What's SLP got to do with it?

So in the beginning, I let you all know that my day job might come in to play while writing this blog, so it just makes sense that I tell you what it is!

During the day, I provide speech and language therapy to kids with a variety of communication disorders. I am an S L P (speech-language pathologist).  Yay for all the SLPs out there!

Now, what does this have to do with learning languages and how is this going to help me in my language-learning journey?

1. speech LANGUAGE pathologist ------- LANGUAGE learning journey (ok, that one's too obvious)

2. To be an SLP, you need to do a lot of training to learn about the various aspects of language and communication, such as:

• all of the parts of grammar
• the typical progression of language development for a child learning a first language
• phoneme production (how to make the sounds in speech), including accent modification
• how languages develop from other languages, dialects, pidgins, etc.
• what happens during typical bilingual language development (one of the scenarios being a child learning a second language after establishing some competency in the first, this is most relevant to my situation, but just at a different age)
• most importantly, what to do to help develop language (we learn this specifically to help children who have language learning disorders or delays in trying to learn their primary language, but I believe I could take a few ideas from these methods and apply them to learning a SECOND (or 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc) language

3. I could probably use some resources, games, or activities and translate them into another language to practice

4. Being a speech-language pathologist encouraged me to learn ASL to help kids who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing, though I was interested in this before choosing this career.

There are some limitations for using language therapy on myself, of course. For the first part, I'm not trained to help children who are typical language learners (unless it's for another problem, such as articulation or voice). So the activities/treatment approaches wouldn't transfer over exactly. Also, it's a bit difficult to do therapy on yourself :/ Also, it wouldn't quite be therapy because I don't have a language impairment. Lastly (but probably forgetting plenty of other reasons), I'm not a child! My brain is not developing as quickly as let's say, a 2-year old. That doesn't mean that I can't learn new languages. Si, el loro viejo SI aprende a hablar. (Old dogs DO learn new tricks). It will just take more time.

So where does that leave me?

My hope is to do a lot more research on bilingual language development and test out some methods I can use to transfer some ideas to my own language learning. This should be interesting!

Anyway, if you're still interested about what an SLP does, check out the American Speech-Language Hearing Association website: www.asha.org

Ok, everyone, I will see you next week! It will be my first video post speaking in Mandarin (hoping I can get all of the technical stuff worked out so I can post a video 😕). I'm already nervous! Hit subscribe up top to make sure you don't miss it!