Assessment

As SLPs we are responsible for assessing all learners who may potentially have a language disorder and of course this includes students with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In my own clinical practice as school-based SLP, I have to admit that when I hear about an upcoming evaluation of a bilingual student, I get a nervous. It’s overwhelming and a huge responsibility. We need ...

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Last November at ASHA we decided to focus our efforts on documenting progress in our talk, “Documenting Language Therapy Progress in School Settings.” It was exciting (and a bit nerve wracking) to present to a packed room, but we were so grateful for everyone who attended! Judging by the number of SLPs who showed up, it’s fair to say that the demand to demonstrate accountability as a school-bas...

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We just wrapped up the second trimester at school and I finished writing out progress notes for nearly 60 kids on caseload, all of whom have multiple goals on which to report. Every trimester I’m a little daunted by the fact that I have to write progress notes on top of managing therapy sessions, evals and IEPs - it’s another thing to get done. I need to be pretty focused if I’m going to ever g...

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How SALT Evolved Since the first version of SALT software in 1981, before we even had a name for it, our focus was on how to coax a computer to carry out as much of the labor of language sample analysis (LSA) as possible. The idea was to reduce the encumbrance of some of the steps, leaving clinicians with more time for interpreting the results. Over the years, SALT has worked to improve the con...

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This has been a challenging fall to say the least. We have all been thrown into remote learning or a hybrid version of school. Tensions are high among parents wanting their kids back in school and teachers wanting to be back in school as well. But no one wants to contract COVID. Most of us are still figuring out what all of this means for our day-to-day practice. As I reflect on the first month...

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In the first installment of this article we discussed the case of Brendan Dassey, a young man with language disorder who was tried and convicted of murder despite profoundly problematic police interrogation methods. Brendan was a minor at the time. Brendan’s case was both tragic and fascinating. It was even the focus of a Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer. More importantly, it raises big q...

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Stuttering is a childhood-onset disorder of speech fluency that has an incidence of ~5% in preschool age children and a prevalence of ~1% in adults (Bloodstein & Ratner, 2008). For most children, stuttering begins between the age of 2-5 years (Guitar, 2019). With the relatively high incidence of stuttering, it is more than likely that a SLP working with pre-school age children will have a f...

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This article is based on a telephone conversation between Sally Miles, Ph.D., CCC-SLP and Karen Andriacchi M.S., CCC-SLP. The conversation was a follow-up to the language sample transcription [by SALT Services] and the analysis [by Sally using SALT software] of the Brendan Dassey interrogations made famous by the Netflix documentary, “Making A Murderer”. The first half of the interview (today’s...

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One of my favorite features of SALT software is the linking option. Basically, the program lets you link any two samples so that all reports are generated with the data from BOTH language samples presented side by side. Having the data simplified and in one report is a convenient way to present data in IEP meetings or for interpreting data yourself while writing diagnostic or progress reports. ...

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SALT Comprehension Questions Take About 5 Minutes and Will Help You Get More Out of Language Samples A few years back SALT developed comprehension questions for each of the story retell language sample elicitations. Can I just say that I love these add-on questions! They are based on the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy(1) with a framework of questions in a hierarchy going from easy to more complex hi...

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