14. The History of School Speech Pathology

Cultural and Linguistic Barriers “I became a teacher of students with disabilities in 1971. I was there when Public Law 94-142 planted its roots firmly in the soil of prejudice. Before 1975, we as a people of this nation prejudged and unknowingly misjudged who could benefit from public education. In our ignorance of how to [...]

13. The History of School Speech Pathology

Progress in the General Curriculum A problem growing out of the mental retardation rights movement promoted by The ARC and other groups was to find a way to make sure handicapped children were protected from curriculum neglect.  Before 1975 special education teachers often in isolated rooms taught silly things, like beads, blocks and colors.  And [...]

5. History of School Speech-Language Pathology

1960s In the 1960s money was flowing into schools and universities.  Research was encouraged and paid for.  On the horizons were significant changes in the speech pathology practice.  The “scope of practice” expanded as a result of research studies, speech science applications and linguistic theory.  Professor Duchan refers to “The Linguistic Era from 1965 to 1975 [...]

15. New School Phonology and Cloud Computing

To rebuild our views of how phonology works in schools — in the school community — we are wise to return to some old notions from structural linguistics entailing communities of speakers using a common abstract code having some tolerance for variation (dialect, style, accent) as agreed to by the speakers. A child who uses an [...]

14. New School Phonology: Wait to Fail!

The President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education (2001) found American schools follow a pattern members called “wait to fail.”  A modern phonology outlook (including articulation) brought forth by school speech-language pathologists can help to solve the wait to fail problem, as summarized by the Commission: “Finding 2: The current system uses an antiquated model that waits [...]

15. New School Phonology: Prosodic Relationships

Within a framework of prosodic phonology we can see the true interrelationships between “speech” and “language” through the connecting principles of phonology.   A school child says, “He kicked the can, ” pronounced,   /’k:I duh ‘kae: /.      It is traditional to say that there is an omission of final /k/, and the child might have [...]

13. New School Phonology: Misidentification of Accent

The dynamics of the misplacement of at-risk children as played out in IEP meetings can be illustrated with a case study example drawn from prior practice some 10 years ago.   A seventh-grade teacher referred a boy for speech and language evaluation because he had a “terrible speech problem” in class. He was hard to [...]

12. New School Phonology: The Fragmentation Problem

Old notions of speech therapy fragment current  thinking about school phonology. Here are some illustrations of the point.   CATEGORIES   1. Commercial Products.   Companies publish speech, language and hearing materials for school speech-language pathologists.   Authors are often working practitioners.   Materials correspond in rough manner to professional scope of practice categories.   To use only one example, LinguiSystems (East Moline, Ill, [...]

11. New School Phonology: Poor Theory for Practice

School speech therapists or speech-language pathologists have all but ignored phonological theory as a gateway to integrated practice yielding countless advantages for everyday success and acceptance.  By sticking with phonetics and articulation drill and practice, the power of “higher level” theory has escaped them.  They stick with the old traditions out of convenience, habit and social acceptability. Here are [...]

10. New School Phonology: The LD Problem

We argue here genetic learning disability derives to a large extent from phonological disability occurring prosodically across levels of grammatical processing.  Preschool children with functional “multiple artic problems” are learning disabled but the most dramatic symptom is speech.  These are the “wait to fail” children widely discussed in education.  From a prior post we ask: “But where are [...]