Language and Literacy: What’s a Speech-Language Pathologist to Do?
Posted by Callier Library on June 9, 2009
A series of letters to the editor, published in The ASHA Leader in 2008, suggest many speech-language pathologists are concerned and confused about the expanded scope of practice into literacy. In this article, the author addresses the concerns raised by the author of the first letter to the editor. It is suggested that working on language alongside literacy is well-supported and may well lead to improved language outcomes for children.
Robert, SLP said
We are indeed concerned and (sometimes) confused, especially those of us who work in school settings. My standard line is that I’m not qualified to teach literacy, but I can treat the neural substrates of literacy, such as phonemic awareness, auditory processing, short-term memory and mental manipulation, grammar, narrative structure, inferencing, analogies, vocabulary, etc. Often, it seems to me that the confusion is on the part of my teacher coworkers, many of whom appear to view me as an overeducated paraprofessional and want to send their students to me for some extra help studying for Friday’s spelling test.
There is a real danger here, in that we school-based SLPs are already spread so thin treating speech and language disorders. With an average of 22.5 minutes per student per week, my feeling is that I should not spend any time doing anything that could be done by someone without SLP credentials–not because I’m too stuck-up to do those things, but because I owe it to the students on my caseload to focus my highly specialized skills on them and not get distracted with “other duties as assigned”.