The pan-European organisation for Speech and Language Therapy – CPLOL – celebrates it’s ‘birthday’ every year on 6th March with a campaign to raise public awareness of the profession.
Each year there is a focus on a specific communication difficulty, and this year the theme is ‘Reading and Writing Difficulties‘.
Speech and Language Therapists support people of all ages who may have poor literacy skills that are associated with their spoken language difficulties.
And for some people, improving their literacy level will be an essential component of their communication strategies, to enable them to be as independent and successful as possible in interpersonal interactions.
For the February #ReSNetSLT journal club we have chosen to focus on the role of speech and language therapists who work with young offender populations.
Research reported by the UK National Literacy Trust confirms that the link between poor educational outcomes and youth offending is inarguable.
This research suggests that 90% of young people in custody have been excluded from school at any one time before entering custody, and 60% have significant speech, language or communication difficulties.
The open access paper for this month’s #ReSNetSLT discussion will be:
Young offenders’ perspectives on their literacy and communication skills (2016) by authors Thomas Hopkins, Judy Clegg and Joy Stackhouse. Their findings highlight a need for increased language, literacy and communication training, and support for Young Offenders, and for the staff who work alongside them.
Join us on 26th February 7.30pm – 8.30pm (UK time) by following the hashtag #ReSNetSLT, when we will have a series of question prompts to elicit shared examples and experiences of work in this field.
The chat will be led by Hazel Roddam on behalf of @ReSNetSLT. And we are delighted to announce that Team ReSNetSLT will be joined by Dr Maxine Winstanley, winner of this year’s IJLCD prize for “Research Paper of the Year” for her work with adolescents with DLD in the YO population.
We’ll be joined by speech and language therapists from across CPLOL member associations, so this will be a unique opportunity for live international discussions on this topic.
Additional online activities to promote CPLOL’s role in reciprocal exchange of research and practice knowledge include:
- Wednesday, 3rd March, 2020 – RCSLT will host a live Webinar presented by the UK-CPLOL Action Group
- Friday, 6th March, 2020 – @ReSNetSLT will join @CPLOL_EU to tweet throughout the day
You can download the CPLOL poster here to share with colleagues (right click on the image below) …
HERE’S THE SUMMARY OF THE CHAT …
Team ReSNetSLT were delighted to see so much international participation in this chat – from Iceland, Italy, Malta, Slovenia and Australia, in addition to many regions around UK. We’ve also had subsequent comments on the hashtag from New Zealand. This gives such a spread of perspectives and insights from contrasting service settings and delivery models.
Thanks to paper author Thomas Hopkins for joining our chat, and to our guest host Maxine Winstanley. This is such a unique opportunity for conversations between individuals from practice, education and research, at all career stages – another indicator of the authentic Community of Practice that continues to grow through our monthly tweetchat events.
The full transcript of the chat includes helpful links to other relevant research as well as exemplars of best practice. We also saw a wide range of proposals for future research priorities. Everyone can access the direct links to our chat statistics and the transcript from our Calendar tab – enjoy reading, and use our hashtag #ReSNetSLT to continue the conversation on Twitter!
And here’s the link to the fabulous video from the students at University College London (UCL) in their own words …
