The number of children with communication disorders has increased significantly over the last few years. At the same time, Canada is becoming increasingly multilingual, with more people than ever before speaking two or more languages.
Emily Wood has experienced these trends firsthand. After six years as a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) in the public school system, she decided to take her experience to the next level and earned a PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences from the University of Toronto. She spoke with writer Sarah McMahon about what drove that decision and the direction she plans to take her career.
You worked with school-aged children as a Speech-Language Pathologist in a school board for six years. What was that like?
Working in a school allowed me to be a generalist and practice across the various domains of the profession. There is usually one SLP per school, so you really get to see it all! I worked with individuals aged 3-21 to support oral language, literacy, speech and articulation, voice and resonance, play and pragmatic skills. I developed alternative and augmentative communication systems for non-speaking or minimally verbal students, and I worked collaboratively with other professionals to support children who were d/Deaf and hard of hearing, or who had developmental difficulties like autism spectrum disorder. It was a really rewarding, fast-paced and interesting career.
It sounds like you were enjoying your career. What prompted you to leave your clinical role in the school board to pursue a PhD?
During my time at the school board, rates of bi and multilingual children enrolled in our district and referred to my caseload were increasing. I felt like I did not always have appropriate assessment and intervention tools to evaluate or treat them. I needed fairer and more valid ways to assess early literacy skills for bi and multilingual populations.
Most assessment tools were developed and normed for monolingual English speakers. These tools cannot be fairly used to evaluate bi and multilingual children’s language and literacy abilities because it’s like comparing apples and oranges. When we use English tools to evaluate children who speak other languages, we risk misinterpreting their different language and literacy experiences as a disorder. This misidentification can lead to long-term negative impacts for these students, but also often results in misallocation of limited resources in our schools, affecting the whole system.
Finding very few tools were developed for this specific population, I decided to pursue research in this space. I was inspired to develop materials that could support these students and their literacy success and I decided to return to graduate school and complete my PhD.
Bridging research and clinical practice can be challenging. How did you make sure your academic work stayed relevant to clinicians and patients?
To ensure that the assessment tool I developed was useful for SLPs, I communicated with and involved clinicians at all stages of its development. The tool was piloted with real practitioners and real students. This ensured that I stayed close to authentic clinical issues while gaining relevant insights from speech-language pathologists.
In terms of next steps, I’m focused on publishing the results of the study and making some changes to the tool based on clinical feedback. There are several school boards who are interested in participating in larger scale validation studies of the tool. Once the tool is finalized, it will be open access and free to use online!
Learn more about Dr. Wood's new literacy assessment tool.
Where do you see your work heading next?
I’m continuing to develop and promote the assessment tool I created. Also, I have just started as an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream here at the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Toronto. I hope to bring both clinical and research insights to the graduate level SLP students that I teach. Although I have limited time for clinical practice in my new role, I plan to continue mentoring newly graduated speech-language pathologists.
What advice do you have for students who are just starting out on their journey to becoming a speech-language pathologist?
For students just starting their clinical journey, my one piece of advice would be to stay curious and reflective. Try to ask yourself, why am I doing what I’m doing in my practice? What’s informing my decisions? This self-reflection and openness to growth and change is essential.
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