Speech Pathology

During my interview with Speech Pathologist, Deborah Kirsch, I learned countless details about the Speech Pathology career field. When we first began talking, I learned that Mrs. Kirsch works out of a company called “Professional Therapy Services”, where she is contracted out to work for “Eunice Smith Nursing Home” which is located in Alton, Illinois. She has been working at this facility for about a year. She is a newly found graduate from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and she graduated in May 2011. Another thing that I learned about Mrs. Kirsch is that she originally did not go to school to become a speech pathologist, this was a career that she found later in life. After she had graduated from SIUE, the first time with a bachelors in Psychiatry, she started working at a nursing home around this area. She came to know a Speech Pathologist that worked there and she quickly found the field very fascinating. She had always been driven to help others, and she witnessed some of the exercises being done with individuals at the nursing home and decided to go back to school to get her masters in Speech Pathology.

Choosing a major can be difficult, especially when considering expanding your collegiate career from your undergraduate career. For myself, Speech-Language Pathology was a clear answer for me to pursue, especially since I have a desire to help change an individual’s life and make a substantial impact that can affect more then just one individual. From the start of my Speech-Language Pathology collegiate career, I have always been drawn to working with children and increasing their communication skills. Although, my passion for working with children does not stop with expanding their communication skills, but also to help them to become more confident and content with whom they are.

Many people would like to make a difference, not only in their own life, but in others’ lives as well. Deepak Chopra once said, “Everyone has a purpose in life…a unique gift or special talent to give to others. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of our own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals.” All of us, at one point in our lives, have to make the difficult decision of the goals we want to work towards. We all have certain goals, standards, and expectations of ourselves. Not everyone will figure out what they want to be right away, and some will know from the very beginning. My plan for my life is helping others through Speech Language

From being diagnosed at a young age with dyslexia and apraxia of the speech, I am not sure where I would be without the help and encouragement of my speech pathologists. ‘Speech-language pathologists assess, diagnose, treat, and help to prevent communication and swallowing disorders in patients’ (Summary, www.bls.org, 2015). Along with helping their patients overcome or learn how to understand their disorders, speech pathologists must keep records.

2B. In the field of speech-language pathology, a therapist needs to be prepared to work with individuals from diverse backgrounds with respect to language, dialect, culture, socioeconomic status, religion and sexual orientation. Describe some potential benefits and challenges to a speech-language pathologist in working with diverse populations? How would you address the challenges and benefits you described. We are all one.

For Speech and Language Pathologists, there exists a myriad of roles and responsibilities to be met, as it is stated by ASHA, they work to prevent, assess, diagnose and treat speech and/or language difficulties. But cognitive communication is also included, as well as swallowing disorders in both children and adults. From the list of Reflection Tool Summary; I have chosen one option from each of the four areas that I found most appealing to me.

At this time, I plan to become a speech-language pathologist. The specialized body of knowledge for speech pathology is communication, cognition, feeding, and swallowing problems.6 I plan to acquire this knowledge by attending the University of South Carolina to obtain a master’s degree in speech-language pathology. The American Speech-Language Association certification maintenance standards require that “all certificate holders must accumulate 30 certification maintenance hours of professional development during each 3-year certification maintenance interval in order to maintain their ASHA Certificates of Clinical Competence.”5 A compliance form must be submitted to validate the 30 hours of professional development. A SLP must follow specific

The speech pathology program at Texas State University is attractive to me because it is very science-based. I have heard great accolades from alumni that they received an all-encompassing education with great opportunities in research and clinical practice. I am looking for a program that allows me to place an emphasis on what specialty of speech pathology I am interested in as well as covering all aspects of the profession.

I am a Speech-Language Pathology/Audiology and Deaf Studies combined major. Throughout middle and high school I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer in elementary school classrooms. Many times, I worked in the second grade special education classrooms. This experience engrained in my mind what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. My favorite part of volunteering was helping the children with special needs. Many of these children were isolated from their classmates as a result of what was described to me then as a disability. As I got to know a little bit about these children I saw more and more that the label "disabled" that society places upon these children was not applicable. Deafness is a difference, not a disability.

Damian is a returning five year old kindergarten student on our campus. He is repeating kindergarten this year due to the lack of progress during the 2014-2015 school year. He has not shown mastery in identifying all his letters and sounds. He comes to school regularly with a positive attitude and ready to learn. He follows directions and listens to instructions always wanting to please the teacher. His smile on his face shows he is happy and content. However, he struggles academically in all content areas. He is stronger in math than in reading, yet significantly below grade level at the end of the school year. I chose Damian for this assignment because I feel that he needs extra support in phonological awareness. He works hard and could benefit from one on one instruction.

A speech pathologist is an expert prepared to recognize, survey, and restore people with speech or dialect issue, for example, enunciation issues, dialect issues, voice, or faltering issues. Keeping in mind the end goal to end up plainly one, they should have a bachelor’s degree in correspondence sciences and disarranges or related fields. For further education they will need an master’s degree that is authorize by the council on Academic Accredited in Audiology and Speech dialect pathology is required. With a specific end goal to work in this field of study you need to managed clinical experience and once that is finished you at that point proceed onward to clinical practice for a sum of 36 weeks or 1260 hours. Finally, a passing score on

Nearly 4 years of professional experience as a speech and language pathologist, and more than 2 years in pharmaceutical field develop my interpersonal,organizational and analytical skills. However, knowledge is to be necessary to provide me with opportunities for more challenging and interesting work. So I feel the need to seek obtain knowledge in Master of management administration

Speech-Language Pathology has been around since about the 1940's. It is traced back to after World War II when thousands of young servicemen and women returned with noise-induced hearing loss. The United States Government responded by creating hearing rehabilitation programs at the military hospitals where hearing aid procedures were standardized across the country. So what exactly is Speech-Language Pathology? Have there been many Speech Pathology developments over the years, and who are some of the key players? Yes, due to an increase in the need for new advancements, there have been many new developments over the years.

Apraxia of speech is a disorder in which an individual has an unknown motor issue that affects their speech communication (Beathard & Robert, 2008). The extent and severity of the apraxia can vary from person to person. Apraxia of speech can occur in both children and adults. Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a newer diagnosis and controversial because it does not have specific markers that differ from other speech acquisition disorders (Beathard & Robert, 2008). For an individual to be diagnosed with apraxia of speech or CAS they must meet 8 out of 11 features and not have structural problems in the speech organs, signs of dysarthric symptoms, hearing problems, and/or have at least average nonverbal intelligence (Martikainen & Korpilahit, 2011). The features of CAS are: limited consonant and vowel repertoire; frequent omission errors; high incidence of vowel errors; inconsistent articulation errors; increased difficulty imitating words and phrases; predominant use of simple syllable shapes; impaired volitional oral movements; reduced expressive language skills compared to receptive language skills; and incorrectness in producing multisyllabic sequences (Beathard & Robert, 2008;Martikainen & Korpilahit, 2011). The treatment options for apraxia of speech are limited. There has been no one treatment that has been found to be superior to others but researchers have been experimenting with different treatment options to see if one will help improve the features of

CAS is a rare neurological, sensorimotor speech sound disorder. According to related research, successful therapy for those with CAS is achieved by incorporating four tenets of motor learning into therapy: precursors to learning, conditions of practice, feedback, and influence of rate. Other studies suggest that intense treatment is necessary for success, but intensity is rarely measured, and research specifically addressing practice amounts had not been conducted prior to this study. The study hypothesized that children would achieve greater in-session production accuracy and generalization of speech targets when treated with a higher frequency of productions.