feeding disorders.
Teaching Collaborative Practices: A Scoping Review of Preservice Interprofessional Education With a Focus on Preservice Speech-Language Pathologists and Preservice Teachers of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: Collaboration between preservice SLPs and teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students can help all parties involved, but these collaborations may need to be taught. In this article, the authors provide best practices and real-world recommendations that enable SLPs and teachers to collaborate in order to better help students who are deaf and hard of hearing.
Bridging Research and Practice
You can read all these articles, plus more, in the latest issue of Perspectives. The journal publishes six times a year, and the archive contains thousands of articles from the last 25 years.
Perspectives is free for all affiliates of ASHA’s 20 Special Interest Groups, but the articles featured above will be available free for the next 2 weeks. The next time you face a unique challenge in the clinic, why not start by checking to see what Perspectives has in store for you?
