Hello everyone,
Happy New Year! I
cannot quite believe it is 2014! I remember being in year 13 and thinking how I
was going to start university September 2010. I also remember thinking wow four
years was a really long time to be in university, as normal degrees end after
three years. However here I am, currently working on my dissertation, finished
lectures and have placement, exams and dissertation to hand in still and then
I’m DONE!
I thought I’d take the
opportunity today to reflect on a lot of what I did throughout my years
studying my degree, in particular the multitude of placements I had. In total I
think I had five, not including my first year placements and any voluntary
placements.
I remember one of my first
clinical placements was in a mainstream primary school and I saw children with
specific language impairment (SLI). The school had a speech and language therapy
base within the building, this meant that any children identified, as having a
problem would be seen by the speech therapist. Until that placement I’d never
known about specific language impairment and I have to say I learned so much in
that placement. I remember seeing two children with SLI who were completely
different. One showed good social skills as she was very talkative but her
speech made no sense and was filled with jargon, whereas the other child was
shy and didn’t talk as much but had really good understanding of language. The
fascinating thing about SLI is that despite the child developing normally there
is a problem with language that is usually unknown. Here are two articles
concerning SLI that look at various different things. One looks at identifying SLI in deaf children and the other looks at cognitive abilities in children with SLI. You can check them out here for free.
In this school in
particular, only children that had a statement of special educational needs (an
official document saying they require specialist input) were seen. That was my
first placement where after I finished I had to do my dreaded Viva exam on. Any of you who know me, will know how much I dreaded
that exam. It was an exam where we had to videotape ourselves giving therapy to
a client, write a report about our client, edit the video which we would
present to our examiners, give a 15 minute verbal presentation of our client and
finally prepare for the viva part where we would be asked questions regarding
any part of the exam including our report, future management of our client and
so on. Doesn’t that just sound so horrible? And I’ve had to do it twice in my
life, first in my second year and then in my third year! I will never miss that
exam!
During my summer placement
in second year I was at a clinic where the speech and language therapist went
out to see students at different schools. I remember always driving from the
clinic to the school and back again and it only being lunchtime! Since it was a
block placement I got to really refine my skills in report writing and working
independently since I sometimes led sessions unsupervised. I gained a lot of
confidence in delivering therapy. In that placement most of the children I saw
had regular language impairment mixed with some children who had suffered from
ear infections as infants and as a result had hearing problems. Check out this
free article about developmental language impairment entitled “a
place where I can be me” by Lucy Myers, a lecturer at City University London.
See what she found out about long-term well-being in children with language
impairment.
One thing that really
struck me was last year when we had our deafness lectures. I remember we had a
lady who used British Sign Language (BSL) come in to talk to us. Since she uses
BSL on a day-to-day basis it was really quite difficult for her to talk about
her life to us. However she did a great job. I remember her saying how she was
born to hearing parents and that it was really hard for her. She eventually
went to a fully deaf equipped school where she could get the support she
required. She went on to say she married someone who was hearing and that they
had a child who was born deaf and that now she is able to help her child. Read
this free article by Ros Herman who actually led our deafness lectures
at Uni. She looks at early vocabulary development in native deaf signers.
In the spirit of the days,
check out this video of a little girl who is hearing but has two deaf parents
and signed all the Christmas songs at her school assembly for them!
Anyway I hope you’ve
enjoyed my blogs reflecting on my experiences as Speech and Language Therapy
student or in brief an #slp2b and I will probably still update you all on my
progress with my dissertation and my work.
Ciao for now,
H x
