Thursday 29 February 2024

Congratulations Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod

Congratulations to ECIR co-lead Sharynne McLeod on being appointed a Charles Sturt University Distinguished Professor. 

Nominations for Charles Sturt University Distinguished Professor are considered with reference to the following criteria:

  • An international reputation for exceptional research and scholarship
  • Professional peer recognition of significant achievements at a state, national and international level
  • Research/research team leadership
  • Outstanding community engagement

Sharynne McLeod


Thursday 22 February 2024

Congratulations Kate Margetson - PhD submission

Congratulations to Kate Margetson who submitted her PhD today. 

Her PhD is titled: "Moving Beyond Monolingual Practices with Multilingual Children: Learning from Vietnamese-English–Speaking Children, Families, and Professionals". Professor Sharynne McLeod and Associate Professor Sarah Verdon supervised Kate.

Congratulations Kate!

Here is Kate's PhD abstract:

Multilingual children’s speech assessment and differential diagnosis of speech sound disorders can be challenging for speech-language pathologists (SLPs), especially if they do not speak the same language as the children they are working with. While best practice recommendations include assessing children in all the languages that they speak, in many English-dominant contexts SLPs often rely on English assessments for diagnostic decision-making. There are few guidelines for how SLPs can assess, transcribe, and analyse speech in children’s home languages. This doctoral research aimed to explore assessment, transcription, speech analysis, and diagnosis of speech sound disorders in multilingual children involving direct speech assessment of children’s home languages. Vietnamese-English–speaking children and their families were the focus of this research.

The thesis contained four parts, which included five publications. Part One, Monolingual Speech-Language Pathologists in Multilingual Contexts (Chapter 1), included an orientation to the thesis, situated the researcher, presented a literature review, and outlined methodology. Linguistic multicompetence (Cook, 2016) and the emergence approach (Davis & Bedore, 2013) were presented as the theoretical frameworks underpinning the research.

Part Two, Vietnamese-English–speaking Children’s Speech described similarities and differences between Vietnamese and English phonology, Vietnamese-English–speaking children’s speech acquisition, and current resources available to SLPs for assessment and intervention with Vietnamese-English–speaking children (Chapter 2). The interaction between Vietnamese and English phonology was explored in a cross-sectional study (n = 149) of Vietnamese-English–speaking children’s and adult family members’ speech in Vietnamese and English (Chapter 3) and found that direction of cross-linguistic transfer in children’s speech was significantly associated with children’s age and language proficiency. 

Part Three, Diagnosis of Speech Sound Disorders in Vietnamese-English–speaking Children presented in-depth case studies of Vietnamese-English–speaking children’s speech. Case studies of four children considered the impact of assessing both languages on differential diagnosis (Chapter 4). All four children appeared to have speech sound disorder based on English assessment only, but analysis of children’s speech in both languages revealed that only two children had a speech sound disorder. A longitudinal case study explored four influences on a Vietnamese-English–speaking child’s speech over time (Chapter 5) and found that most speech mismatches could be explained by development, dialect, cross-linguistic transfer, and ambient phonology, and that cross-linguistic transfer reduced over time.

Part Four, Moving Beyond Monolingual Speech-Language Pathology Practices with Multilingual Children presented an evidence-based research protocol, the VietSpeech Multilingual Transcription Protocol, for assessing and transcribing multilingual children’s and adults’ speech, that ensured consistent and reliable transcription (Chapter 6). A clinical protocol, the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages, was proposed, for SLPs to assess, transcribe, and analyse multilingual children’s speech, to account for the idiolects of children, their families, and their SLPs (Chapter 7). The Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages will enable SLPs to collaborate with family members and interpreters to assess speech in children’s home languages, providing opportunities to consider children’s entire phonological repertoires during diagnostic decision-making. Finally, conclusions, contributions of the doctoral research, limitations, and future directions were presented (Chapter 8).

This doctoral research sought to bridge a gap between research and practice in multilingual children’s speech assessment by demonstrating the importance of speech assessment of home languages, describing ways of analysing multilingual children’s speech to identify four potential mismatches (development, dialect, cross-linguistic transfer, ambient phonology), and outlining how SLPs move beyond monolingual practices in the way they assess, transcribe, and analyse multilingual children’s speech using the VietSpeech Multilingual Transcription Protocol and the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages.

Tuesday 20 February 2024

First ECIR team meeting for 2024

The first team meeting for ECIR in 2024 was held on 15th February. We are all very excited about plans for the year ahead!

ECIR members


Friday 16 February 2024

Our Springer book cover has arrived!

 Our book cover has arrived!


Now we have a cover design, soon this book arising from papers at our first Early Childhood Voices Conference in 2020 will be published by Springer.


Thursday 8 February 2024

ECIR at AJEC Research Symposium

The 2024 Australian Journal of Early Childhood (AJEC) Research Symposium is taking place virtually on 8 and 9 February. 

https://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/events/ajecsymposium/ 

https://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-AJEC-Research-Symposium_Discussion-papers_Final.pdf

The conference includes papers on innovative research methodologies, research and pedagogical practices. It will be attended by early years professionals, policymakers, researchers, leaders, academics, and students from Australasia and beyond. The 2024 AJEC Research Symposium program includes more than 50 presentations by Australian and international early childhood researchers. 

The CSU Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Group (ECIR)presented a symposium on the first day.

Our presentations were titled: Empowering children’s voices through the Children Draw Talking Project 

  • Listening to children: The Children Draw Talking Project - Belinda Downey, Sharynne McLeod 
  • Development of an instrument and protocol for the virtual collection and analysis of children’s drawings - Carolyn Gregoric, Van H. Tran, Suzanne C. Hopf, Sharynne McLeod 
  • A meaning-making analysis of children’s drawing vs children’s talking in the drawing: A cultural-historical perspective - Shukla Sikder, Lysa Dealtry, Sarah Stenson 

Dr Belinda Downey


Dr Carolyn Gregoric

Dr Shukla Sikder

ECIR member Leanne Gibbs also presented this morning. Her presentation was entitled "Leading early childhood education through crises and complex times".

We enjoyed the International Keynote Address by Associate Professor Sonja Macfarlane titled “He Awa Whiria and Early Literacy: The emancipatory power of braiding knowledge streams in research and practice”. The keynote speaker shared this resource: https://www.education.govt.nz/early-childhood/teaching-and-learning/assessment-for-learning/te-whatu-pokeka-english/