At first I was a bit apprehensive about taking a class about literacy for my “W’ (Intensive Writing) credits. As with most people, I have my own concept of what literacy is and I just thought we’d be learning about applying literacy to our lives and writing a lot; after all, the class is called “Uses of Literacy.” Maybe we’d just learn how it pertains to reading and writing, I thought… but it’s turned out to be much more than that, which I think is valuable for those who want to be Speech-Language Pathologist or just want to work with children or community projects.
It is known that there’s some amount of literacy building in a SLP’s therapy. Some clients has Dyslexia, some are little children still learning how to put the pieces together, some have trouble recognizing the symbols and connecting them with sounds and words. The list can go on. But have you actually thought about the concept of literacy in a broader, more socio-developmental sense? How does the area where one lives affect their literacy and language capabilities? What about identity and literacy. Your literacy can affect who you identify as, and visa versa. There’s also different domains of literacy, including technology, which has created a whole literacy type of it’s own.
If we can formulate an idea about how our client’s culture and identity affect language skills, then that could help us understand what approach to take for therapy. Maybe the client is more literate in one domain, like computers, but not as competent in social “literacy.” Or, perhaps the community and culture surrounding this person and that have cultivated this person into his/her being have given way to a literacy that is different than what you are used to but is the “norm” where that person was brought up. This can be dialect, idioms, how they use language/ use it to express their thoughts, social behavior, etc. You have to be sensitive to all of these things in order to find the perfect piece to complete the therapy jigsaw puzzle. If you don’t account for these types of literacies and try to treat each client with similar problems in the same way, it might not always click. You need to customize it to their level and type of literacy.
Maybe you can ask you client some questions, like:
*What are your favorite memories of reading and writing?
*How did you learn to read and write? Did anyone help?
*What are some of your favorite traditions?
*What re some things you like to do in your town/community?
*How do you normally talk to someone (write, talk, sing, …etc)?
*What confuses you about language, reading, writing and speaking?
*When is it difficult for you to understand others, or for them to understand you?
Basically, just ask them anything to do with literacy. This can expand from just reading and writing; in fact, it includes much more than that. Try to think of definition of literacy… does yours reference to sign langauges/body language or how culture, society and events maybe shape one’s literacy? There’s also literacy “events” (like, remembering when you first learned to read a book, or reading/decoding a street sign, eavsdropping and understanding someone’s conversation… basically anything can be a literacy event). Another thing is literacy sponsors… who or what has helped lay the foundation of your language and literacy skills? It can be people, places (school, library, home, travel), or things (books, websites, magazines, technology) or even abstract stuff like dreams,languages and age (your literacy changes as you age) .
Hope this helps you customize your therapy plans or understand a new way to tackle some speech and languages issues!
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Tags: Dyslexia, informative, learning, Literacy, SLP, Speech and language pathology, Speech Language Pathology, Speech Therapy, therapy ideas
Specialty Profile: Transgender Voice Therapy
18 JunAlthough I´ve been aware of voice therapy for teachers, musicians and actors or accent reduction therapy for foreigners, I hadn´t given much thought to transgendered people. It´s not due to a fear or ignorance of that population, I´ve just heard more about therapy that was available for foreigners, teachers, etc. After receiving a text bringing up therapy for transgendered people, the gears in my mind started cranking… there´s plenty of people who go through these operations, so why wouldn´t there be therapy for their voices? After all, hearing someone´s voice can be a pretty decent indicator of their gender.
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Just a simple search of ¨Transgender voice speech pathology¨(creative, I know) brought up quite a bit of information! There were even some scholarly articles and books listed, albeit most were in Transgender scholarly journals and not written by speech researchers. None the less, the topics seemed interesting! Some of the non-scholarly webpages that were brought up were articles on voice therapy for those that went through the transition, or stories about voice therapy. Some were even speech pathologists´websites stating one of their specialities was teansgender voice femininization-masculinization. There were even fellow transgender people (not certified speech-voice therapists) offering vocal therapy services to teach their techniques. Even the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) had information on transgender voice therapy! How was I not in the know about this?
From what I read, there´s quite a bit that goes into therapy for these clients. For men that are now female, there is a bigger obstacle of obtaining a feminine voice, as estrogen doesn´t make the voice higher. Female voices also have a higher pitch and rely on intonation rather than volume to stress words in an utterance. These two facts came from the second article below, which has more discrepancies between male and female speech and body langauge. There´s plenty more information in these articles/websites.
A Speech Pathologist who does this work in NY:http://www.transgendervoice.net/about.html
Info-Q&A- Further Reading: (Note, the lady interviewed is not a speech therapist)http://blogs.plos.org/wonderland/2011/08/17/learning-to-speak-like-a-woman/
A Transgendered male-to-female´s website: http://www.lauras-playground.com/transgender_voice_therapist_list.htm
ASHA: http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/TGTS.htm
Article on Gov´t giving money to GWU for transgender voice research:http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/gov-t-spending-152500-study-voice-therapy-transgenders
Brochure: http://people.umass.edu/mva/pdf/ComDis%20612%20Student%20Presentations_09/Transgender%20Voice%20Therapy%20Brochure.pdf
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Tags: ASHA, informative, Male to Female, research, SLP, SLT, Speech, Speech and language pathology, Speech Language Pathology, Speech Therapy, Transgender, Transgender voice, Transgendered, Transition, voice, voice femininization, voice masculinization, voice therapy