Culturally Responsive Assessment of South Asian Languages

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Transcript of “Culturally Responsive Assessment of South Asian Languages” – Bright Conversations Podcast

Hi and welcome to another episode of Bright Conversations. I'm Shontaye Glover- Jones and I will be your host for today's episode. This evening I am excited to have a conversation with two SLPs who will be talking about culturally responsive assessment strategies for students who speak South Asian languages. Our guests this evening are SLPs Prabhu Eswaran and Puja Goel-Sakhalkar I think I said that correctly. Did I say that correctly?

Okay, good. Prabhu has expertise in multilingual assessment and language development in South Asian populations and Puja is a bilingual SLP, an advocate for linguistic diversity and a specialist in culturally sustaining therapy practices. I am excited to hear from both of them and talk a little bit about different practices, tools and techniques that you can also consider when you're thinking about the population on your caseload. So welcome. Thank you.

So let's get started. I'm going to just ask a problem. I'm going to ask you first. Could you walk us through the linguistic diversity across South Asian communities and what that really means for SLPs? I'm sure a lot of folks I'll say admittedly that I'm unfamiliar with the diversity of South Asian communities and the languages.

So could you share a bit about that with us? Sure, Shontaye. Thank you for having us. So based on multiple resources and data, we want to say that there are about 5 million people of South Asian origin here in the United States. There are mostly people from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives.

They are mostly concentrated in major cities and states like New York, New Jersey, California, Texas, Illinois. And tell you what, we all speak different languages. Most people from South Asia do speak many different languages. A few common languages are Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi. And in countries like Pakistan, they speak Urdu and Bangladesh, they speak Bangla.

And there are other dialectical variations as well. So there are multiple languages here and these children do attend schools here in the United States and when they are referred for speech therapy or when they are referred for speech evaluation, what it means to the SLPs and how can they handle these kind of referrals? What it means for them is that they need to be culturally sensitive and very responsive. They need to be conducting assessments by tailoring the protocols and assessment systems in a very non biased manner. Also, it's very important to avoid any monolingual bias, right?

And in the overall interpretation of the results, it's very important to recognize the strengths and complexities of the multilingual speakers and most importantly, it's necessary to understand the typical bilingual language development to avoid the over identification and under diagnosis. So we don't want to identify students just because they speak another language and they did not score well on the standardized testing. We really have to look deeper into their language, potential language, strengths and areas of need and make an informed clinical decision when we enroll him or when we need to find the determination for special education services. I'm curious and I'm speculating, but I would imagine that when you look at the field of speech language and hearing sciences, that the majority of the clinicians that are working in the field are probably non speakers of South Asian languages and more so going to encounter students who speak a native language that's unfamiliar to them. So I think that this is probably an area on topic that is going to become more and more popular and will resonate with a lot of monolingual speakers who are put in a position where they're wanting to serve and help the students, but they're not quite sure where to begin.

And I think you bring up a really important point too. We want to be careful to not over identify anyone because they have a language difference or because they don't speak English, the standard English. So that's a very important topic, a point that we should always keep in mind when we're facing any students who are native speakers of another language besides English.

What are some common misconceptions about South Asian language speakers that you frequently encounter in either the educational or clinical setting?

Thank you for this wonderful question and insight.

So I'm going to focus on three that are common and Prabhu has also alluded to a couple of these ideas that are overarching. But when we think about stereotypical information, we have to think about why are we stereotyping our own implicit bias and what that means to a student, a parent, and a family who are either immigrants or native to this country or first generational. And so I think that it's really important to think about what are you thinking about as a clinician in terms of your understanding or your potential implicit bias and not let that translate into a microaggression without realizing. Number two, sometimes there is not a direct discrepancy between a difference versus a disorder. So when we think about, for example, a dialectical difference, it's a cultural consideration that we must think about.

We must be cognizant of versus a language disorder which is actual diagnosis of a language disorder. And keep in mind, it's a language disorder in their native language, especially if they're receptively and expressively speaking in that native language being L1. So for example, if a student's ELL versus bilingual versus multilingual, so it's really important to understand a difference versus a disorder, but they're not being really a direct discrepancy for differentiating between the two. And then three, accent training for accent reduction. We all know in the educational model, we don't target accent reduction.

We don't do accent training. We do it in the corporate world. If you're a corporate SLP, we also do it in a clinical setting . It can be addressed. So what does accent reduction really mean?

It's technically a difference. It's a dialectical difference is what it boils down to. And is it really an articulation issue? Is it really an apraxia issue? Is it really a phonological process issue?

So those are very common misconceptions in my opinion. Yeah, you bring up a lot of really good points to consider, especially when you're thinking about accent reduction. It's not something we work on in schools with students, but you do see a lot with adult populations. Would you mention? Yeah.

Was there anything that you wanted to add to that, Prabhu? I want to give you a chance to share as well. Oh, you're on mute. Well, talking about the misconceptions, you know, it just basically people assume that if we speak English that is not a standard American English, they can't assume that, you know, there isn't a proficiency in that language. It's always, right?

So there needs to be a good understanding of the language proficiency versus the way you convey your information, right? Yes, definitely. So how do you want to add to that? I'm sorry. So as Prabhu was talking about standard American English, so I'm first generational born and brought up in the United States.

My parents are immigrants from India, specifically New Delhi. They were taught when they were matriculating from grade school up until college. They are taught in British English. So not only do they write, like in British scripture, for example, color is OUR, not OR, but they speak with the British accent. And so one must think about that too and not assume or not confuse that with, or are they from the UK?

No, they're not from the UK, but they have that accent typically. And you see that in African countries as well. Yes, yeah, that's true. Or French as well. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the biggest challenges that SLP space when assessing multilingual students who speak different languages?

Are there assessment tools available? That's a great question, Shontaye. Absolutely. We did present on this topic at the recently concluded, Kasha and the CEC, the spring. And many attendees at our session in Queer Abora, assessing children who speak South Asian languages.

At this here in California, there are certain cities with a high South Asian population, especially in Bay Area, where they speak multiple languages, you do to Silicon Valley, the Tech Hub and all that. Central California, the farmland. We hear a lot of inquiries from SLP, asking about test materials in Punjabi. And also here in Southern Cal, we do receive questions from SLP, " Hey, this child speaking Tamil, how do we do that?" So the SLP's are not necessarily aware of the languages. There are some resources at the ASHA website, but it's not adequate.

But again, when you look at the biggest challenges when assessing multilingual speakers, there aren't any standard assessment tools. There's a lack of standardized norm reference tools. There's nothing is available here. And also when you look at the complexity of the mult ilingual profiles, there are families that speak more than one heritage language in their home. There are families that speak both Telugu and Tamil at home, but at school they speak English are when possibly they go to a greater community event.

They all speak Hindi. So any South Asian child is exposed to more than two or three languages there. Again, when they are, I think one of the biggest challenges is the access to the interpreters, right? So we do not have interpreters that can provide clinical information without bias. You may also bring in the parents or someone that speak the language, but again it brings them the bias and the reliability conscience that needs to be avoided.

And most importantly, I want to bring up this point here, which is that there's always a risk for both overhead identification of language disorders, like misinterpreting language difference as a delay and under identification, like assuming the child will catch up English. That's not the case. So what happens here is that the SLP must walk a very fine line and use that dynamic assessments. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. Do a lot of patent interviews and the language history tools just to build the child's language profile and also that's going to help them make an informed clinical decision.

I'm glad that you said dynamic assessment because that's what I was thinking as you were speaking, that that may be a consideration for a situation like this. I do have a question now just thinking for myself, if you are in a position where you need to use a family member, whether it's a parent or some other caregiver as an interpreter, are there any suggestions that you would have for how to try to reduce bias as much as possible? Yes. As SLPs, we can tell them what exactly to listen for and have them provide the exact verbatim of the child's expressions or the child's production of the speech samples. And we tell them to look for the various syntax structures, the sound errors and what's the commonality between English and the native language, which I was speaking.

And they are developmentally appropriate, then it's the developmental error, not necessarily a speech error. And looking at the language patterns, we've got to be cognizant of the fact that languages are very different. In English, we follow a different syntactic rules versus Tamil or Hindi. So we just want to be cognizant of the fact that we get adequate information so that we are able to come up with proper determination for further special education services or additional services. Yes, understood.

So how can cultural norms around communication, like, def erence to authority, code switching or nonverbal communication, impact the assessments? Puja, you're muted now. Sorry about that. Okay. You have to think about the buzz word of the areas we look at as a speech language pathologist, there's five.

There is expressive language, receptive, fluency, voice. And then there's pragmatic language, which is so big. Academic language is the crux of what your question is asking, in my opinion. And we have to look at how that kind of intersects, I want to say, with social skills. Okay .

That's huge in many cultures, not just ours, but it's variable across the board. Okay. And regionally, in India, it's very diverse. So for example, what you may encounter in New Delhi, it's very different culturally than in Bombay. It's much more informal, but in New Delhi, it's very formal.

But it also depends on your audience too. So we know pragmatic language looks at who is your audience? What are you discussing? Where is it occurring? When is it being brought up?

All of those factors come into play. So for example, in your social skills, your mannerisms, your etiquette, okay, they need to be considered and contextually correlated to cultural norms, like I said, formal versus informal. In Hindi, there's two different ways of speaking. So when I learned Hindi from not just from my parents, but learned it growing up, my Hindi teacher taught me about the formal way of speaking versus the informal way. And it's very, very overt, especially to a parent or an elder in terms of respect.

So as your question stated, deference to authority, respecting authority, the mannerisms and etiquette considerations you must make. That's going to be, it's very, it's a very respectful way of communicating. You're going to speak in a formal tone, especially if it's to a professor, to somebody who's higher up than you in terms of stature. A code switching, that's a social pragmatics type of norm, I would say, where it's so common to use both English and Hindi together. We refer to that as English, just like Spanglish is a term used.

We hear a lot, Spanglish is when you combine Spanish and English together. Same thing with English with H.I. from Hindi and English all in one. There is a movie that was, I came out probably about 10 years ago, at least, it was called English, English, which was the name of the movie. And it wasn't really a parody per se, but it was kind of capturing that whole rhyming thing that occurs.

So often when we talk informally, especially, we might rhyme a little bit. It's very popular in Northern India, especially in the Punjabi culture. They tend to rhyme words quite a bit. So English, English is playing off of that rhyming type of wordplay or association. The way I have to go look for that movie, I have the gold.

And you can see it in subtitles. So, you know, most things are closed captioned subtitles. You'll be able to look at it and see it. But it's with a famous, interestingly, a very famous South Indian actress who passed away tragically about several years ago. And it's a really good movie.

The third thing I want to address is nonverbal communication. So that's another mannerisms etiquette consideration. Culturally, for example, we may not make eye contact directly. We may not say anything. We might just go like this.

Okay . Now that doesn't mean the person's being selectively mute or nonverbal deliberately, it 's just that it's implied and understood. But that's a cultural norm. Yes. I hope that answers your question.

Oh, that totally answers the question. Those are aspects that we see in a lot of different cultures when we are assessing our students. We have to take those practices and considerations. Keep those in mind when we're working with our students to not assume that something is what it may not actually be. Right.

So what should SLP's avoid doing to prevent misdiagnosis or over referral of South Asian students? Now, with this question, I'm thinking more about a student who maybe doesn't make eye contact with their teacher when, and the teacher may suspect that there's something else going on or maybe the child tends to use a lot of nonverbal responses as opposed to verbal responses. And the teacher refers the student to the speech that I pressed one during wise and the student communicating with me properly. So how would you combat that or what would you do to avoid getting those types of referrals? Yes.

Again, we don't want to overgeneralize the cultural norms as well. This is very important if the child is going to make an eye contact and there is an underlying language disorder. Do you want to really say this is autism? But you know, I mean, pretty much right now we are pretty much focusing on body orientation than the eye contact. We are moving away from the eye contact.

Let me put that thing there. But how is the child engaging with others in us? Because in most of South Asian families, it's the elders that service models and have high expectations for the children. So they are maybe more strict, more authoritarian and all that. But we just wanted to differentiate whether it's just a cultural practice that's impacting the child's behaviors or it's a true social interaction with social communication or pragmatic disorder that's causing the child to not perform certain social, expector social skills within a human setting.

Would you suggest that the educator or the clinician meet with the students' family to find that information out? We could. We could talk to the families. We can try to glean on more information. Again, we just need to be cognizant of the fact that we need to be more aware of the various cultural expectations and norms within the community and mega from clinical judgment.

And going back to your question, Shante, regarding the prevention of misdiagnosis of overreferral, of course, we need to avoid using the standardized test that doesn't have any cultural or linguistic considerations. Absolutely. I'm not even using the cell 5 with some of my ELL students because it tends to over identify the students. I pretty much use more of a qualified standardized evaluation so that I'm able to get better information about the student's language profile. And most importantly, this is basically can use the dynamic assessments.

Talking about the dynamic assessments, it's a highly interactive process and it's also very process oriented. So you are able to better differentiate the speech and language differences from the disorders. And in consideration of assisting a student that speaks South Asian language, my go-to resource is the SLAM cards, the school age language assessment measures by Dr. Crowley, the Teachers College Columbia University. The SLAM cards are available in multiple languages and few of the languages that's relating to South Asia are the Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi and Urdu.

So the translations are available and SLAM cards is one of the best resources to go to. There are a series of photo stories and there's a list of questions based on which you are able to make a technical judgment about the child's language need and come up with appropriate determination. We'll be sure to put a link to that in the show notes. So the one who's listening, looking for resources is able to find that as well. Thank you for that.

Puja, did you have anything that you wanted to add about misdiagnosis or over referral? I think it's common , you know, from a personality standpoint that we are very compassionate. I'm not stereotyp ing, not all of us, but we want to make sure we're doing the right thing. So it's important to check with a few people. Call a friend without sharing the names or de-ident ifying everything, but share the information which is fine.

You can also talk to a colleague in your district, another friend SLP that you work with. Again, de-identify. We want to respect F ERPA and HIPAA rules. If you think you need to get permission from your boss, you can always do that. But I would say, you know, collaboration is a key.

Consultative collaboration is a key. In our field, we provide those services to, we document minutes and time for that. So I would take the time to, you know, just kind of delve in if you're unsure. I don't know everything about the African-American culture. It is, it's widely different depending on whether the person's from Africa or they're from the Caribbean or they're from another place.

And so it's important to take those considerations into fact when making an eligibility determination. Consult with people. Few, not too many, just a few. Yeah, good tip there. We talked a little bit about the tools that you would recommend and we spoke about dynamic assessment.

Are there some standardized assessments that you use, but you modify them for this population? Is that possible to make an adaptation of a standardized test for your, yes? Yes, I have, I have personally, Shontaye, I've used the self, the, the PLS for the little ones. The PLS, I think we're on PLS three now, right? PLS five?

Oh goodness. Okay, so I haven't done the PLS in a while, but I used to use the PLS and modify. And so what I would do is when I was asking questions, I would ask the questions in both Hindi and English, see what they respond with spontaneously. If they respond with English, that means really they're not L1 in their native language. That means their L, their L1 is really English.

Okay, and so you have to fact that in, I would literally look at the amount of questions there were with the raw score and see how many did they answer in Hindi versus English. You don't have to report to standard scores. Just give the amount they got correct and incorrect. Out of 20, they've got 12 correct and eight incorrect in English. In Hindi, they got 18 correct and two incorrect.

Well, that tells something big. Yeah. What does that tell you that tells you that Hindi is a strength, not a weakness, but you also have to look at receptive. So you have to see do they understand you and also when you're asking the question and what they're responding with. Probably talked about the SLAM cards.

I do want to bring up another tool which should be in someone's toolkit. It's not really well known and used, but I do feel that the BVAT, spelled B-V-A-T, is something that clinicians should be aware of. It's actually normed in 14 languages, additional languages other than Spanish. If you can't get your district to purchase it, they may not. You might not hear from them, your lead or your director.

Just buy it yourself. It's a good investment, especially if you're part of a diagnostic team where that's all doing all day long, citywide hopping from one of L to another. It's a great tool to have. The BVAT is educationally relevant because it measures the cognitive academic aspect of language proficiency needed for learning in schools. So when we're making eligibility determination, what do we look at?

The academic impact, the social emotional impact, the vocational impact. So it is relevant. It's a relevant test. It is effective. It's not perfect.

It's an instrument of bilingual assessment. There's two options. It's either age based or grade based. There's a couple techniques that I also wanted to quickly go over, if I can. Using an interpreter is a really good technique to implement because they're advantageous into taking an accurate language sample.

A tip would be if you have the interpreter too, or not, but another tip would be in relationship to that. If your district allows you to tape record or video record or phone record, it's helpful because then you have that information as backup to review and go over. We all know in our clinical educational days when we were training to be SLPs, what did we use? A tape recorder. We don't, I think they 're obsolete now, but that's what we would use.

I would highly recommend using that if you were allowed by your district. Of course, you want to be compliant. Then the other thing would be having an English scan performed by the monolingual clinician. So often, if you're especially if you're a huge district with a diagnostic team, or the clinician at that school site who's doing the monolingual assessment, often what happens is they're doing the English scan or they're supposed to because it's very procedural in a lot of districts where you have the monolingual clin ician to the English scan, and then the bilingual clinician will come in as needed. Now, to avoid because we only know most of us work on a six and a half hour day, but our jobs are really eight to 10 hours, it is more efficient to have the English scan completed before the bilingual diagnostic is conducted.

And another tip would be to talk to your monolingual clinician before you go in. I would always do that. I would always go to the monolingual SLP and just say, what were you able to get? What, I don't want scores. It's okay if you can test .

What were you able to tell? And if there's a written up version or a narrative and they were speaking in English, why would I go in to do a bilingual assessment? Right. So we would avoid that trip over to another school site that wasn't needed because a lot of bilingual SLPs would say half of these vowels are not indicated. Not missing.

I'm thinking it's been about it's been a couple of years since I've worked in a school setting though, but I'm thinking about how many districts are willing to they don't have bilingual SLPs. If they have a bilingual SLP as part of the department, South Asian language is probably not one of the languages that they speak. And then a lot of districts don't have the resources or don't want to use the resources to rush into a bilingual assessment. So if you're a monolingual who is put in a position to go assess a student and you know that they speak a South Asian language at home, in that situation would you still encourage that SLP to first do an English scan and then follow up? Okay.

Okay. An English scan is recommended always first because you're trying to ascertain what is L1 versus L2. That's what you have to figure out first because sometimes it's hard to tell. Especially what if they're bilingual? What if they 're multilingual?

What if they're multilingual? Mm hmm. An English language learner that would look a little different, right? Because then they're learning English. But what if they're then then you have to really think about okay well if they're proficient in their native language then we're not going to offer services.

Yeah. Because when we look at offering services to a student where their native language is not English you have to determine that there there's a disorder in that language. Okay. A bilingual? A bilingual?

I like that. Yes. I want to highlight that that it's important that even if you're doing the English scan we're looking to see to determine what the L1 is we're not looking to see how well they speak English and I recall being in a lot of situations where students were being identified because they weren't proficient in the English language and that's not what we're here to do as therapists. Correct. We talked a little bit I think your point that you brought up kind of flows nicely into talking about collaborating with families and the teams and considering that there are lots of cultural differences.

Are there any practical tips that you can give for SLPs or educators if they're listening as well on how you can build trust and communicate and collaborate with South Asian families? Absolutely. So when we build relationships whether it's with someone new that we may have seen or a family that we're serving. Okay. To make assumptions about someone's culture is not good.

It's nice to ask questions in an appropriate way. You know , not in a kind of sending way or a smart alec way or a patronizing way. You know, you could be genuine and ask and so think about inquiring about somebody's culture. People are all aware of Bollywood. Okay.

They may have heard about certain actors and actresses who are now popular in the US mainstream culture but it's important to just ask. Not everybody's on Instagram or Facebook. Not everybody's looking at Wikipedia all day long or Googling Bollywood. So what do you do? You ask.

Okay. You know, my spouse is from India and from Bombay, whereas which is where Bollywood originated from the term Bombay and they made the Batsha B. Okay. Prabhu studied in Bombay and the area where he studied the location is very well known for a lot of Bollywood actors and actresses but that could be a common ground especially somebody enjoys entertainment. What about restaurants?

What about going to a wedding? Because a lot of people also are aware from social media or otherwise that Indian weddings are big. They're huge. They're they can be a several day event. They can be a three day event.

They're typically a three day event here in the US. What about going to temples? What about religious festivals? Where they throw color at each other called holy? What about famous sites to visit in India such as the Taj Mahal?

Those are all common ground for discussion. And Prabhu who grew up in India, I have not had the opportunity to ask him too many questions but you know, I might pick his brain and ask about places certain places that he likes to hang out or go visit when he is visiting. So those are some ways and I think that you know, somebody could like you, I was mentioning the movie English English and you commented and you said, oh, I think I might want to check that out. So, you know, talking about like or asking, we want to visit India. Do you have any recommendations of where to go?

We would like to celebrate the volley with our neighbors in the fall. What can we do to acknowledge it? So, that would be a way to kind of break the ice so to speak, I think. And that builds trust that builds collaboration opportunities. So, when you have moments that you do need to speak to the parent, you're not feeling awkward or not feeling weird.

I mean, I would admit, I speak to my South Asian parents. I might be a little nervous or it might be a little awkward. They know my name is Puja and it's Indian but I don't have an accent so they know I'm from here. But you know, it's all about just being genuine and being humble, I think. Yeah, yeah.

And being comfortable engaging in conversation and getting to know people and showing a genuine interest in their lives and in their child, their children. Yeah, if I may add some of the practical tips that we do as SLPs, that we can as SLPs, starting with a very respectful listening, you know, when parents come to you, they trust you as a service provider and the trust is earned, right? You are not a just another client but you just take an extra mile, just build relationships so that the family is comfortable and happy to share their hopes and wishes for the child and you as a team member, as a well-wisher and also as a clinician, you are able to provide services in a non-judgmental way and you are really a partner in the child's development and success. And also when you are discussing the test results, it's very important that we provide the information in a very clear jargon-free explanations, right? I mean, when we're in a rush, we go through in a lot of SLP terms, parents might be aware of it, you know?

So we just want to use very simple language so that they understand what exactly are the child's needs and also offer practical tips that may be relevant for them and they're able to use those therapy strategies outside of the therapy realm, right? And most importantly, always, always engage and involve the family members. Especially when I do therapy, I invite in the father or the mother or the whole family, okay, come on in, it's a team effort, I'm doing therapy, watch what I'm doing and I hope you may want to do the same thing with your child at home. So they become partners as you coach and teach the child. They're also learning some from you because you are the specialist and you are able to build that relationship, that ongoing relationships that just want to serve you better.

Yeah, those are great points to bring up. I want to just ask as we prepare to close out this conversation, I do want to also thank you both for sharing so much of your professional and personal experience on this topic. But as we prepare to close out, if there's one thing that you want SLP to take away from hearing this conversation, what would it be? Sure, okay, thank you for this opportunity again, Shontaye. The one thing that the key takeaway would be that embrace culturally and linguistically responsive practices, right?

You need to recognize the rich diversity within the South Asian communities and it's very important and essential to accurately differentiate the language disorders versus difference, build trust with families and provide meaningful and equitable support to the child. That's very important. Okay. I would say my biggest key takeaway is that or one thing I feel very strongly about is you don't want to assume you always want to ask questions that are relevant, that are appropriate, that are specific to that student and they're experienced, whether it's their biographical information of how they got here or historical information. It's really important.

It's really important to uncover or discover that information as it's shared. Keep in mind, you can be a globe trotter as an SLP. You could have been all over the world, but that doesn't mean you know it all. Because you don't know what that family has gone through or what they've endured. They could have been a migrant family coming into a sanctuary city like Chicago.

Well, their experience might be a lot more emotional or socially different than somebody who was here for about 10-15 years. I think it's really important to ask and not assume. I do want to offer a quick tip, but it's a big tip. I know we've shared a couple of tips, but one big tip I'd like to offer is the multicultural constituency group of ASHA. There's 10 of them, but one of them is the South Asian caucus.

Prabhu was past president and he currently serves as an advisor to the caucus. I'm on their executive board. I'm their secretary. We take a concerted effort in answering questions that come through, or emails that come through from either membership or non membership or ASHA membership, clinical questions. What I would encourage SLPs to do is if they have questions and they want to ask, please feel free to email the caucus.

Prabhu, do you have the email address handy? I'll get that from you and I'll make sure that I have that included in the show notes as well, because I think that that's a wonderful resource. I didn't know it existed for anyone outside of membership also to reach out. So that's great to know. We're not as big as in Basla, Shontaye.

I went to my first in Basla this year in Long Beach. We don't put on conferences, but there's a plethora of information to be gained and shared and be aware of. Not about the numbers. It's necessary to have the work being done and that's a valuable, very valuable asset to have. So thank you for bringing that up.

I'm glad you squeezed that in and we'll be sure to list that along with the other resources in our show notes for anyone who's listening. And with that , I want to say again, a very warm thank you to you both for your time and your expertise and your experience that you've shared with us. I feel like there's a lot more that we could discuss on this topic that this time just isn't quite enough. So maybe we'll have to have you back or think about some other ways. Are there any courses that are coming up that you could share where folks can go attend you if you're presenting anywhere?

Let us know that as well and we'll be sure to include that in the notes too. Great. Absolutely. And thank you all for listening. Whether you're listening on one of your preferred podcast stations or if you're on the Bright Ideas website, keep in mind that Bright Ideas Media is your resource, your resource for related resources and professional development opportunities.

We thank you for listening. Have a great evening. Thank you. TT Hi and welcome to another episode of Bright Conversations. I'm Shontaye Glover- Jones and I will be your host for today's episode.

This evening I am excited to have a conversation with two SLPs who will be talking about culturally responsive assessment strategies for students who speak South Asian languages. Our guests this evening are SLPs Prabhu Ashw aran and Puja Goel. I think I said that correctly. Did I say that correctly? Okay, good.

Prab hu has expertise in multilingual assessment and language development in South Asian populations and Puja is a bilingual SLP, an advocate for linguistic diversity and a specialist in culturally sustaining therapy practices. I am excited to hear from both of them and talk a little bit about different practices, tools and techniques that you can also consider when you're thinking about the population on your caseload. So welcome. Thank you. So let's get started.

I'm going to just ask a problem. I'm going to ask you first. Could you walk us through the linguistic diversity across South Asian communities and what that really means for SLPs? I'm sure a lot of folks I'll say admittedly that I'm unfamiliar with the diversity of South Asian communities and the languages. So could you share a bit about that with us?

Sure, Shontaye. Thank you for having us. So based on multiple resources and data, we want to say that there are about 5 million people of South Asian origin here in the United States. There are mostly people from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives. They are mostly concentrated in major cities and states like New York, New Jersey, California, Texas, Illinois.

And tell you what, we all speak different languages. Most people from South Asia do speak many different languages. A few common languages are Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi. And in countries like Pakistan, they speak Urdu and Bangladesh, they speak Bangla. And there are other dialectical variations as well.

So there are multiple languages here and these children do attend schools here in the United States and when they are referred for speech therapy or when they are referred for speech evaluation, what it means to the SLPs and how can they handle these kind of referrals? What it means for them is that they need to be culturally sensitive and very responsive. They need to be conducting assessments by tailoring the protocols and assessment systems in a very non biased manner. Also, it's very important to avoid any monolingual bias, right? And in the overall interpretation of the results, it's very important to recognize the strengths and complexities of the multilingual speakers and most importantly, it's necessary to understand the typical bilingual language development to avoid the over identification and under diagnosis.

So we don't want to identify students just because they speak another language and they did not score well on the standardized testing. We really have to look deeper into their language, potential language, strengths and areas of need and make an informed clinical decision when we enroll him or when we need to find the determination for special education services. I'm curious and I'm speculating, but I would imagine that when you look at the field of speech language and hearing sciences, that the majority of the clinicians that are working in the field are probably non speakers of South Asian languages and more so going to encounter students who speak a native language that's unfamiliar to them. So I think that this is probably an area on topic that is going to become more and more popular and will resonate with a lot of monolingual speakers who are put in a position where they're wanting to serve and help the students, but they're not quite sure where to begin. And I think you bring up a really important point too.

We want to be careful to not over identify anyone because they have a language difference or because they don't speak English, the standard English. So that's a very important topic, a point that we should always keep in mind when we're facing any students who are native speakers of another language besides English. >> What are some common misconceptions about South Asian language speakers that you frequently encounter in either the educational or clinical setting? >> Thank you for this wonderful question and insight. So I'm going to focus on three that are common and Prabhu has also alluded to a couple of these ideas that are overarching.

But when we think about stereotypical information, we have to think about why are we stereotyping our own implicit bias and what that means to a student, a parent, and a family who are either immigrants or native to this country or first generational. And so I think that it's really important to think about what are you thinking about as a clinician in terms of your understanding or your potential implicit bias and not let that translate into a microaggression without realizing. Number two, sometimes there is not a direct discrepancy between a difference versus a disorder. So when we think about, for example, a dialectical difference, it's a cultural consideration that we must think about. We must be cognizant of versus a language disorder which is actual diagnosis of a language disorder.

And keep in mind, it's a language disorder in their native language, especially if they 're receptively and expressively speaking in that native language being L1. So for example, if a student's ELL versus bilingual versus multilingual, so it's really important to understand a difference versus a disorder, but they're not being really a direct discrepancy for differentiating between the two. And then three, accent training for accent reduction. We all know in the educational model, we don't target accent reduction. We don't do accent training.

We do it in the corporate world. If you're a corporate SLP, we also do it in a clinical setting . It can be addressed. So what does accent reduction really mean? It's technically a difference.

It's a dialectical difference is what it boils down to. And is it really an articulation issue? Is it really an apraxia issue? Is it really a phonological process issue ? So those are very common misconceptions in my opinion.

Yeah, you bring up a lot of really good points to consider, especially when you're thinking about accent reduction. It's not something we work on in schools with students, but you do see a lot with adult populations. Would you mention? Yeah. Was there anything that you wanted to add to that, Pr abhu?

I want to give you a chance to share as well. Oh, you're on mute. Well, talking about the misconceptions, you know, it just basically people assume that if we speak English that is not a standard American English, they can't assume that, you know, there isn't a proficiency in that language. It's always, right? So there needs to be a good understanding of the language proficiency versus the way you convey your information, right?

Yes, definitely. So how do you want to add to that? I'm sorry. So as Prabhu was talking about standard American English, so I'm first generational born and brought up in the United States. My parents are immigrants from India, specifically New Delhi.

They were taught when they were matriculating from grade school up until college. They are taught in British English. So not only do they write, like in British scripture, for example, color is OUR, not OR, but they speak with the British accent. And so one must think about that too and not assume or not confuse that with, or are they from the UK? No, they're not from the UK, but they have that accent typically.

And you see that in African countries as well. Yes, yeah, that's true. Or French as well. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the biggest challenges that SLP space when assessing multilingual students who speak different languages? Are there assessment tools available?

That's a great question, Shontaye. Absolutely. We did present on this topic at the recently concluded, Kasha and the CEC, the spring. And many attendees at our session in Queer Abora, assessing children who speak South Asian languages. At this here in California, there are certain cities with a high South Asian population, especially in Bay Area, where they speak multiple languages, you do to Silicon Valley, the Tech Hub and all that.

Central California, the farmland. We hear a lot of inquiries from SLP, asking about test materials in Punjabi. And also here in Southern Cal, we do receive questions from SLP, " Hey, this child speaking Tamil, how do we do that?" So the SLP's are not necessarily aware of the languages. There are some resources at the ASHA website, but it's not adequate. But again, when you look at the biggest challenges when assessing multilingual speakers, there aren't any standard assessment tools.

There's a lack of standardized norm reference tools. There's nothing is available here. And also when you look at the complexity of the mult ilingual profiles, there are families that speak more than one heritage language in their home. There are families that speak both Telugu and Tamil at home, but at school they speak English are when possibly they go to a greater community event. They all speak Hindi.

So any South Asian child is exposed to more than two or three languages there. Again, when they are, I think one of the biggest challenges is the access to the interpreters, right? So we do not have interpreters that can provide clinical information without bias. You may also bring in the parents or someone that speak the language, but again it brings them the bias and the reliability conscience that needs to be avoided. And most importantly, I want to bring up this point here, which is that there's always a risk for both overhead identification of language disorders, like misinterpreting language difference as a delay and under identification, like assuming the child will catch up English.

That's not the case. So what happens here is that the SLP must walk a very fine line and use that dynamic assessments. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. Do a lot of patent interviews and the language history tools just to build the child's language profile and also that's going to help them make an informed clinical decision. I'm glad that you said dynamic assessment because that's what I was thinking as you were speaking, that that may be a consideration for a situation like this.

I do have a question now just thinking for myself, if you are in a position where you need to use a family member, whether it's a parent or some other caregiver as an interpreter, are there any suggestions that you would have for how to try to reduce bias as much as possible? Yes. As SLPs, we can tell them what exactly to listen for and have them provide the exact verbatim of the child's expressions or the child's production of the speech samples. And we tell them to look for the various syntax structures, the sound errors and what's the commonality between English and the native language, which I was speaking. And they are developmentally appropriate, then it's the developmental error, not necessarily a speech error.

And looking at the language patterns, we've got to be cognizant of the fact that languages are very different. In English, we follow a different syntactic rules versus Tamil or Hindi. So we just want to be cognizant of the fact that we get adequate information so that we are able to come up with proper determination for further special education services or additional services. Yes, understood. So how can cultural norms around communication, like, def erence to authority, code switching or nonverbal communication, impact the assessments?

Puja, you're muted now. Sorry about that. Okay. You have to think about the buzz word of the areas we look at as a speech language pathologist, there's five. There is expressive language, receptive, fluency, voice.

And then there's pragmatic language, which is so big. Academic language is the crux of what your question is asking, in my opinion. And we have to look at how that kind of intersects, I want to say, with social skills. Okay . That's huge in many cultures, not just ours, but it's variable across the board.

Okay. And regionally, in India, it's very diverse. So for example, what you may encounter in New Delhi, it's very different culturally than in Bombay. It's much more informal, but in New Delhi, it's very formal. But it also depends on your audience too.

So we know pragmatic language looks at who is your audience? What are you discussing? Where is it occurring? When is it being brought up? All of those factors come into play.

So for example, in your social skills, your mannerisms, your etiquette, okay, they need to be considered and contextually correlated to cultural norms, like I said, formal versus informal. In Hindi, there's two different ways of speaking. So when I learned Hindi from not just from my parents, but learned it growing up, my Hindi teacher taught me about the formal way of speaking versus the informal way. And it's very, very overt, especially to a parent or an elder in terms of respect. So as your question stated, deference to authority, respecting authority, the mannerisms and etiquette considerations you must make.

That's going to be, it's very, it's a very respectful way of communicating. You're going to speak in a formal tone, especially if it's to a professor, to somebody who's higher up than you in terms of stature. A code switching, that's a social pragmatics type of norm, I would say, where it's so common to use both English and Hindi together. We refer to that as English, just like Spanglish is a term used. We hear a lot, Spanglish is when you combine Spanish and English together .

Same thing with English with H.I. from Hindi and English all in one. There is a movie that was, I came out probably about 10 years ago, at least, it was called English, English, which was the name of the movie. And it wasn't really a parody per se, but it was kind of capturing that whole rhyming thing that occurs. So often when we talk inform ally, especially, we might rhyme a little bit.

It's very popular in Northern India, especially in the Punjabi culture. They tend to rhyme words quite a bit. So English, English is playing off of that rhyming type of wordplay or association. The way I have to go look for that movie, I have the gold. And you can see it in subtitles.

So, you know, most things are closed captioned subtitles. You'll be able to look at it and see it. But it's with a famous, interestingly, a very famous South Indian actress who passed away tragically about several years ago. And it's a really good movie. The third thing I want to address is nonverbal communication.

So that's another mannerisms etiquette consideration. Culturally, for example, we may not make eye contact directly. We may not say anything. We might just go like this. Okay .

Now that doesn't mean the person's being selectively mute or nonverbal deliberately, it 's just that it's implied and understood. But that's a cultural norm. Yes. I hope that answers your question. Oh, that totally answers the question.

Those are aspects that we see in a lot of different cultures when we are assessing our students. We have to take those practices and considerations. Keep those in mind when we're working with our students to not assume that something is what it may not actually be. Right. So what should SLP's avoid doing to prevent misdiagnosis or over referral of South Asian students?

Now, with this question, I'm thinking more about a student who maybe doesn't make eye contact with their teacher when, and the teacher may suspect that there's something else going on or maybe the child tends to use a lot of nonverbal responses as opposed to verbal responses. And the teacher refers the student to the speech that I pressed one during wise and the student communicating with me properly. So how would you combat that or what would you do to avoid getting those types of referrals? Yes. Again, we don't want to overgeneralize the cultural norms as well.

This is very important if the child is going to make an eye contact and there is an underlying language disorder. Do you want to really say this is autism? But you know, I mean, pretty much right now we are pretty much focusing on body orientation than the eye contact. We are moving away from the eye contact. Let me put that thing there.

But how is the child engaging with others in us? Because in most of South Asian families, it's the elders that service models and have high expectations for the children . So they are maybe more strict, more authoritarian and all that. But we just wanted to differentiate whether it's just a cultural practice that's impacting the child's behaviors or it's a true social interaction with social communication or pragmatic disorder that's causing the child to not perform certain social, expector social skills within a human setting. Would you suggest that the educator or the clinician meet with the students' family to find that information out?

We could. We could talk to the families. We can try to glean on more information. Again, we just need to be cognizant of the fact that we need to be more aware of the various cultural expectations and norms within the community and mega from clinical judgment. And going back to your question, Shante, regarding the prevention of misdiagnosis of overreferral, of course, we need to avoid using the standardized test that doesn't have any cultural or linguistic considerations.

Absolutely. I'm not even using the cell 5 with some of my ELL students because it tends to over identify the students. I pretty much use more of a qualified standardized evaluation so that I'm able to get better information about the student's language profile. And most importantly, this is basically can use the dynamic assessments. Talking about the dynamic assessments, it's a highly interactive process and it's also very process oriented.

So you are able to better differentiate the speech and language differences from the disorders. And in consideration of assisting a student that speaks South Asian language, my go-to resource is the SLAM cards, the school age language assessment measures by Dr. Crowley, the Teachers College Columbia University. The SLAM cards are available in multiple languages and few of the languages that's relating to South Asia are the Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi and Urdu. So the translations are available and SLAM cards is one of the best resources to go to.

There are a series of photo stories and there's a list of questions based on which you are able to make a technical judgment about the child's language need and come up with appropriate determination. We'll be sure to put a link to that in the show notes. So the one who's listening, looking for resources is able to find that as well. Thank you for that. Puja, did you have anything that you wanted to add about misdiagnosis or over referral?

I think it's common , you know, from a personality standpoint that we are very compassionate. I'm not stereotyp ing, not all of us, but we want to make sure we're doing the right thing. So it's important to check with a few people. Call a friend without sharing the names or de-ident ifying everything, but share the information which is fine. You can also talk to a colleague in your district, another friend SLP that you work with.

Again, de-identify. We want to respect F ERPA and HIPAA rules. If you think you need to get permission from your boss, you can always do that. But I would say, you know, collaboration is a key. Consultative collaboration is a key.

In our field, we provide those services to, we document minutes and time for that. So I would take the time to, you know, just kind of delve in if you're unsure. I don't know everything about the African-American culture. It is, it's widely different depending on whether the person's from Africa or they're from the Caribbean or they're from another place. And so it's important to take those considerations into fact when making an eligibility determination.

Consult with people. Few, not too many, just a few. Yeah, good tip there. We talked a little bit about the tools that you would recommend and we spoke about dynamic assessment. Are there some standardized assessments that you use, but you modify them for this population?

Is that possible to make an adaptation of a standardized test for your, yes? Yes, I have, I have personally, Shontaye, I've used the self, the, the PLS for the little ones. The PLS, I think we're on PLS three now, right? PLS five? Oh goodness.

Okay, so I haven't done the PLS in a while, but I used to use the PLS and modify. And so what I would do is when I was asking questions, I would ask the questions in both Hindi and English, see what they respond with spontaneously. If they respond with English, that means really they're not L1 in their native language. That means their L, their L1 is really English. Okay, and so you have to fact that in, I would literally look at the amount of questions there were with the raw score and see how many did they answer in Hindi versus English.

You don't have to report to standard scores. Just give the amount they got correct and incorrect. Out of 20, they've got 12 correct and eight incorrect in English. In Hindi, they got 18 correct and two incorrect. Well, that tells something big.

Yeah. What does that tell you that tells you that Hindi is a strength, not a weakness, but you also have to look at receptive. So you have to see do they understand you and also when you're asking the question and what they're responding with. Probably talked about the SLAM cards. I do want to bring up another tool which should be in someone's toolkit.

It's not really well known and used, but I do feel that the BVAT, spelled B-V-A-T, is something that clinicians should be aware of. It's actually normed in 14 languages, additional languages other than Spanish. If you can't get your district to purchase it, they may not. You might not hear from them, your lead or your director. Just buy it yourself.

It's a good investment, especially if you're part of a diagnostic team where that's all doing all day long, citywide hopping from one of L to another. It's a great tool to have. The BVAT is educationally relevant because it measures the cognitive academic aspect of language proficiency needed for learning in schools. So when we're making eligibility determination, what do we look at? The academic impact, the social emotional impact, the vocational impact.

So it is relevant. It's a relevant test. It is effective. It's not perfect. It's an instrument of bilingual assessment.

There's two options. It's either age based or grade based. There's a couple techniques that I also wanted to quickly go over, if I can. Using an interpreter is a really good technique to implement because they're advantageous into taking an accurate language sample. A tip would be if you have the interpreter too, or not, but another tip would be in relationship to that.

If your district allows you to tape record or video record or phone record, it's helpful because then you have that information as backup to review and go over. We all know in our clinical educational days when we were training to be SLPs, what did we use? A tape recorder. We don't, I think they 're obsolete now, but that's what we would use. I would highly recommend using that if you were allowed by your district.

Of course, you want to be compliant. Then the other thing would be having an English scan performed by the monolingual clinician. So often, if you're especially if you're a huge district with a diagnostic team, or the clinician at that school site who's doing the monolingual assessment, often what happens is they're doing the English scan or they're supposed to because it's very procedural in a lot of districts where you have the monolingual clin ician to the English scan, and then the bilingual clinician will come in as needed. Now, to avoid because we only know most of us work on a six and a half hour day, but our jobs are really eight to 10 hours, it is more efficient to have the English scan completed before the bilingual diagnostic is conducted. And another tip would be to talk to your monolingual clinician before you go in.

I would always do that. I would always go to the monolingual SLP and just say, what were you able to get? What, I don't want scores. It's okay if you can test . What were you able to tell?

And if there's a written up version or a narrative and they were speaking in English, why would I go in to do a bilingual assessment? Right. So we would avoid that trip over to another school site that wasn't needed because a lot of bilingual SLPs would say half of these vowels are not indicated. Not missing. I'm thinking it's been about it's been a couple of years since I've worked in a school setting though, but I'm thinking about how many districts are willing to they don't have bilingual SLPs.

If they have a bilingual SLP as part of the department, South Asian language is probably not one of the languages that they speak. And then a lot of districts don't have the resources or don't want to use the resources to rush into a bilingual assessment. So if you're a monolingual who is put in a position to go assess a student and you know that they speak a South Asian language at home, in that situation would you still encourage that SLP to first do an English scan and then follow up? Okay. Okay.

An English scan is recommended always first because you're trying to ascertain what is L1 versus L2. That's what you have to figure out first because sometimes it's hard to tell. Especially what if they're bilingual? What if they 're multilingual? What if they're multilingual?

Mm hmm. An English language learner that would look a little different, right? Because then they're learning English. But what if they're then then you have to really think about okay well if they're proficient in their native language then we're not going to offer services. Yeah.

Because when we look at offering services to a student where their native language is not English you have to determine that there there's a disorder in that language. Okay. A bilingual? A bilingual? I like that.

Yes. I want to highlight that that it's important that even if you're doing the English scan we're looking to see to determine what the L1 is we're not looking to see how well they speak English and I recall being in a lot of situations where students were being identified because they weren't proficient in the English language and that's not what we're here to do as therapists. Correct. We talked a little bit I think your point that you brought up kind of flows nicely into talking about collaborating with families and the teams and considering that there are lots of cultural differences. Are there any practical tips that you can give for SLPs or educators if they're listening as well on how you can build trust and communicate and collaborate with South Asian families?

Absolutely. So when we build relationships whether it's with someone new that we may have seen or a family that we're serving. Okay. To make assumptions about someone's culture is not good. It's nice to ask questions in an appropriate way.

You know , not in a kind of sending way or a smart alec way or a patronizing way. You know, you could be genuine and ask and so think about inquiring about somebody's culture. People are all aware of B ollywood. Okay. They may have heard about certain actors and actresses who are now popular in the US mainstream culture but it's important to just ask.

Not everybody's on Instagram or Facebook. Not everybody's looking at Wikipedia all day long or Googling Bollywood. So what do you do? You ask. Okay.

You know, my spouse is from India and from Bombay, whereas which is where Bollywood originated from the term Bombay and they made the Batsha B. Okay. Prabhu studied in Bombay and the area where he studied the location is very well known for a lot of Bollywood actors and actresses but that could be a common ground especially somebody enjoys entertainment. What about restaurants? What about going to a wedding?

Because a lot of people also are aware from social media or otherwise that Indian weddings are big. They're huge. They're they can be a several day event. They can be a three day event. They're typically a three day event here in the US.

What about going to temples? What about religious festivals? Where they throw color at each other called holy? What about famous sites to visit in India such as the Taj Mahal? Those are all common ground for discussion.

And Prabhu who grew up in India, I have not had the opportunity to ask him too many questions but you know, I might pick his brain and ask about places certain places that he likes to hang out or go visit when he is visiting. So those are some ways and I think that you know, somebody could like you, I was mentioning the movie English English and you commented and you said, oh, I think I might want to check that out. So, you know, talking about like or asking, we want to visit India. Do you have any recommendations of where to go? We would like to celebrate the volley with our neighbors in the fall.

What can we do to acknowledge it? So, that would be a way to kind of break the ice so to speak, I think. And that builds trust that builds collaboration opportunities. So, when you have moments that you do need to speak to the parent, you're not feeling awkward or not feeling weird. I mean, I would admit, I speak to my South Asian parents.

I might be a little nervous or it might be a little awkward. They know my name is Puja and it's Indian but I don't have an accent so they know I'm from here. But you know, it's all about just being genuine and being humble, I think. Yeah, yeah. And being comfortable engaging in conversation and getting to know people and showing a genuine interest in their lives and in their child, their children.

Yeah, if I may add some of the practical tips that we do as SLPs, that we can as SLPs, starting with a very respectful listening, you know, when parents come to you, they trust you as a service provider and the trust is earned, right? You are not a just another client but you just take an extra mile, just build relationships so that the family is comfortable and happy to share their hopes and wishes for the child and you as a team member, as a well-wisher and also as a clinician, you are able to provide services in a non-judgmental way and you are really a partner in the child's development and success. And also when you are discussing the test results, it's very important that we provide the information in a very clear jargon-free explanations, right? I mean, when we're in a rush, we go through in a lot of SLP terms, parents might be aware of it, you know? So we just want to use very simple language so that they understand what exactly are the child's needs and also offer practical tips that may be relevant for them and they're able to use those therapy strategies outside of the therapy realm, right?

And most importantly, always, always engage and involve the family members. Especially when I do therapy, I invite in the father or the mother or the whole family, okay, come on in, it's a team effort, I'm doing therapy, watch what I'm doing and I hope you may want to do the same thing with your child at home. So they become partners as you coach and teach the child. They're also learning some from you because you are the specialist and you are able to build that relationship, that ongoing relationships that just want to serve you better. Yeah, those are great points to bring up.

I want to just ask as we prepare to close out this conversation, I do want to also thank you both for sharing so much of your professional and personal experience on this topic. But as we prepare to close out, if there's one thing that you want SLP to take away from hearing this conversation, what would it be? Sure, okay, thank you for this opportunity again, Shontaye. The one thing that the key takeaway would be that embrace culturally and linguistically responsive practices, right? You need to recognize the rich diversity within the South Asian communities and it's very important and essential to accurately differentiate the language disorders versus difference, build trust with families and provide meaningful and equitable support to the child.

That's very important. Okay. I would say my biggest key takeaway is that or one thing I feel very strongly about is you don't want to assume you always want to ask questions that are relevant, that are appropriate, that are specific to that student and they're experienced, whether it's their biographical information of how they got here or historical information. It's really important. It's really important to uncover or discover that information as it's shared.

Keep in mind, you can be a globe trotter as an SLP. You could have been all over the world, but that doesn't mean you know it all. Because you don't know what that family has gone through or what they've endured. They could have been a migrant family coming into a sanctuary city like Chicago. Well, their experience might be a lot more emotional or socially different than somebody who was here for about 10-15 years.

I think it's really important to ask and not assume. I do want to offer a quick tip, but it's a big tip. I know we've shared a couple of tips, but one big tip I'd like to offer is the multicultural constituency group of ASHA. There's 10 of them, but one of them is the South Asian caucus. Prabhu was past president and he currently serves as an advisor to the caucus.

I'm on their executive board. I'm their secretary. We take a concerted effort in answering questions that come through, or emails that come through from either membership or non membership or ASHA membership, clinical questions. What I would encourage SLPs to do is if they have questions and they want to ask, please feel free to email the caucus. Prabhu, do you have the email address handy?

I'll get that from you and I'll make sure that I have that included in the show notes as well, because I think that that's a wonderful resource. I didn't know it existed for anyone outside of membership also to reach out. So that's great to know. We're not as big as in Basla, Shontaye. I went to my first in Basla this year in Long Beach.

We don't put on conferences, but there's a plethora of information to be gained and shared and be aware of. Not about the numbers. It's necessary to have the work being done and that's a valuable, very valuable asset to have. So thank you for bringing that up. I'm glad you squeezed that in and we'll be sure to list that along with the other resources in our show notes for anyone who's listening.

And with that , I want to say again, a very warm thank you to you both for your time and your expertise and your experience that you've shared with us. I feel like there's a lot more that we could discuss on this topic that this time just isn't quite enough. So maybe we'll have to have you back or think about some other ways. Are there any courses that are coming up that you could share where folks can go attend you if you're presenting anywhere? Let us know that as well and we'll be sure to include that in the notes too.

Great. Absolutely. And thank you all for listening. Whether you're listening on one of your preferred podcast stations or if you're on the Bright Ideas website, keep in mind that Bright Ideas Media is your resource, your resource for related resources and professional development opportunities. We thank you for listening.

Have a great evening. Thank you.

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