Office Hours: The Professor is In

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Re: Training to work with people who stutter

From: Lynne Shields
Date: 10/4/02
Time: 9:50:12 AM
Remote Name: 199.217.208.172

Comments

Elizabeth,

Your first question points out a fact that has always rather amused me about our profession--we purport to be about the business of helping people communicate better, yet have had an historically difficult time deciding what to call ourselves. Hence, we end up confusing the public that we hope to serve. The terms you mentioned, speech therapist, speech clinician, speech pathologist, speech-language therapist, along with a few other variations I can think of, are all essentially equivalent terms in the United States, referring to someone who has been trained to provide assessment and treatment services for people having speech and/or language disorders. In this country, this typically involves obtaining a master's level degree and meeting the requirements for the certificate of clinical competence as established by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). The other term that you mentioned, certified fluency disorder specialist, indicates that a certified speech pathologist has obtained a higher level of preparation/training in the area of fluency disorders, and has worked with a significant number of individuals who have fluency disorders.

I encourage you to make contacts within your own country to see what training for speech pathology might be available there or in a nearby country. Perhaps someone else on this panel may know. I think it would be helpful for you to be in touch with Joseph Lukong, who has an article at this conference entitled, "Out of Africa: Emerging Self-Help". He is involved with a stuttering support group in Cameroon called Speak Clear Association of Cameroon.

I am pleased to hear that you are interested in studying this field. I suspect that there is a need for trained speech-language pathologists in Cameroon. Best wishes to you.

Regards,

Lynne Shields


Last changed: September 14, 2005