title: The challenge of linguistic and cultural diversity: Does length of experience affect South African speech-language therapists' management of children with language impairment?
abstract: BACKGROUND
  South African speech-language therapists (SLTs) currently do not reflect the country's linguistic and cultural diversity. The question arises as to who might be better equipped currently to provide services to multilingual populations: SLTs with more clinical experience in such contexts, or recently trained SLTs who are themselves linguistically and culturally diverse and whose training programmes deliberately focused on multilingualism and multiculturalism?
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To investigate whether length of clinical experience influenced: number of bilingual children treated, languages spoken by these children, languages in which assessment and remediation can be offered, assessment instrument(s) favoured, and languages in which therapy material is required.
  
  
  METHODS
  From questionnaires completed by 243 Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA)-registered SLTs who treat children with language problems, two groups were drawn:71 more experienced (ME) respondents (20+ years of experience) and 79 less experienced (LE) respondents (maximum 5 years of experience).
  
  
  RESULTS
  The groups did not differ significantly with regard to (1) number of children(monolingual or bilingual) with language difficulties seen, (2) number of respondents seeing child clients who have Afrikaans or an African language as home language, (3) number of respondents who can offer intervention in Afrikaans or English and (4) number of respondents who reported needing therapy material in Afrikaans or English. However, significantly more ME than LE respondents reported seeing first language child speakers of English, whereas significantly more LE than ME respondents could provide services, and required therapy material, in African languages.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  More LE than ME SLTs could offer remediation in an African language, but there were few other significant differences between the two groups. There is still an absence of appropriate assessment and remediation material for Afrikaans and African languages, but the increased number of African language speakers entering the profession may contribute to better service delivery to the diverse South African population.
authors: Department of General Linguistics, Stellenbosch University. fs@sun.ac.za.
authors: Frenette
authors: F
authors: Southwood
authors: Ondene
authors: O
authors: Van Dulm
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002983:Clinical Competence; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D005260:Female; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000628:therapy*; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D013019:South Africa; D013066:Speech-Language Pathology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D000078329:Workforce