You’re an SL…what?

So you’ve seen The King’s Speech or you’ve heard about your cousin’s ex’s friend’s nephew who couldn’t say his R’s, and you think… yeah, I know what a speech therapist does.

But what if I told you that there is

so much more to it?

Speech-language pathologist, speech pathologist, speech therapist, and SLP all refer to the exact same job: folks who help with communication! See here for an excellent explanation of what we do.

My main areas of interest are language and literacy, so that’s what you’ll find a whole lot of here. However, SLPs can also help with speech sound production (the CLaSS Lab’s research shows that this goes way beyond “just R’s and lisps”) and augmentative and alternative communication, also known as AAC.

There is also a subset of medical SLPs who work on swallowing skills, or dysphagia, but I don’t do any of that. Nope. Chewing noises make me feel like my brain is imploding into a thousand tiny pieces. Nope, nope, nope. But I have lots of respect for those who do dysphagia work, and if you’re interested in learning more about it, check out this community.

So: communication skills! Broadly speaking, as an SLP I’m interested in helping folks with their oral and written language for the purpose of communication.

It was only natural that I would discover this field, as language has always been in my blood. Growing up, when I was not correcting my family’s grammar as the young prescriptivist I was (“actually, it’s ‘between you and me’, not ‘between you and I’”), I could be found researching etymologies and swapping lists of interesting words with friends. When I learned that I could make a career out of thinking about language, it seemed too good to be true. (Wait, someone will PAY me to think about semantics and syntax?) Oh yes, and eventually I chilled TF out about correcting folks’ speech and learned that descriptivism is way cooler than prescriptivism…more on that later.

So, how exactly does an SLP “work on language”? Well, folks who find oral language and communication challenging can make great progress through systematic, targeted treatment of the underlying areas of difficulty. Language treatment may focus on:

  • Grammar

  • Formulating longer sentences with correct word order

  • Understanding and using new vocabulary

  • Retelling stories and texts

  • Answering questions such as who, what, where, when, and why

  • & more

SLPs are specifically trained to support the understanding (comprehension) as well as the expression of language, and we work across the entire lifespan. This might look like helping a 3-year-old string together more than 2-3 words in a sentence, or supporting a 4th grader’s listening comprehension, or helping a high schooler understand the vocabulary in their driver’s permit test, or supporting the communication of an adult with aphasia.

Literacy (written language) also connects deeply to this work, and I enjoy learning about the Science of Reading and theoretical frameworks such as Scarborough’s Reading Rope. While I like to support all aspects of written language, including phonemic awareness (how sounds come together to form words) and phonics (matching letters to sounds), my passion is reading comprehension, which includes (but is not limited to) the following:

  • Comprehending:

    • Words (vocabulary)

      • Morphology (prefixes/suffixes, root words)

    • Sentences (grammar/syntax)

    • Text structures (narrative, expository)

  • Higher-level thinking, such as making inferences and predictions about a text

  • Understanding figurative language (idioms)

  • & much more!

I hope this elucidates more of what SLPs do and what you can find more information about here on my website. If you don’t like conversations about Latin and Greek word roots, sentence structure, orthography, higher-level reading skills, linguistics, and critical analysis of the speech-language pathology field, then this might not be the place for you. But if any of those terms intrigue you…WELCOME! You’re my people. Stick around for resources, blog posts, and more.