This text-based course is a transcript of the live event, "Culturally Responsive Support for Dual Language Learners,” presented by Elenny Tuleta, M.A., CCC-SLP; M.Ed.; TESL/TEFL.
Forming Culturally Responsive Hypotheses for Valid Support
>> Elenny Tuleta: What I am going to be assisting you with today is forming culturally responsive hypotheses. Asking the right questions, I feel as speech pathologists, is one of our primary charges. In order to design appropriate support for any client, we need to ask the right questions to come to the right conclusions. If you think of a typical /s/ problem, you are going to give very different advice and recommendations to a parent, family, teacher and team member depending on if that child is perhaps a three-year-old versus a nine-year-old. I think you would all agree with me. But if we do not ask the fundamental question of the age of the child then we are not going to come up with the right support or the appropriate supports. That holds true also for English Language Learners. We need to ask the right questions and many times our teams are not informed enough to, in fact, ask the right questions. We are going to look at what we need to know, how we get to the info we need to know, how we acknowledge what might be missing, and what questions we should ask.
We are going to look at forming some hypotheses around some scenarios. I would like you to think about these cases, even jot down your thoughts or immediate clinical impressions, as I read through these quickly. Then at the end of our session we are going to revisit them and you weill see how much more enriched your hypotheses have become and your clinical impressions might have changed one way or the other. Let's look at the four scenarios for your consideration.
We have first an early childhood program staff. The staff member is concerned that a three-year-old “refuses” to open her mouth and states that the child is “just stubborn.” The second scenario is a kindergarten aide who reports that although it is almost winter break she has a child that “is still not talking” and suspects the child has selective mutism. The third case comes from a counselor who was absolutely convinced that a four-year-old is on the autism spectrum. The child “echoes” everything the teacher says - this is the primary referral concern. For our fourth scenario, a kindergarten teacher refers a child for behavior problems because he runs around the room constantly and takes supplies away from other children. She wants this child removed.
I wish I can tell you I am creative enough to come up with the scenarios off the top of my head. However that is not the case. These are actual case studies that have come to me over the years. These are actual initial referral concerns and I am sure many of you are probably very familiar with similar cases, and that is hopefully why you are tuning in today. Some of the referral concerns we hear for some English Language Learners, especially the young English Language Learners, appear very daunting at first. But if we ask the right questions we can offer much more support in a culturally responsive way.
