Do speech and language therapists have a role in literacy?

A group of speech and language therapists (SLTs) tell us why they believe the answer is yes. We hear about a survey of SLTs in the UK on their views of this question and find out about attitudes in Germany, Australia and wider.

Interviewees:
Carol Moxam, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University & Director of The Children’s Speech & Language Clinic
Claire D’Urban-Jackson, Dually qualified SLT with a postgraduate certificate (Level 7) in Language Literacies & Dyslexia, Knowl Hill School
Prof. Pamela Snow, Prof. of Cognitive Psychology, La Trobe University
Sarah-Maria Thumbeck, SLT in a rehabilitation center, research at Uni Erfurt (PhD project on looking at text level reading comprehension in persons with aphasia)

Resources:
• Stephenson, C., Serry, T.A. & Snow, P.C. (2023). Teachers’ perspectives of the role & scope of practice of speech-language pathologists working to support literacy in the early years of school. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2023.2250934%20, Published online 2023.
• Stephenson, C., Serry, T.A. & Snow, P.C. (2023). Australian speech-language pathologists’ self-rated confidence, knowledge & skill on constructs essential to practising in literacy with children & adolescents. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, Published online April 28, 2023. doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2023.2202839
• McLean E., Snow, P. & Serry, T. (2021). Dual-qualified teachers and speech-language therapists reflect on preparation and practice in school-based language and literacy. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 37(3), 249-263. doi.org/10.1177/0265659021995543
• Snow, P.C. (2016). Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language. Positioning Speech Language Pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms, & polemics. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 18(3), 216-228. DOI: doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1112837.
• pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-d…ologists.html
Literacy for everyday life:
• Rosebrock, C. (2012). Was ist Lesekompetenz, und wie kann sie gefördert werden? [Online-Plattform für Literalität]. Leseforum.ch. www.leseforum.ch/myUploadData/fil…_3_Rosebrock.pdf
• Rosebrock, C., & Nix, D. (2020). Grundlagen der Lesedidaktik und der systematischen schulischen Leseförderung (9., aktualisierte Neuauflage). Schneider Verlag Hohengehren GmbH.
• Snow, C. E. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension (Science & Technology Policy Institute (Rand Corporation), Hrsg.). Rand.
Aphasia:
• Parr, S. (1995). Everyday reading & writing in aphasia: Role change & the influence of pre-morbid literacy practice. Aphasiology, 9(3), Article 3. doi.org/10.1080/026

Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

Transcript

Transcript Date:  

29 October 2024  

Speaker Key (delete/anonymise if not required):  

HOST: JACQUES STRAUSS  

CLAIRE D'URBAN-JACKSON

CAROL MOXAM

PAMELA SNOW

SARAH-MARIA THUMBECK

MUSIC PLAYS: 0:00:00-0:00:07 

HOST: 0:00:07 Welcome to the RCSLT podcast. My name is Jacques Strauss, and in this episode we’re going to talk about the role that speech and language therapists play in literacy, so really, people’s ability to read and write.  

Not everyone agrees on what the SLT’s role is, and of course, there are varying standards across the world, so we gathered a very broad group of expert SLTs – not only from the UK – to discuss the issue.  

Two of the SLTs on today’s panel, Carol and Claire, conducted a survey about attitudes towards SLTs’ involvement and literacy, and their work was the genesis of today’s podcast.  

As always, I started by asking all the guests to introduce themselves. 

SARAH: 0:00:47 Hi, I’m Sarah Thumbeck and I’m speech and language therapist in Germany in a rehabilitation centre. I work mainly with adults and I’m also involved in research at the University of Erfut. I just recently submitted my PhD dissertation on text comprehension and people with aphasia.  

CLAIRE: 0:01:05 Hi, I’m Claire D'Urban Jackson, a dually qualified speech and language therapist with extra training in literacy. I’m based at Knowl Hill School, which is an educational setting that specialises in supporting students with dyslexia and other co-occurring difficulties such as DLD and ADHD.  

CAROL: 0:01:26 Carol Moxam. I’m a speech and language therapist working at Newcastle University. I’m a senior lecturer, and I’ve been very fortunate to be able to run a clinic for children with language and literacy difficulties, and also worked with Claire running various projects around the links between language and literacy.  

PAM: 0:01:47 Hi everyone. Pam Snow. I’m a professor of cognitive psychology and co-director of the SOLAR LAB – the Science Of Language and Reading Lab – in the School of Education at La Trobe University in Australia. By background, I’m what we in Australia call a speech language pathologist. We often just say ‘speechie’ for short, or SLP, and I’m also a registered psychologist. My area of research interest is reading and the translation of high-quality evidence about reading instruction into classroom practice.  

HOST: 0:02:28 Carol, you conducted some research and were basically the instigator of this podcast with Claire. I wonder if you can tell us a little more about your journey and how you came to feel that we needed to address the question of literacy.  

CAROL: 0:02:45 Well, as a speech and language therapist starting out, I spent a lot of time working in schools. And in doing so, what came very apparent very early on was not just that the children had speech or language or communication difficulties, but their ability to access the curriculum. The vehicle through which they were doing that was very much about literacy, and as they went through the years, that became more of an important issue.  

I was very interested in the links between language and literacy. My initial training didn’t give me that additional knowledge that I needed, so I went out and got additional training in that area. And then, for my sins, I ended up working at Newcastle University, setting up and running a literacy clinic for children with speech language difficulties that also [co-existed 0:03:40] with literacy.  

Then my interest grew; I did my PhD. What I found really interesting was that there was differences nationally and internationally in people’s views about their role, and it wasn’t a universally accepted thing that speech and language therapists would be involved in written language.  

Cutting a long story short, I ended up meeting Claire, one of our panellists here, and we got together and did a couple of projects looking at… well, the first one was about… we thought we would survey speech and language therapists in the UK to find out their views about their role in written language. We’ve got all the data there. We’ve got just over 500 respondents, both adults and paediatric therapists, and we’re in the final stages of getting that written up and published.  

We wanted to open the debate wider and just see generally [whether our/where there are 0:04:38] findings and have this discussion with the likes of Pam and Sarah.  

HOST: 0:04:45 Claire, was it like a meeting of minds?  

CLAIRE: 0:04:47 Absolutely. When Carol and I met at a training by Susan Ebbels on the evidence base for working with children with DLD, during coffee breaks, we realised that we both had gone down the route of literacy and had got our level 7s, so we had lots of stuff to talk about. Yeah, that’s kind of what sparked discussions and led to the research project which was the survey. And then following that, we went a bit further and we’ve started a second research project.  

So, yes, it’s exciting, I think, when you meet sort of other professionals in your field who are very like-minded and share a passion and an interest like yourself.  

HOST: 0:05:36 Pam, I wonder if you can give us an understanding of what we traditionally think the role of SLTs is in literacy.  

PAM: 0:05:45 If we go back to first principles here and think about the scope of practice of the SLT, obviously we’re looking at human communication. And human communication takes many forms. It can be spoken communication. It can be gesture, body language. It can be sign language, like British Sign Language, Estonian Sign Language. And, of course, a very big part of human communication is the written word – reading and writing.  

From my perspective, written communication is just a communication channel, so it is completely in scope, from my perspective, for the field of expertise that SLTs have with respect to human communication.  

What we know about written communication, though – so we’re talking now about reading and writing – is that, unlike spoken communication, these are not biologically primary skills. These are not skills that humans have evolved a natural evolutionary advantage for. So, we happen to have very well evolved brains that favour language. We’ve got an entire half of our cerebral cortex that is devoted to language, that’s how specialised we are as a species [recording scrambled 0:07:16] highly evolved, not just communication, but language and all of the components of language: word, sentence structure, phonology, semantics, pragmatics. This is a very complex, elaborate system. So, that’s biologically primary.  

But we have this human contrivance called writing systems, and we have various kinds of writing systems. But this is a human contrivance that has been around for, we think, somewhere around 3,000, 5,000, 6,000 years, which is very, very recent in evolutionary terms, so it’s not something that our brains have had time to adapt to. Even though, in social and cultural terms, we think it’s important, brains take a very long time to catch up with what we think, as humans, is important. 

So, we’ve got brains that can learn to read, write, and spell if they’re given adequate instruction and support. And we know that when we look at the process of reading comprehension, for example, not just the simple process of lifting words off the page, but really comprehension, that’s entirely language-based. So, we’re looking at vocabulary. We’re looking at understanding of sentence structure – active versus passive voice is a good example there. We’re looking at shades of meaning. We’re looking at the mastery of the phonological system, and understanding that if we change just one small phonological feature, like voicing, we change a word in meaning completely – like from fan to van. One small phonological feature and the meaning is completely different, let alone all of the pragmatic aspects of how and why we communicate.  

So, when we… and I’ll focus on the developmental period. When we look at children who are having difficulty with reading comprehension and also with writing, in many cases those difficulties sit in the language system. And of course, the language system is fairly and squarely in the area of expertise of SLTs. I don’t know any other professional group that has the expertise in human language and the ability to support people who struggle with language. I don’t know of any other group that fits that bill better than SLTs do.  

HOST: 0:09:54 It makes a lot of sense, and yet we are here discussing the role of SLTs in literacy.  

Sarah, it would be great to get your views as someone working in Germany; what are the views there?  

SARAH: 0:10:07 Yeah, sure. I completely agree with you, Pam, that speech and language therapists play a very important role in literacy skills. And also, you mentioned society, so I think literacy is a very important element of nowadays or everyday society and everyday life, and a lot of activities we do in everyday life are inherently connected to literacy skills. And the society expects us to be able to read and to be able to write. The infrastructures require literacy skills. And I think also internationally, we use the international justification of functioning disability and health the, ICF.  

So, with regard to the ICF, speech and language therapists are supposed to work on improving participation in people who may have trouble with literacy skills, and some participation goals may require to work on literacy, on written language, on reading and writing.  

So, I think in Germany and also in other countries, written language is an integral part of speech and language therapy. In adult therapy, for sure, we work on all of the four modalities on talking, on listening comprehension, on writing, and on reading. And there’s many groups of people that this is relevant for. There’s people with aphasia, for example, there’s people with cognitive communication disorders, then there’s also some people who may have trouble using spoken language, so written language may be a very important part to compensate those difficulties and can be used as augmentative or alternative communication.  

And also, later on in life, there may be people with dementia, for example, for whom it may also be important to maintain literacy skills. For example, they can write down things to remember, or reading can be an important leisure activity as well.  

And literacy is an important part of assessment [batteries 0:12:11] already. There’s elements in assessment batteries on visual word comprehension, for example, and newer assessment tools – they also focus completely on written language, for example, the comprehensive assessment of reading and aphasia. And there’s also already some interventions that target written language. 

HOST: 0:12:32 Claire and Carol, this is probably a good point to start talking about your survey. What were the attitudes in the UK?  

CAROL: 0:12:37 Generally, what was interesting, and following on from what Sarah was saying, is that in the survey there seemed to be a higher percentage of speech and language therapists who work with adults who feel they have a role in assessment and intervention. Not that the therapists who work with children didn’t feel they had a role, they absolutely did, but the percentages of therapists who felt they had a role was far higher in a wider range of domains.  

For example, we looked at vocabulary and spelling and reading comprehension, morphological awareness, sentence writing, written narrative, assisted technology, and those sorts of things. So, there were high percentages of the therapists who felt that they had a role.  

Now, the paediatrics who felt they had a role, therapists… like I say, they didn’t disagree that we had a role. It was more around resource. And I would say from the data that was coming out, it felt like more confidence to actually take the skills that they had and use them in a functional way, but also context as well and training – pre-training.  

HOST: 0:13:55 So, for those people who didn’t think it was their responsibility, whose did they think it was?  

CLAIRE: 0:14:01 Talking to the people that you work with and that you come in connection with, in the UK you’ve got specialist teachers who’ve done a similar training to Carol and I and got their level 5 or level 7 in literacy. So yeah, in the UK that’s kind of the route that some people go. But unfortunately, a lot of that seems to be privately funded. It’s quite hard to get that in EHCPs, so they get funded for SEN schools, but then it’s whether those SEN schools then have those professionals to work on those skills.  

And I think it’s quite hard, from my experience, doing group work. Sometimes that works – it depends if you’ve got similar children at a similar level with similar difficulties. But if you’ve got a very mixed group, it can be really hard to tailor it and meet all the individuals, depending what sort of group you’re running.  

So, I can kind of identify that if you are a specialist literacy teacher working in a classroom, it can still be quite challenging to meet all the individual needs of those children. We’re quite fortunate in that as SLTs, we can decide whether we do paired work, group work, individual group work, so we’ve got that flexibility, which I think is quite nice and a good reason for having SLTs in schools.  

CAROL: 0:15:32 And I’d also add as well, I think, I’m not sure whether there’s any consensus as to who… say, a teacher is in a classroom with a child who’s got difficulties with literacy. They may go to their educational psychologists for assessment and advice. They may have access to a special educational needs coordinator who may have additional knowledge or training or skill. They may have access to specialist teams who work into schools who have additional training in literacy, or they may have a Claire who they have access to who is also… she’s a speech and language therapist, but she also has additional knowledge in literacy.  

I think for schools, their first port of call would probably very likely be an educational psychologist.  

HOST: 0:16:19 Pam, could you talk to us a bit about the frameworks that inform thinking around this issue?  

PAM: 0:16:27 When we think about the reading process, there are quite a few theoretical models, and one that will be well known, I would think, to most listeners in the UK is going to be the Simple View of Reading because it had a central place in what we refer to in Australia as the Rose Report, which was your national review into the teaching of reading, led by the late Sir Jim Rose. And that report was really built around the Simple View of Reading that was proposed by Gough and Tumner back in 1986.  

And what that is is essentially a mathematical formula that says that reading comprehension is the product not the sum of decoding ability, so the ability to lift the words off the page, and oral language comprehension. And it’s really important to remember that that’s a multiplier in the middle of the equation, it’s not an addition sign, because anything multiplied by zero is zero. So, decoding ability multiplied by oral language comprehension gives us our reading comprehension.  

I think it’s fair to say that there has been a bit of a tendency over the decades to put decoding ability over there on one side and oral language comprehension over there on the other side. But as SLTs, we know that they’re both language-based skills, so the ability to map phonemes and graphemes in reading is a language-based task because we’re asking children to understand and apply the alphabetic principle – the idea that the squiggles on the page, the graphenes, have a representation in speech as phonemes, so that is actually a linguistic skill.  

And then on the oral language comprehension side, we’ve got a whole lot of skills. Sometimes people talk about these as constrained versus unconstrained skills. There’s a relatively constrained amount of knowledge that children need, and I’m going to focus on English here because we can’t possibly cover every language and every writing system. But there’s a constrained amount of knowledge that children need about phoneme, grapheme correspondences, how speech and print map to each other, in order to be getting a high score on that decoding side of the formula.  

But when we move to the oral language comprehension side of the formula, sometimes people now talk about these as unconstrained skills, because there’s limitless levels of complexity that writers could use with respect to the vocabulary that they call on, or the length and complexity of sentences – whether there’s subordinate clauses and long sentences, where there’s a long distance between the subject and the predicate, and active versus passive voice. There’s all kinds of ways that writers can make that dense and complex for readers. And there’s figurative and idiomatic language, so writers use metaphors and use puns and plays on words and idioms, and they use analogy and sarcasm and irony, paradox – all kinds of linguistic devices that, when they’re transacted between speakers, can often be easier to untangle, but when a writer uses them, then all of the responsibility sits with the reader for making sense of what the writer is saying.  

And then, of course, there’s this background knowledge. So, the simple view of reading, I think, is a helpful reminder that, yes, we need to be able to develop beyond the biologically primary oral language comprehension skills, we need to develop decoding abilities, but we need to develop this ability to put it all together in real-time as readers and then as writers. And all of these skills are language skills. So, the theoretical models, like the Simple View of Reading, and some listeners will be familiar with Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, which, in a sense, is like a more elaborate version of the Simple View of Reading and it uses the visual metaphor of strands of rope that come together, with the top half being the language comprehension side of things, and the bottom half being the word identification side of things. And we see skills on the bottom half becoming more automatic and skills on the top half becoming more strategic.  

But what wraps around all of this is language, and the fact that they’re part of the language system. So, we’ve got good theoretical support as a profession – very strong theoretical support – for the written word and its development and across the lifespan and various disorders that can impact on literacy skills.  

But we’ve got good theoretical frameworks that support this being in scope. And as we were talking about before, who else is going to do it? Certainly, in our education system in Australia, we don’t have a teaching workforce that’s got this highly developed knowledge of the language system. The only people who are likely to set foot in a school who’ve got this really well-developed knowledge of the human language system is going to be an SLT.  

HOST: 0:22:13 Is it fair to say that Australia is ahead of the UK in this work? 

PAM: 0:22:20 Well, I think we’re out of the blocks in Australia. I don’t think most SLTs would think it’s controversial that some of their colleagues work in schools and work on literacy. But I don’t think we’re where the United States of America is. I think they got going in this area way ahead of us. I can’t really speak for New Zealand. I suspect New Zealand is a little bit similar to Australia, but I think there’s still way too much variation in Australia. 

And I should mention that my colleague, Professor Tanya Serry, and I have a PhD student, Caitlin Stevenson, who is an SLT who works in schools. The focus of her PhD is what teachers think about the role of SLTs in the literacy space, and how well SLTs themselves feel prepared to work in the literacy space. And she’s also tried to do some mapping of curriculum content in Australia and SLT courses. There’s still a lot of gaps in our knowledge.  

On the ground, I think it’s very dependent on the individual school that a practitioner is working in. So, in some schools, the leadership team think SLTs are the best thing since sliced bread, and say wonderful things on social media and how useful they are and how transformational it’s been to have an SLT in their team. And there are others who say, stick to your lane, work on articulation problems, and that’s all we’re interested in hearing about. 

HOST: 0:24:07 What do you think the resistance may be for SLTs to become more involved in literacy?  

CLAIRE: 0:24:15 Yeah. HCPC talk about our scope of practice, and it tends to indicate that it’s up to the individual in terms of making sure that they’ve got enough knowledge and skills and experience to practice lawfully. So, the onus is actually on the individual.  

I know for the likes of Carol and myself, we felt when we qualified as SLTs, that we didn’t have quite enough knowledge and skills and experience in literacy, and so, therefore, we pursued further education to get those qualifications.  

And I think for me, I found, even though I went on those courses, I still had to do further courses with the American SLPs to expand on my knowledge and skills in terms of a speech and language therapist.  

CAROL: 0:25:10 As speech and language therapists, we go to different institutions to be trained, and some institutions will have a greater emphasis on written language and links between the two than others. Some individuals will go off and do additional training, so thereby widening their scope of practice. But that’s not consistent. So, some people will feel, absolutely, this is within my scope of practice to work in written language. Other people might not feel that.  

In the adult domain – and Sarah can correct me if I’m wrong here – as part of their training, written language is integral to what they do and they’re thinking about supporting the communication of the clients that they work with. They again… it’s different again. So, even within the profession, across paediatrics and children, there is a difference. So, therein lies the first challenge. It’s getting consensus across adults and [inaudible 0:26:03], never mind the national and international question here. 

In terms of the challenges, I think that… I was going to say traditionally we’ve always been a profession that is in short supply. There is never enough speech and language therapists around. But then, you might say that about most allied health professionals. Then you’ve had COVID, which has exacerbated the already challenging resource that we have. So, for some individuals, the challenge in the idea of working in written language is the idea that this is additional to their workload already, and so therefore that is an additional challenge.  

What I’m hoping is that people come around the idea that working on written language isn’t an addition, it’s actually part of what you already do, and what you do from a spoken speech and language point of view underpins the written language, and it’s really about just making those links.  

There’s also the resource. When I first started working, I was in a trust where you would only work with children up to a certain age, so secondary school children had a lesser service, so you have resource issues. And then you have this idea which Claire touched on a little bit, that you do your training, you do your additional courses in written language, but that doesn’t then equip you to go, right, I know exactly what to do when I get somebody who’s got a written difficulty or disorder in the context of speech and language. That in itself takes time, it takes experience to actually learn how to put the theory into practice.  

HOST: 0:27:45 That’s interesting. In other areas of SLT, say, dysphasia, it’s more structured in the way you assess your ability.  

PAM: 0:27:53 I think this is potentially problematic, because in Australia, certainly I, amongst others, have been critical of the fact that there’s been a culture enabled by education academics, and I think you are definitely ahead of us in reading instruction and standardising reading instruction in schools. But in Australia, there’s been a culture of choose your own adventure. And we need to be very careful that that same kind of choose your own adventure doesn’t apply to our profession and how they go about carving a space for themselves in the literacy space. So, we still need to be thinking about professionalism, accountability, transparency, credentialing, keeping our knowledge and skills up to date – the ethical imperative to be an evidence-based practitioner.  

And this is coming through in our PhD student, Caitlin’s, work that we have to be very careful that if… as I say in Australia, if we’re being critical of there being way too much variability in how reading is taught, then we need to make sure that there’s not way too much variability in how SLTs go about providing support in classrooms, whether that’s support to the mainstream or support to small group work or working with individuals.  

CAROL: 0:29:30 Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with Pamela. But when we’ve got our level 7, the expectation is that we have to sign up on a regular basis to say that we are keeping up to date with research, and we have to submit work that we’ve done and training that we’ve done, and there is a standard to which we have to write our reports if we’re doing formal reports about a person’s strengths and needs.  

I think there is a danger… I like that term ‘choosing your own adventure’. And this is one of the reasons, going back to our original discussion, about there needing to be a position statement that really makes clear what our role is and how we work and then the stuff around that about what the standards would be and how we ensure. There’s a bit like what we’ve done going down the road of dysphagia, where that’s really become something that we’ve really worked hard at in Royal College and as a profession. I think a similar thing needs to be done with written in the idea of written language, that there needs to be standards.  

I think the starting point is a position paper, which is what I would be pushing for.  

HOST: 0:30:42 We’re talking a lot about paediatrics. What about adults when it feels, I guess, less educational and more rehabilitative.  

SARAH: 0:30:52 I feel as if it was, for sure, part of my education and training. And I think there were a lot of elements on, for example, written language regarding sentences or words. But then once it comes to larger units, for example, text comprehension or the production of written texts, then there was less content in my training. And I think that’s where also in clinical practice that may be more difficult for some people. But yeah, SLTs do… from my experience in Germany, they do feel responsible to work on these areas.  

HOST: 0:31:34 Are you saying with adults there was a focus on a basic functional level but nothing really beyond that?  

SARAH: 0:31:41 That’s what in clinical practice often happens. Like, then people are released from rehabilitation centres, or they don’t receive additional service. But then, actually, in real life, written language is much longer than just one word or one sentence! Yeah, that’s where we have less treatment approaches and less assessment options as well. So, I think that’s where research also needs to focus on.  

HOST: 0:32:09 So Pam, I’m curious as an outsider, what do you think SLTs in the UK should be doing to address this?  

PAM: 0:32:17 It’s a good question, Jacques. I guess there needs to be a national conversation, really, between sectors, which we’ll hear about the education sector. So, we need to hear from non-SLTs as well, and we need to be looking at the trajectories of those children who do have diagnosed language disorders and what their needs are. We know from the work of Courtenay Norbury and her colleagues in the UK that we can expect 2 children in every class of 30 to meet diagnostic criteria for a language disorder. Now, that’s a lot because the other 28 don’t have fantastic language skills. There’s there are other children in that class who, for a range of reasons, have vulnerable language skills.  

I think back to some academic papers that I published with the late, wonderful Professor James Law about trying to put a public health framework around what we do in the SLT profession, and think population level. One of my criticisms of the profession has been that it’s too much focused on individuals and not enough focused on how our expertise can benefit entire population. So, what can we bring to the table to make the education sector stronger? And that might be SLTs working alongside teachers in building and refining curriculum, for example. It doesn’t all have to be about sitting down and working one-to-one with individual children. In fact, I think the more high-quality upstream work we do, then the less of that ambulances down the bottom of the cliff one-to-one work that we should be needing to do.  

HOST: 0:34:20 Should we be differentiating between what we do for adults and children in terms of literacy?  

SARAH: 0:34:27 From my point of view, it seems much more important or a higher priority to focus on clarity on [inaudible 0:34:35] paediatric therapy from what everyone was just talking about. But I think in order to clarify whether such a position statement would be necessary for [edit 0:34:45] therapy as well, I think we would need a survey to find out more about that, or something like that.  

From my point of view, I feel as if it’s quite clear for myself that it is part of my role, and I feel as if it’s like that as well for other adult SLTs. But, of course, I cannot talk for everyone! 

HOST: 0:35:08 Carol, final question from me. What do you think are the next steps?  

CAROL: 0:35:13 Yes, thank you for that question. I think three things come to mind. Firstly, around our interprofessional learning opportunities. I think it would be great to have more opportunities between educationalists and speech and language therapists to promote not just understanding of our professional roles but also encourage collaborative approaches to supporting individuals with written language difficulties or disorders.  

Secondly, at pre-registration training, making clear the links between spoken and written language for our students, so that by the time they graduate, they’re really clear about the links and therefore our potential role in terms of assessment and intervention.  

And I think finally, and perhaps most importantly, given it was the motivation behind our survey, is a position statement. And within this statement, it would be really important that the primary aim was to clarify our role in written language across the lifespan, making clear what is appropriate and what is possible, given our training and expertise.  

HOST: 0:36:32 I think that’s a great point to end on. A very big thank you to all the panellists who joined us. As usual, please see the show notes for links to materials and the research discussed. Until next time, keep well.  

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