In the month of September 2024, the Be Podcast Network partnered with Reading Is Fundamental for a campaign designed to spread awareness of effective literacy practices. As part of this effort I hosted a series of guests on De Facto Leaders to speak on topics relating to language, literacy, and advocacy. Reading Is Fundamental is…
Category: The SLP’s Role in Literacy
It seems like everywhere we turn, we can’t get a straight answer about what SLPs are supposed to be doing to support our students literacy skills. We’re told to, “Use our professional judgement” to figure it out, which isn’t very helpful because it gives us no sense of direction. The articles in this section will help solve that problem.
Advocating for the Right to Read and Becoming a Literacy Leader
This past year, I interviewed Brianna Guild from SLP Literacy Corner for the De Facto Leaders podcast. In preparation for our interview, she shared a detailed summary of what she wanted to discuss in our episode, and I decided to publish it as a post because it has a lot of useful information for clinicians…
Audiobooks, the Matthew Effect, and the “20 minute” rule
This past year, I had the opportunity to connect with various administrators and Ed Tech leaders who are selling curriculum products to school districts at a large scale. During many of these conversations it became clear that districts are making core, evidence-based reading curriculum a priority. One of the best ways to see what’s important…
What is texting doing to spelling and reading skills?
As an SLP I spend a fair amount of time doing research on strategies for building language and literacy skills. But back when I was in elementary school, I didn’t catch on to reading right away. I had what I like to refer to as the Catholic school version of Response to Intervention. I still…
Language screenings: How to accurately identify students in need of help
I get asked all the time, “What’s the best language screener”? Usually people want some kind of a formal test, because that’s what most speech pathologists been trained to do. But if you want to accurately identify kids who might need a full case study evaluation…that type of thinking might result in overidentifying or worse…underidentifying…
What’s working now: For building spelling skills
Building spelling skills can have a huge impact on overall language processing and vocabulary growth, which falls perfectly in line with your expertise. Vocabulary is one of the biggest predictors of success or failure in school because of it’s impact on overall comprehension and language processing (Nagy & Scott, 2000; Nippold, 2017). But most people…
3 Steps to Better Generalization in Language Therapy
When I talk to the different SLPs I mentor, I usually hear the same things over and over again: They want to be able to go to work confident and actually SEE their students making progress… And they want to do it without sacrificing the rest of their life in the process.They’re starting to realize…
Are SLPs qualified to treat dyslexia?
Speech-language pathologists play an important role in language and literacy intervention for individuals with language processing disorders and dyslexia. But if you’re an SLP, you may be struggling to get a clear answer as far as where exactly you fit in to the process. That’s why I wanted to record this quick video for you…
Morphology and the SLP’s Role: The When, the Why, and the How
The members of the Effective Language Therapy for SLPs group recently took a vote about what topics they wanted to study, and one topic that came up was morphology and it’s impact on spelling and language processing. No one seems to doubt that morphology is important. What isn’t clear is WHEN and HOW we should…
Should SLPs be working on parts of speech in language therapy?
There’s a lot of debate as to whether or not SLPs should even be addressing parts of speech in language therapy. Some say we shouldn’t do it because it’s not functional. Some say it’s the teacher’s job and we don’t have time for it. Other say it’s super important because no one’s taking the time…