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Home | School-Based | In the Spotlight

Lafayette, Louisiana

Program Philosophy/Mission

The goal of the Communicative Disorders program is to seek understanding of how communication works and how it breaks down. The endpoint of this goal to design better intervention procedures that can enable individuals with communication disorders to lead richer, fuller, and more productive lives. This endpoint is implemented by educating professionals to provide services to accomplish these goals. This is accomplished through intensive classroom training, supervised clinical experiences, as well as, basic, clinical, and applied research training experiences.

Program Description

The program in Communicative Disorders offers bachelor and master degrees in speech-language pathology, and a Ph.D. in Applied Language and Speech Sciences. The bachelor's degree is a pre-professional degree that is designed to lead students to an advanced degree in communication disorders. The master's degree is the entry-level position for those individuals interested in a clinical career in speech-language pathology. The Ph.D. program is tailored for individuals that seek a career in research and/or higher education.

The clinical component of the program operates with a dual mission. We are dedicated to providing effective, state of the art community services within the university setting that improve the communication abilities of clients. We also provide graduate and upper level undergraduate students studying communicative disorders with clinical experience and training as they fulfill requirements for certification as speech-language specialists. The university setting provides a unique opportunity for faculty, staff and students to study, research and develop theory and practice for the enhancement of the client's communication.

Faculty-Research

The department houses 12 faculty members and the Doris B. Hawthorne Center for Special Education and Communicative Disorders. Each faculty member has a current research program and each faculty member is active in dissemination of this research in national and international forums including research publications and conferences and proceedings. Last year, for example, research findings from this program were presented on four continents and at fifteen different international conferences and conventions. The department had over 35 research publications last year. Areas of research activity include work in literacy acquisition and usage in disordered populations, stuttering, clinical phonetics, voice disorders, AAC, dementia, clinical aphasiology, language disorders in children, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders, and applications of qualitative research to communication sciences and disorders. Graduate students are encouraged to collaborate with the faculty in various research activities

Faculty Spotlight: Jack S. Damico, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Dr. Damico holds the Doris B. Hawthorne Eminent Scholar Professorship in Communicative Disorders and Special Education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received an M.S. in Communicative Disorders from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of New Mexico. He has worked as a public school speech-language pathologist and in various clinical settings. An ASHA Fellow, Professor Damico has received an ASHA Journal Editor's Award for an article in Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools and has been honored recently with the University Distinguished Professor Award from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Foundation. Dr. Damico has been a Keynote Speaker at national conferences in Egypt, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Germany, Canada and the United States and he has published over 90 articles in scholarly journals in the areas of language assessment and intervention, conversational analysis, linguistics, second language acquisition, and qualitative research methodology. He currently has mentoring responsibilities in the doctoral program in Applied Language and Speech Sciences at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has authored or co-authored eight books, including Limiting Bias in the Assessment of Bilingual Students with Else Hamayan and Childhood Language Disorders with Michael Smith.

Personal Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is based upon my belief in how all meaning-making manifestations are facilitated, develop, and are employed regardless of whether one is a child or adult. Consequently, I try to make my interactions with students meaningful, contextually embedded, personal, recurrent, and provided in such a manner that the student may become actively engaged in learning. In my courses I strive to provide a theoretical/foundational base to students and the principles and practices that are the result of the foundational orientation. Individual attention, defensible theoretical and practical knowledge and real world application are the hallmarks that I try to provide to my students.

Throughout the year I mentor students in various research activities and in the Summers I am actively engaged in providing direct supervision of graduate students in our Language and Literacy Project which is a specialized clinic during the summer focusing on elementary school age children demonstrating difficulty in the area of language and literacy. Intensive reading and writing experience in both individual and group settings is provided over 7 weeks with emphasis on skills and strategies which utilize the entire language system with an emphasis on comprehension and meaning.

My research and writing have focused on a number of areas due to my interests in language as a synergistic phenomenon to accomplish social action. Specifically, I work in the areas of compensatory adaptations in individuals with aphasia, Asperger Syndrome, and reading impairments, on the impact of language disorders on literacy, learning, and communication, in language testing, conversational analysis and the application of qualitative research to human communication sciences and disorders.

Classes Taught

Over a 22-year university career I have taught numerous courses in clinical aphasiology, child language disorders, language arts, clinical and applied linguistics, and research methodologies. Currently I teach the MA course in Childhood Language Disorders, a Seminar in Language and Literacy, Qualitative Research Methods, and five rotating seminars in areas involved with advanced understanding and application including advanced literacy theory, clinical aphasiology, advanced intervention theory and practice, sociological applications to human communication and advanced theory in language acquisition. These courses are offered to both doctoral and Master degree students.

Favorite Textbooks

I prefer not to use textbooks in my courses since I would rather tailor the readings to the needs of the course and the students. However, I do have a "soft spot" for the following texts across several disciplines: Child's Talk. Learning how to use language by Jerome Bruner, Understanding Reading by Frank Smith, Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon by Duranti and Goodwin, Clinical Sociolinguistics by Martin Ball, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design by John Creswell, Language Shock: Understanding the culture of conversation by Michael Agar, and anything by or about Lev Vygotsky.