#WeSpeechies Chat August 5 2014 6pm AEST

I am delighted to have been asked by Drs Caroline Bowen and Bronwyn Hemsely, creators of the WeSpeechies twitter handle, to curate WeSpeechies this week.

Topic: Oral language competence in children and young people: Early beginnings, transition to school, literacy, and the young people's interface with the law in the ICP2014 year.

I look forward to lively interaction and discussion across the week! 

The chat session will take place on Tuesday August 5, as follows:

Date: Tuesday 05 August 2014
Time: 6:00pm AEST for one hour
Time Zone: Australian Eastern Standard Time (Bendigo, Melbourne, Sydney)
8pm NZST AUK
10am SAST DBN
9am BST LON IST DUB

Curator: Pam Snow @PamelaSnow2 (August 03 - 09)

Early oral language competence (skills with everyday talking and listening) is critical to social and academic success in the early school years, but is often simply "assumed" when children enter school. Unfortunately, many children enter school with inadequately developed expressive and receptive skills in one or more linguistic domains (e.g. vocabulary, narrative skill, phonemic awareness) and are not ready to meet the rapidly evolving and increasing demands of school life. Furthermore, some have difficulties with pragmatics, or the social use of language.

Some such children come from relatively linguistically impoverished home environments and a significant proportion will display a combination of learning and behaviour problems by mid primary years. Some will enter the youth justice system, after early school exclusion because of behaviour problems in and out of class.

Speech Language Pathologists / Speech and Language Therapists have a significant role to play at policy and practice levels in both promoting early oral language skills and the transition to literacy through the application of evidence-based literacy instruction, and by providing services to those whose risk trajectories see them marginalised from the economic mainstream by the time they reach early adolescence.

Questions

Welcome

Q1 What needs to happen for children with early language delays/difficulties to be better identified before or at school entry? #WeSpeechies

Q2 Are children who come from verbally impoverished environments ‘language impaired’ - why or why not? #WeSpeechies

Q3 Behaviour can be a form of communication - but how can we convince policy makers of this, and ways that #WeSpeechies can help with this?

Q4 Why are SLPs/SLTs mostly absent from Youth Justice Settings, and how can we increase our influence in this important area?#WeSpeechies

Chat concludes