A geographical analysis of speech-language pathology services to support multilingual children

Abstract

The speech-language pathology workforce strives to provide equitable, quality services to multilingual people. However, the extent to which this is being achieved is unknown. Participants in this study were 2849 members of Speech Pathology Australia and 4386 children in the Birth cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). Statistical and geospatial analyses were undertaken to identify the linguistic diversity and geographical distribution of Australian speech-language pathology services and Australian children. One fifth of services offered by Speech Pathology Australia members (20.2%) were available in a language other than English. Services were most commonly offered in Australian Sign Language (Auslan) (4.3%), French (3.1%), Italian (2.2%), Greek (1.6%), and Cantonese (1.5%). Among 4–5-year-old children in the nationally representative LSAC, 15.3% regularly spoke and/or understood a language other than English. The most common languages spoken by the children were Arabic (1.5%), Italian (1.2%), Greek (0.9%), Spanish (0.9%), and Vietnamese (0.9%). There was a mismatch between the location of and languages in which multilingual services were offered, and the location of and languages spoken by children. These findings highlight the need for SLPs to be culturally competent in providing equitable services to all clients, regardless of the languages they speak.

Keywords::

• Cross-cultural practice
• bilingualism
• multilingualism
• professional practice
• speech-language pathology
• cultural competence

Acknowledgements

The first author acknowledges support from a scholarship from the Australian Department of Education, and an Excellence in Research in Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network scholarship from Charles Sturt University. The second author acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT0990588). This paper uses unit record data from Growing Up in Australia, the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. The study is conducted in partnership between the Department of Social Services (DSS), the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The findings and views reported in this paper are those of the author and should not be attributed to DSS, AIFS, or the ABS.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Editorial responsibility was undertaken by the guest editor, Dr Nicole Watts Pappas, since the second author was the editor of the journal